Woke up late today. I slept until almost 9 a.m., and haven't done a single productive thing with my day so far. Not that it's been a bad day--just that I haven't done the only thing that I care to do on any given day, just lately, which is: work on the novel.

Work on the fucking novel.

I got home from work around 11 last night, took a shower, made an old-fashioned, and watched Murder, She Wrote until past midnight. All three of my worst vices in one night--African Black Soap, Whiskey, and Jessica Fletcher. It's really no wonder today has been such a wash.

So I sat down to work on the book, despite my hard-partying evening with Agatha Christie last night...but with less than an hour before I have to start walking to work and the tall cup of black tea in front of me doing little to slap the sleepless night out of my foggy brain, I decided to write up a journal instead.

Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats are playing in my office right now. Blood Lust is the name of the album. I'm sure the comparison has been made before, by someone, somewhere in this wide world, but Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats sound precisely like what the Beatles would've sounded like, had they fully committed to the transcendentalist drug rock they were wandering into right before the breakup. This band is truly marvelous. I've been a fan for a few years, but each time I revisit them, I end up liking them more.

Hoopla continues to delight and entertain and reward me. I just finished listening to an incredible short story by Warren Ellis, called Dead Pig Collector, read by Wil Wheaton.

(...aaaaaand just went and bought the Kindle edition on Amazon for $0.99. Really. It's about a hitman who specializes in an incredibly meticulous and graphically-described method of body disposals, and the day he fell in love while bleeding and jointing a body. It's. So. Good.)

I've been fascinated with Joyce Carol Oates, lately. In the last months, I've listened to two of her books--a collection of essays on the creative process and artistry called Soul at the White Heat, and The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares, a surprisingly dark collection of novellas and short stories. She's a brilliant writer, and a smart writer, one with a voice all her own, and a peculiarly discernible heart beating beneath the stories. Yet I find it hard to engage with her writing, sometimes. There are long vistas of breathtaking language and gut-level emotional connection that sweep me in...only to be swept out again by equally long sections so stiffly intellectual that they feel more like a test to gauge one's vocabulary and reading comprehension of long, complicated compound sentences. An oscillation between a towering, vivid, poetic intellect...and the sort of obtuse academic writing that is the meat and potatoes of Master's Theses across the country.

That said, I've only encountered three of her works (the two I just recently listened to and Blonde, her fictionalized imagining of the life of Marilyn Monroe, which is absolutely spectacular). I loved one, and liked two, and, really, I'm more thinking aloud than criticizing.

I'm fascinated by her. I just bought six more of her novels at a library book sale, to dig into and absorb and ponder over. There's something about her and her life and the work that she does that I find myself drawn to.

What? Now?

Now, I'm listening to The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty. The Harper Collins 40th anniversary recording, read by the author. He has a marvelous voice for horror and hell, let me tell you.

Actually, now I have to go to work. With any luck, I'll get out early. I'll get a good night's sleep behind me, and get some writing done tomorrow. I let today slide, and already I feel worse for it. It isn't hard to push my mental health in either direction.

Don't write, feel like shit and the world goes gray.

Write, the world is a beautiful place and anything is possible.

It really is as simple, and as hard, as that.