Writing and Drinking and Writing

The legend is that Stephen King wrote on an old IBM Selectric typewriter. I have never seen one, but the romance of the myth is almost as potent as Hemingway’s Cuban daiquiris. Mine is a shitty laptop that often shuts down on me, has a peeling sticker that catches the hairs on my right forearm as I type, and whose right mouse button only works if you hit it from a particularly acute angle from the right. It makes little noises at me, like tiny drunken mice sprinting like lightning in their circuitous wheels. 

It’s not even 1:00 in the afternoon, but I want to open the bottle of cabernet sauvignon in the kitchen because writers write, but writers also drink. It’s where the muse hides, in the bottom of the bottle. Bukowski knew that, slovenly fucking genius that he was. He knew she was down there, doing the breaststroke through waves of crimson manna, just waiting for us to summon her like a genie out of a lamp. It’s not to say that self-control is elusive, it just oscillates in its veracity during the day and wanes like a crescent moon at night until it’s as thin as the sheet of paper that I’m not going to print this on. 

Writing is like riding a bicycle, but mine is covered in cobwebs, rusted, a few inches too short, and has a flat tire. It smells of pennies and dusty rubber, and makes me want to wash my hands, wash my hands of it. It reminds me of my shortcomings, my fatness spilling over the seat, my knee that won’t bend without screaming in protest as it hits my doughy belly, the sweat that always starts and ends on my face (why is it always my face?) so that my representation to the world immediately speaks to my inadequacy. I’m painfully pedaling through pinot, wretchedly riding around rioja.