Chapter Twenty-Four: Daily Routine

So, find a cafe, buy coffee, drink coffee, drink water, write, drink coffee, write, finish coffee, drink water, write, buy new coffee, write, coffee, write, bathroom, coffee, write, coffee, write, coffee, write, chat (?), coffee, coffee, water (it's important to balance out the coffee), write, write, coffee, write, coffee, water, bathroom, coffee…

And it's nice to be around other people who are working… Or who are chatting, and having interesting conversations.

Instead of being cooped up in an apartment alone—

Coffee… coffee…

Now he decided he'd make coffee his new addiction, instead of alcohol. Yeah, screw alcohol. He'd noticed how that stuff made him more tired during the day. Maybe a lot of coffee affected his sleep a little, but it was still better than alcohol. Strange thing, that… The tiredness that alcohol brought was weirdly subtle. It had taken him a long time to notice.

Worship coffee… worship coffee.

Have a pastry. Pastry soaks up coffee… you can't just drink so much coffee on an empty stomach, yeah? Pastry, coffee, pastry, coffee, water.

The writer Balzac (who?) drank fifty cups of coffee a day. The film director David Lynch used to drink 20. Bowser didn't drink that much (Balzac wrote Father Goriot and Cousin Bette. French classics, right?) but it gave him encouragement… encouragement that this altar was terribly great, and he could "pray at it" for so much longer than he already was doing, that he didn't have to worry about "overdosing" or some moronic idea like that— he was OK, he was OK giving his soul over to coffee, yes, here was the black pool of rebirth (sure whatever) he needed, dive in, take me down. Goodbye world, goodbye, just give me coffee, ha ha ha ha ha…

He still had to work that teaching job, to make the money (so he could buy coffee)… but he could deal with it. Because he knew that this other world existed: the world of cafes, where he could disappear from the first world for hours.

And again, surprisingly, his sleep wasn't too badly affected. He seriously slept better now that he was addicted to coffee instead of alcohol. Now that coffee was his medication. Maybe… it was because he felt better about himself, because he was getting more done with regards to what he cared about… that coffee allowed that, while alcohol just took his brain out of the world for some time, without constructive results.

So both remove you from the world, but one lets you do work…

Yes. This was good.

Now, for another problem—

It's a problem with the writing, the poetry. Bowser wanted to write epic poems. That's what he was interested in— the blend of poetry and great storytelling.

That is the artistic desire that had come to him, for whatever reasons.

And he wanted… he wanted to make it a great new thing! A great new piece of art, something brilliant and influenced and pushing the consciousness of the world forward (or something impressive in any case, excuse the obnoxious language…)

And yet…

Though he felt his skills were up to the task…

And he was developing them through practice and continual interest in his creative end goal…

...He found himself stuck using characters he was stealing from elsewhere.

He found… that he could not write at all, if he did not use certain characters and settings he had picked up from other stories.

And even worse (!): they were childish characters, taken from nursery stories he had enjoyed as a child.

It was not even that he wanted to make tribute to those stories— although that had sort of been the idea at first. It came about that, even in wanting to make distinctly different stories of an original nature, he found himself forced to use the old puppets, the old paper cut-outs of these nursery characters, with whom he was so deeply familiar with.

The characters that, when he was all alone in childhood—seeking solace from abuse and loneliness—his imagination became so utterly drenched in…

And that had left the outline and phantasmagorical imagery of a world he had not seriously engaged with for years… and yet remained alive in his head.

That though he had many ideas for new worlds and peoples— life would not come to them. Life would only come to the old characters and ghosts of his childhood…

And how it annoyed him! He was getting better and better at his art (and, ah, consider these thoughts stretching out and developing over the last three years, if you would) and yet still he was stuck writing what appeared on the surface to be nursery stories about big bad wolves and architecturally-minded pigs! That which looked like foolishness and baby-stuff on the surface… that most people would not take seriously, and could not be sold and spread out in the wider world (for what does an artist want, even if they won't admit it…?)...

And there was no reasoning with the muse, or whatever brought the creative energy forward. If he refused to write on the nursery stories, and tried to focus on something from his heaps of unrelated, purely original notes, he'd find his spiritual ink gone utterly dry…

What could he do? The stories could not exist unless he gave in, and wrote with the "baby" stuff. Even as the material became increasingly unrelated to the original sentiment of the original material…

He could only hope that if he just kept writing, and getting practice in, that eventually something would break, and he'd finally be able to write on his true ideas with the same flow and possibility with which he wrote the nursery material now.

(Because if he was honest about his creative process, it mostly involved being slave to a mysterious spirit.)

Now, what if he just took what he had written, and changed it around a little— simply change the names? What he had written was already so original, a "simple" solution like that should produce a publishable work…!

But any attempt to begin that process brought a foot down from the muse, who would not allow the work to continue properly.

And if she (they?) did not let the ink flow… well, then… game over, there.

In his creative process, he was essentially following along a narrow valley, and if he did not take the smoothest way forward (if he attempted to climb the walls of the valley) the process would almost instantly become distorted, and no work would be produced.

(Well then,) he thought, (I bow down to you). I bow down to you. And I hope you know that eventually my work has to evolve, it has to evolve past the nursery rhymes… or else it will begin to rot. Because I wasn't born to write nursery rhymes my whole life. I have not survived for so long to write the "perfect nursery rhymes". I haven't made it through so much shit and misery for that. I will obey you…

...because I have faith… that in the end, the flower will bloom.

What good is it to make it fast?

Sing a song to pass the playground

Coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee…

And water of course.

Coffee coffee coffee coffee coffee…

Yrev very good—

Coffee coffee coffee…

(Encapsulating a prayer.)

Coffee…

(A meditative procedure, a modern-day mode of concentrative practice. Creating a bullet shot straight through time, the soul the core of the bullet, the body the shell, piercing through reality.)

Coffee.

(A crystal independent of time, a shape of existence, protected from the hailstones of meaninglessness.)

...

(A wheel rolling in of itself. A first motion, a self-rolling wheel, that which compels the stars to revolve around it.)

Eeffoc.

(Divinely blended. Forwards or backwards, direction without stress. The divine course of the stars: they keep moving in the night above.)

...Eeffoc.

(Break right through, break right through, break right through, break right through, breathe, focus on breathing, 30 minutes of walking and breathing, 30 minutes of writing.)

— a wheel, rolling —

(Accept every invitation you get. Go there, where the people are. Even if you don't want to, you go, and if you hate it, you can leave. Just do it. Just...)

— rolling itself —

(...Do it. Accept the collective conscious, the influence of the ocean of souls. Let their water run through your wheel.)

— Itself … rolling … —

(Accepting all invitations, the invitations multiply. They multiply in ways surprising. Unpredicted. Expanding, expanding, expanding.)

(Straight through—)

...

Could we say, after all, that the problem was a problem of loneliness? Simple loneliness?

Time spent mostly alone— whether inside or outside. Family gone. Friends exist, sure, but the time spent with them was perhaps not enough.

It wasn't certain, all of it… the source of the pangs of pain. But they didn't come as long as he was with people. If he took shelter, even in… unimportant circumstances, gatherings of useless pursuits or peoples of ill repute… To be at that metaphysical There, with the people, was to have a blanket of souls stretched overhead, that stopped the falling rain of tears.

It didn't even matter who, really (and there were many details in all this that would have sounded foolish or like nonsense before, but it was all overridden by the utility of it, the end of pain), and even just by accepting the invitations and interacting with others in an honest way, he was carried forward, lifted upward into different circumstances and enjoyable places, closer to his natural place. It was of a logical necessity that by going to events, meeting people, and being honest, that he was sociologically sorted out, sort of.

In any case, he felt much better.

— "For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them."