The Damn Thing

I’m writing this as I sit in the upstairs of a little coffeehouse in Parkville, Missouri. In the corner of the big room, here, they have shelves of books for sale, and a couple of my books are on one shelf.

Three of my books used to be there, but either the shop sold both copies they had stock, or someone who works here opened one of them, read some of what was inside, and management decided it was too obscene for Parkville.

That book is Weird Pig. One of the first things Weird Pig (a talking pig) does in the novel is have passionate sex with the woman he lives with, who is essentially his adoptive mother. And so it’s a distinct possibility, that they pulled it from the shelves for being gross.

But I was sitting here for a while, working on something new I’ve been writing, cursing myself for being so stupid, so bad at everything, so full of rotten thoughts and dumb ideas.

I don’t really think I’m stupid and bad at everything. But it’s part of the agony of writing, for me, that I feel constantly inadequate, ill-equipped for the endless task I have given myself, of writing stuff.

When I'm working, I'm locked in combat against all the parts of me that conspire to halt my progress, if you can call it progress.

I swear, at least about 30 percent of Robert Long Foreman—maybe as much as 70 percent of him—would rather he lose his mind and have all his pens, pencils, and notepads taken away, like in “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” than to continue spewing words like he does.

I don’t know which parts of me they are. The lungs, maybe?

I never did have my appendix taken out.

But they want to stop me from doing this thing I’m doing right now. This “writing.”

If they had their way, they would prevent me from finishing, for example, my essay-in-progress about a recent episode in which my cat jumped in front of my computer camera during a small event with a famous writer, turned around, and showed her butt to everyone on the Zoom call, including the famous writer.

Did that person see my cat’s anus? I don’t know.

This is the vital question my essay essays, what it attempts, you see, to explore adequately.

When I’m working on stuff, I might as well have never done anything before. I am floating in a void of nothing, and the nothing I float in stretches before and behind me. I am part of the nothing. It and I bleed into one another.

At moments like those, of which there are many, all the time, it’s like I don’t even have the most popular blog on the Internet.

It’s like I haven’t been doing this for years and years.

And since I had a moment in which that agonizing contention against myself got interrupted by a nice reminder that I’m not nothing, that I am something—someone, even—and I have been someone for a while and done some things, I wanted to acknowledge that phenomenon in a public space, that deep feeling of inadequacy that seems threatening but is probably really essential to doing anything worthwhile, I don’t know why or how.

I can’t be the only one who feels it. At least three other people out there also feel it. I’m sure of that.

It’s rare that I get to step outside that feeling. That’s all.

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Since this is the time of year when writers post links to things they published online, earlier in the year, I’ll show you my short story, “The Damn Thing,” which was at The Adroit Journal. It’s about a new mother who hears of a strange creature that lives in the woods and can make babies cry less when it sucks on their faces.