The Blog of Wistar Watts Murray

When it’s been a while since I’ve written or created anything I can be proud of, I start to feel like I’m the most worthless person in the world. I feel like I never want to write again because I suck at it so bad.

Yesterday, for instance, I spent hours writing a miserable essay about David Foster Wallace and John McCain and moral authority and suicide which may or may not have proposed that Sarah Palin killed DFW with a fleet of grizzly bears. The post was live for a few hours when I received a very nice email from a reader saying (basically) “No. No no no.” And I appreciated this email because 1) it showed that someone was reading my blog; 2) it showed that some generous person considered my writing superior to that horrible post; and 3) it convinced me to retract the post (breaking my no-retractions policy for the first time, but for good reason!), which delivered me from a lot of embarrassment. Thank you, wise reader.

But now I’m left with this feeling again, this feeling of being the worst writer in the world. I haven’t been writing much at all in the past few weeks but I keep dreaming about writing: writing epic short stories, writing the great American novel, writing feel-good poems about cats. This morning I wrote something awesome while I was sleeping and my arm jerked out to receive a high-five. I immediately woke up to see my unslapped hand hovering there over the bed. I was mortified that I’d been left hanging, but also that my subconscious writer brain aspires to high-fives instead of Bookers and Pulitzers. Maybe I should have joined a sports team instead of starting a blog.

The road from Charlottesville, Virginia, to Columbus, Georgia, should be renamed Slaughterhouse Highway. Every other vehicle on Route 29 South is a truck carrying livestock to their imminent deaths. Yesterday I saw blonde chickens with breasts pumped so full of water they could hardly stand upright in their cramped metal cages. I saw cattle stomping nervously in trailers with their big brown eyes peering at me through air holes. “Save us,” they said. “Hijack this truck and drive us to Mexico.”

“I’ll never eat meat again,” I thought. “I love you guys.”

Then we stopped at Applebee’s for dinner and I accidentally ate a big pile of microwaved chicken. I am such an asshole.

I’ve now been blogging long enough on the outskirts of the lit-blog circle to know that the same links are passed from blog to blog, we’re all competing to blog first about identical material, and only .0001 percent of us are getting book deals.

I love the immediate gratification of posting - I still get a rush from publishing online instead of in my diary - but I often wonder why exactly I’m in this game. Is it all just an exercise in egoism? Am I after 21st century microfame? It’s funny how you have a blog for five minutes, and suddenly you think you’re a superstar like Tila Tequila. At first the exposure feels validating, and then you wonder what you’re exposing, and why. And then you remind yourself that these are irrelevant questions because only a handful of people read your blog.

But you encounter the same questions whenever you put something into the world. Who needs another rock song? Another short story? Another painting? For the most part, no one. Creative work can be appreciated, but there will never be enough people on Planet Earth to idolize the people who need to be idolized. So why do we produce this crap? Because we’re driven? Compulsive? Inspired? Desperate? Why did I decide to make a blog instead of filling up another wine-sotted composition book?

Because people need people, and art needs people, and blather needs people, and I need my handful of readers to know that I exist in the world, and not just on my couch, even if I’m just telling them what they already know from reading Gawker. But what kind of self-obsessed world is this that we feel we don’t exist without a public presence? It’s the kind of world that thrives on the micro-celebrity of its inhabitants. I have a dialogue in my dumb novel:

“I guess I wanted to be famous,” she said. “I found something I could do well and I wanted recognition for it.”
“Everyone wants to be famous, Jess.”
“Well, I wanted to be famous in my family.”

The world is getting smaller, and the extended families bigger, and we have an inner circle that comprises at least our Facebook and MySpace friends. We need to impress more people now than ever in order to be important. And this post started as a lament on how everyone always scoops my stories, but now it is something else. Now it is me being lonely, looking for answers in the blogosphere, where we have all learned the hard way they can’t be found.

PS Here’s a page of more Deep Thoughts.