Allow me to wine, dine, and stand-up 69

69th post in most likely over a year of blogging.

Man, that is some slack shit. Right now I'm hanging out at my parents house in west palm beach, probably for one of the last times. I'm writing this on my sister's laptop, and quite honestly, after about a year back on a desktop, writing on a laptop keyboard is a giant pain in the ass. I'm waiting for everyone to get done with their family dinners so we can go out and try and have a fun evening in a boring town. I'm hoping that my years of living here have endowed me with some sort of wisdom and experience that I can apply to my writing, but even lately that's been unsuccessful. Maybe I'm just not channeling the right experiences. Maybe I should just say "fuck it" and write a memoir. I feel like my life has at least been entertaining and interesting enough to do so. I feel like over the past 15 years of living in Florida, I've been imparted with an uncanny ability to describe the human condition. I feel like this is everything I was born to do. I was born to bring to light things people have never thought of before, and the idea of that is both enthralling and terrifying at the same time.

Enthralling because I feel like I can impart ideas and capture people's imaginations the way the Rowling, and Gaiman, and Bukowski, and Klosterman, and even more recently Fowles did for me. Because, hey, maybe I can write that sentence that makes some awkward teenager go "wait, fuccccccckkkkk" the way all of those writers did for me. Maybe I can be the person who juxtaposes the profound with the ridiculous like Dave Barry did for his generation. Maybe I really can be a great writer and a profound thinker like I aspire to be.

But with all of that, it's still mildly terrifying. Terrifying to know that I'm just as capable of fucking everything up. Terrifying to know that the career I've chose to undertake is one that has a pretty low success rate. But it's something I have to do. I feel like I have this unmistakable talent that few of my peers do.

Time to get shit rolling.

-Joe