For all of my conceit, I’m just a humble beast — a breathing mass of bones and skin not much further removed from the simplicity of paramecium — those single-cell vessels of contained little equilibrium, formed to eat and reproduce by transferring weight and water and information, dancing in the perpetuation of that quivering, living mass, to undulate and collapse amid the rhythms of the collective breath. It’s all a sea, this arid heap of waste — and you can’t help but drown amid the indifferent waves.

Back in October 2011, My awesome writer friend, Rachel The Curly Muse (pictured above, assaulting me with her freaky hair), challenged me to write a short story by providing me a randomized creative writing prompt with really messed up plot requirements. Predictably, I didn’t make much progress in the past few months.

Tonight, Rachel came over to my place to visit, and she started giving me massive shit for failing to meet her writing challenge. Luckily for me, I write my best work when I’m under pressure and facing a deadline. All the while Rachel was breathing down my neck and snarling her nagging fits of disapproval, I wrote the following short story. I think it came out pretty well.

“I love to drink, but I hate kids.” That’s what Jerry said one day while getting piss ass drunk. He also went on some mystical journey or some shit to find a valuable treasure. He found something, all right.

The end.

Or, is it?

This has been a KZ joint.

Go on and read it. There’s a good chance you’ll enjoy it even if your name isn’t Joie.

J to the P, the B-Day Supreme
(By KZ, Dawn to the Spence, & D-Pad)

Joie! Joie! She’s a joy to behold
Joie is super awesome
Even though she’s getting old

But not as old as Helen Hunt
I mean have you seen her lately?
She’s not aging so gracefully
Joie is aging better than Double-H
Joie gets old tastefully

Even Joie’s name is super awesome
even with its excess of vowels
Just don’t get too old on us, Super J
And lose control of your bowels
…in the middle of dinner at OSF

Happy birthday, Joie. Go ahead and frame that poem so you can hang it on a wall or something. I wouldn’t blame you for getting caught up in the awesomeness of it all.

Yeah, me neither.

On a completely unrelated note, I haven’t written anything new over the past two weeks because I’ve been busy battling against evil ninjas, landing back flips on motorcycles while flying through fiery hoops, learning how to play the guitar solo for Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird” left-handed because I got bored playing it so perfectly with my right hand, slaying dragons, and not returning Helen Hunt’s telephone calls.

You probably have two questions about that last paragraph. First, yes, I said “slaying dragons”. Did I forget to tell you that I rediscovered the world’s last remaining population of dragons back in October? Yeah, well, don’t get too excited, because it turns out that dragons are all a bunch of dicks. Trust me on this. They’ll all be dead in another two weeks if everything goes my way. Second, yes, I am screening my calls in an effort to avoid Helen Hunt. I already have a lady in my life, Helen. I’m sorry you had to hear it here.

Well, that’s the latest from me. I’ll come back and write something new once I’ve finished kicking so much ass.

I broke my blog late last week while attempting to enhance the layout template. At the lowest point, my homepage was taking twelve agonizing seconds to load, and the comment box would send you to a blank error page when you clicked the submit button. The worst of it, though, came when I rushed through a support forum walkthrough without reading very carefully, and I ended up purging my comments database without taking the proper precautions. My blog comments dropped from 268 to 0 in a matter of clicks. Thursday was a bad night.

Once I realized how badly I had messed things up, I spiraled into a full-on panic. The slow loading time and the comment box errors were minor annoyances, but they were nothing in comparison to the thought of losing all of those comments that I had accumulated over the years from friends, critics, and random well-wishers. Imagine the way you might feel if you had accidentally set your old family photo albums on fire because you left them too close to a gas stove on the kitchen counter. My state of mind was something close to that. After a considerable amount of teeth gnashing, denial, and cathartic swearing, I gathered my thoughts, and I realized that my comments were not completely gone.

Since 2008, when I started blogging on my own dot-com, my WordPress blog settings have been configured so that I receive an e-mail every time somebody leaves me a comment. Thankfully, I’ve had the foresight to save those e-mail notifications, all of which duplicate the full text of every comment I’ve ever received at this domain. I spent the entire weekend manually inputting those comments back onto my page through a long, tedious process of copying text from e-mails, submitting comments to my blog posts while disguised as my own readers, approving those comments through my admin dashboard, and backdating every comment to its proper date and time. Although I was able to salvage all of my readers’ submissions, I did lose all of my own comments since my website never contacts me for admin comment replies. So I improvised as well as I could along the way, inserting the kinds of replies that I remember leaving the first time around. I finally cleaned up my mess by Tuesday night.

All weekend long, I couldn’t help but feel a little silly over the entire ordeal. The whole comment restoration project made me feel a bit like a self-absorbed, inauthentic fraud. There I was, dedicating my entire weekend to the restructuring of the Temple of KZ. To be fair, I was putting a lot of effort into restoring those comments because I didn’t want my outspoken readers’ past generosity and time to have been in vain. Then again, I would be lying if I said that my compulsion to repopulate those comments had nothing to do with self-aggrandizement and vanity. I’m not going to lie — comments are the lifeblood of a blogger’s vanity. That should come as no surprise, though. What’s the point of self-expression if nobody ever takes notice? I didn’t get into the writing game just to hear myself talk, you know. Comments on a blog are an expression of reader interest, a validation of what the author has said, and what the author will continue to say when fueled by the confidence afforded to him by reader feedback. This comment repopulation project has served to remind me that I should never take my blog comments for granted again.

Once I restored my WordPress comments database to nearly its original form, I decided it was time to stop being lazy, and to start transferring over all of those pre-2008 comments from my old home at Blogger.com. This weekend was the first time that I ever made the attempt. As I look back on all of those comments from the past, I have to wonder what took me so long.

I rediscovered a lot of forgotten history in those earlier submissions. The first comment I ever received as a blogger came from my good friend, Carlos, on September 30, 2002, in response to a blog entry titled, A Tribute to Her. “Kevin, you are a fucking genius”, Carlos had said. I’d like to think that he said that without a trace of irony. I was gratified that he had thought so highly of my writing, but I didn’t feel much like a genius at the time for having allowed myself to fall for a girl who was already in a committed relationship.

I remember those early days in 2002 and 2003, when Carlos, Conrado, and Francisco would rock the comment box on nearly every post. I’m pretty sure they were my only readers back then. It really meant a lot to me that they kept coming back.

I remember receiving those incendiary challenges from “Charlie the Possum” and “The Spider” back when I posted Possum Attack in February 2003. Those anonymous comments still makes me laugh when I think about them today. Nice, Conrado. Speaking of irreverent replies, I fondly remember the time when my discussion of The Deer Hunter in my Movie Titles post from 2002 elicited the following response from an old friend, mild-mannered Ed:

“hey ASSHOLE… that’s not cool!”

That’s the only time when Ed ever felt compelled to leave a comment. It was a good one.

Looking back to June 2003 in Fast Food Humor, I think that was the first time when a reader called me out for taking artistic license during the retelling of actual events. As you can see, seven years later, not very much has changed.

I remember those days in 2004, back when my girlfriend, Diana, and I were still in the earliest stages of our courtship. She sat down one night and read the entire contents of my blog, and then proceeded to pepper my site with comments on entries that were over a year old. I was touched that anybody would ever bother to do such a thing. It was a wonderful thing to know that somebody like Diana could find something of value in this modest little site of mine. I think that was around the time when I really started to fall for her.

March 2005 was the first time when one of my blog entries ever broke the tenth comment mark. Maybe it had something to do with all of the sex talk. It was around that time in general, I think, when my writing made a noticeable turn for the better.

And how can I forget November 2009, back when my buddy, Casey, supplemented one of my denser posts with a lengthy, insightful diatribe? That comment was an amazing gift to this blog. It hardly feels like something I deserve.

Since 2002 and beyond, right to this very day, I have been humbled by the outpouring of support that my small band of loyal readers has shown me. I’m not entirely sure why I started to write a blog back in 2002, but I know today why I continue to do it. As I look back on my modest collection of reader comments, I feel a great sense of gratitude for anybody, and everybody who ever took notice of my meager little voice amid the shrieking wind. I am a better writer today because of all the things you’ve said, my friends. All of you.

So . . . can anybody teach me how to back up a comments database? Because that would be super.

One of the earliest lessons that I learned as an aspiring writer is that the key to writing well is never losing your nerve. Although writers are separated from their audiences by distances of time, proofreading, and revisions, there is an undeniable element of performance in the act of writing which can make a writer feel like an actor approaching a stage every time he sits down to face an empty page. Writing something worthwhile during every creative session demands both discipline, and a healthy dose of confidence to roll through the rough patches before you settle into your groove and get it right. To write well is to always believe that you will find your stride. Writer’s block is the opposite of swagger, the absence of stride. Writer’s block is a fear to begin, or a fear to proceed. It is the writer’s equivalent of stage fright. How can a writer hope to succeed if he allows the fear to unravel the might of his mind?

How indeed, my friends.

Here I stand in the final quarter of 2010 after promising in January to write a novel within a year. I suspected from the start that this might have been an overly ambitious promise to make, but it was the kind of promise that needed to be made after years of ambivalence, good intentions, and inaction. All year long in 2010, I’ve genuinely tried. I continue to try, and yet I’ve been stuck on the first paragraphs of the opening pages since day one. I’m running out of excuses, and I’ve lost some confidence in the premise of my story. Maybe it’s time to bid my old story goodbye, and to start again on something new. I just need to find a way to regain my nerve, and to try again. Maybe I’ll find what I’m looking for on a different stage.

And who knows? Maybe this time around, my cat, Momo, will actually jump his furry orange ass off of my writing journal, and let me get something done for once. Freaking cats. Is it too late to redact my previous comments, and to just blame everything on Momo? I’m pretty sure he’s been the reason for my writer’s block in 2010.

I swear, guys. Just give me until the end of 2011, and I’ll blow you away with something special.

Ah, to live among the dreams as intentions melt away, those gentle drifts of repeated steps — an elaborate dance with so many steps — it fools the dancers from perceiving each day’s events as anything other than novel and uniquely unseen. You seem to have mistaken the things we do as deliberate acts.

The thesis of existence unfolded many pages ago, so many words repeated either in ignorance or in spite of the cycles of times, and of writers, and of words. Of words do I sing, for without words we have no meaning, no commonality of wretched being. We’ve become so good at finding new and better ways to repeat the things we’ve always been meant to say — those words that are, and have always been, essentially the same.

The first page. This is the way it begins.

Sometimes when I sit down to write, I end up sitting still for long stretches of time, hovering a pen over an empty page while I sort out my thoughts. More often than not, the words just never seem to come. It’s always during these moments when I’ve reached the most agonizing depths of writer’s block that my cat, Momo, will sit down to watch me write. Without having to look up, I’ll feel his gaze. It’s hard to ignore those wide, golden eyes piercing the back of your shoulder.

For as long as I remain still, Momo’s gaze never wavers. He stays fixed to his spot, forever vigilant, ever watchful of my desperation, my creative stupor. Momo is the fiery sentinel who guards the unwritten word, the gatekeeper of clarity and literary madness.

Momo will stare at me perplexedly with his limited understanding, asking me in that silent way of his, “You could be doing anything with your free time right now, so why are you sitting still?” Most of the time, I’m not even sure of the answer myself. Am I a writer, or aren’t I? Why does writing have to be such an unnatural, labored act for me? How can I be a novelist if I lack the discipline to write on command, or to update a blog on a regular basis?

Then my attention drifts to other questions. What is the point of writing, in the end? How far removed is the desire to be heard from the crassness of vanity? Why am I doomed to serve this agonizing compulsion to express a collection of thoughts that I never seem to have at my command?

Sure, Momo never intended to thrust my thoughts into a spiral of introspection and self-doubt, and yet he takes me there with that curious little stare. How can I write with that furry little inquisitor judging me so passive aggressively, posing those debilitating questions through his muffled, unspoken meows?

Momo has a staring problem.

So where does that leave us? The entirety of human expression amounts to a feeble shriek, a derelict distress call doomed to echo in dutiful repetition.

That’s just my suspicion, anyway.

Honestly, I get it. But then again, I kind of don’t. Why do people always wait until the 1st of January before they initiate all of those lofty, life-altering projects of radical self improvement? I’ve never believed in making new year’s resolutions because I’ve never viewed the start of a new year as a monumental event. Life is life, no matter the date, and no matter the year. The quality of life is generally unaffected by the numerical value that we’ve assigned to our days.

Whenever people tell me they plan to lose weight as part of their new year’s resolution, I always have to prevent myself from blurting out something snarky like, “I never knew being a fat-ass was a seasonal condition.” Okay, so I’m a sarcastic, holiday-bashing asshole, but at least I’m skinny, you Auld Lang Syne bitches! But seriously, consider this: I lost thirty pounds in 2009 between the months of May and August. When I finally got serious about losing weight, I didn’t stop to make sure that the earth had made its full rotation around the sun before I got my shit together. If there’s something that needs to be done, and you aren’t doing what you’re supposed to be doing, then don’t blame the position of the planet for your lack of action.

So on that note, I’m going to contradict myself and make a new year’s resolution without any sense of irony. I resolve in 2010 to write a novel. I’ve been kicking around ideas for more than eight years now, and all of my good intentions have amounted to an unimpressive collection of notes and infrequent blog entries. This year will be different. I’m not sure what I’m going to write about, and I’m not sure if what I have to say is really all that worthwhile. I just know that I have to try for once, instead of coasting dreamlessly through the gentle, ferocious monotony.