BEATNICK SILENTLY FEELS BEAT AGAIN

I'm writing this moment at the Cascade Park Public Library after putting in two hours of writing at the Torque coffee shop and getting my third parking ticket in downtown Vancouver. See photo of Van. library over my shoulder.

Three nights in a row, I slept 8 to 10 hours yet still woke tired and discouraged. I wasn't able to write those three days, and all that ton of self-despising I carry around, waiting for me to tire and drop my guard, came crashing down, and I nearly gave up on writing for the tenth or hundredth time? I can't tell you how hard it's been during much of my life to get out from under the self-hatred and take a breath of air. It's there even when it's not there. If you understand me, you understand a lot. 

Exhaustion always carries with it negative thinking, and negative thoughts are like magnets. One negative thought attracts another. They collect together inside my all too human head and, collectively, they weigh tons. I'll feel that unrewarded writing is useless and worthless. I'll feel foolish and tell myself I'm too old to still be pecking away on a computer keyboard, trying to produce something that'll make me a little money. "After all these years, stupid," I tell myself, "if money for your writing was going to happen, it would have happened by now." To try to explain this to someone, other than my wife, also feels foolish. No one can imagine how much needless suffering I've felt over this obsession with writing and lack of monetary reward for it. I've carried it around most of my life. It sounds stupid to some more happily adjusted people I have not a doubt. I must add, that the angst is much reduced and doesn't appear half so often as it did in the past. Sobriety and much psychological work helps, but it waits, there, in the darkness, for its chances to return.

Then, last night I put in another 9 hours of sleep and, this morning, woke magically refreshed. The cloud of doubt and self-despising lifted for no good reason I can think of, and the sunshine of good spirits filled me. So today, I'm back at it, looking at Manning and trying to figure out "what happens next"—the constant voice that leads the novelist within me on the haphazard process of plotting a novel.