The Great Quote Hunt

Writing, the key to the door, as I mentioned in the previous article, & where is this key I speak of? Well, it’s around your neck of course, like a noose with the rope cut, & the only thinking choking you, is you. Or whoever you let pull your rope. Don’t let someone else pull your rope. That’s another keeper for my “Fishisms,” good stuff. If I add my own quotes to every article I write, I should have a thick book of quotes ready to go in a few months. The math is easy, I’m easily cranking out at the very least, one article a day. So in 3 months time, that’s around 100 quotes, just at the rate of ONE lone article a day, with an addendum quote and/or quotes added at the bottom. The point is, WRITE, every day one must write, if they’re to ever consider themselves a go-to in the bullpen when the batter steps up. Can’t throw like a twerp, you gotta get that ball across the plate EVERY time, strike, strike, strike strike, strike, no balls here, strike strike, strike, strike that hot iron, & maybe send that batter back to the dugout, or give them the homerun pitch, & send them to the moon. The reality is though, you’re lucky to get a base hit, as a writer, but you gotta keep pitching, every day, strike, strike, strike. Somehow the more one writes, at least in my case, the more I write, the more doors open with my own key. What’s in those doors? Quotes, of course, for I’m on a hunt, a hunt for clever quips I can quote, that I can put in parentheses, then stamp them with a big fish, like bags of dope. Oh yes, a key for those wooden pirate’s chests, these treasure chests that contain gem quotes, & I have a key around my neck for them alright, noosed around my neck on a cheap military chain, & my noose is tight, so tight, snug right up to my neck, by thine own hand for some reason, pulling hard on my neck, saying, “Write you fucking idiot, write, write, write, you have nothing else, nothing else left, this rope has stripped you of everything, & now you have nothing, except this, we’ll leave you with your words, & your words alone, now write you stupid fuck, for it’s all were going to give you this round, in this 3d hell-train ride.”

That’s the madness I go through daily, this hydra-headed conscience of mine, it’s quite direct, isn’t it? Certainly doesn’t mince words, but maybe my conscience is doing this, putting all this relentless pressure on me to “WRITE WRITE WRITE YOU FUCKING FOOL OF FOOLS,” as much as I can, while I can, because time is running out, running out the door like Forrest Gump. I know, but it is what it is. I don’t know when my end is, do you? Could be today, tomorrow, next week, 6 months from now, 6 years from now, 60 years from now if I make it to 105(Please God no, don’t keep me here that long), but regardless, the proverbial “end,” comes for us all, there’s no escaping the ride. We all get a ticket when we’re born, a ticket for a train maybe, a train for the recently deceased, or for some it’s a ferry ticket for the dead maybe, perhaps for some it’s a private jet to heaven, I’d wager most just get on city bus pass, across town, & my ticket, my ticket says it is for a private car, like a mini-limo, the budget limo, ready to pick me up at the time of expiration, but it really doesn’t matter how you go, does it? Those are all just silly analogies I just thought up on the fly in real-time, for when you die, you die, & that’s it. I’ve had several friends go already, particularly in the last year. Not only did I lose everything material I had, I lost several good friends, all in the course of a few months in 2022, that now-wretched, cursed year. Worst year of my life by far, & I’m a former decades-long addict, so I’ve had some rough years, & maybe that’s what 2022 was all about, getting railroaded again but while sober as fuck, just to really leave the branding iron for an extra few seconds, to make sure the mark would last, stinging me, burning itself into my microchip, damn that curse, & damn that year, that year I anticipated for so very long, only to end up on the polar opposite end of the place I was trying to go. Instead of the penthouse, I ended up in a roofless doghouse, with sub-zero Colorado snow blanketing what’s left of my war-weary shell. Completely broken, minus this, this writing that I’m writing in the present, only for you to be reading in the past.

Not a matter of self-pity here, & that notion alone annoys the fuck out of me. It’s the simple realization that whatever powers-that-be, just won’t let me be. Nope, they won’t let me go, no freedom for this bloated floating fish, gonna keep you as down as down gets, “Just stay in your corner of The Great Mouse Trap, & keep delusional believing you might be guiding the other mice to the exit doors, because you aren’t, you aren’t doing anything, doing nothing at all but digital words onto digital paper for yourself, & yourself alone, you disgustingly bland narcissist. What’s the word for a narcissist who thinks he’s useless, & serves no purpose. & has complete self-awareness? Is that on a spectrum somewhere? Who is illustrating these mental disorders? Everyone is a narcissist, everyone is a gaslighter, everyone is fucked in the head essentially, to some degree nowadays, right? I don’t know, I don’t really know anything about what’s going on anymore. I’m just writing to write. Like I mentioned in the beginning, just WRITE. Whatever might be in those respective receptors in that apple atop your neck, let it go as you let it flow onto a medium, whether it be with a digital pen or a real pen, WRITE, write you fucker, WRITE, WRITE, WRITE. Jesus, like a drill instructor up there. A drill instructor bitch, that won’t shut the fuck up. Does your conscience torture you too? Geez, sorry I didn’t make it, not going anywhere, so why keep yelling at me? “WRIIIIIIIIITTTTEEEEEE, keep writing asshole,” & that’s how it is. Myself calls myself more names than have ever come out of my actual mouth, such a dick, & by myself, I’m referring to this conscience I’m stuck with of course. Is your conscience really you though? Your “Higher Self,” so to speak? Who is this fucking guy? I don’t recall meeting this person, do you? Did you ever officially meet your conscience?

See what I mean? Just WRITE. This was all off the cuff, just tune in the dial, that’s it. For me anyway, it’s almost like auto-pilot, for I don’t recall what I write, until I write it. There’s a place you go when you…go to mine words, you might say, from the Great Word Mines. You travel there I your head, & you harvest the words, the words that fit into the sentences, building & building, the word architect, albeit all this happens in some kind of accelerated space-time that seems relatively instantaneous. It’s not though, it’s a seems time bends, & there’s countless mini-thoughts between the words as to how to connect them, one by one, like dancers, they fall in line, until they bee-bop in an order that someone else who speaks this language can read. Just tune that knob, static, static, oh, what’s that? Is that a signal? Let’s let it play & see what she sounds like, all of this happening so fast, the brain is quite the super computer, yes?…but I digress. Once you have a frequency, the words will just run, like a river, sometimes a raging river, sometimes just a slow-flowing creek, but if one is to be a writer, one must write, one must ride the river, it’s not complicated. It’s like any other discipline, & only with practice, do you open the doors, with that salty swinging key around your neck, on the broken-rope noose, getting tighter & tighter, as the sand in the weird-looking glass falls & falls. Don’t dwell on the morbidity though, & smack that hourglass off the loose-legged nightstand, just do what you can, while you can. What else is there? Until next time dear reader, I repeat, what else is there? So sayeth FisH™🎣