What the doctor should have meant: dishery.diaryland.com

Donahue: But haven�t you received letters about your work from people?
Algren: I receive a letter now and then.
Donahue: And a million people bought the old paperback edition of Never Come Morning, right? Why did those million people buy it � just to pass time on a train?
Algren: Yeah.
Donahue: They could have selected many other things. How do you know your work isn�t wanted?
Algren: That doesn�t mean it�s wanted. People buy Mickey Spillane by the seven millions, by the ten millions.
Donahue: How do you know when your work is wanted?
Algren: You feel that.
Donahue: Are there any other indications besides your feelings?
Algren: Nobody�s work is absolutely wanted. But the point is � do you believe it�s wanted, or not.
Donahue: Do you believe your work is wanted?

� from "Conversations with Nelson Algren" (1964; interviews conducted by H. E. F. Donahue)

� and then when I do finally get around to writing what passes these days for an entry, I am afterwards so consumed with loathing and self-contempt-for-my-own-deep-pain on account of both the subject matter and the words with which I pin it to the page that it�s a real struggle not to delete the entry and even (lately) the whole damn diary. Late Friday morning, encased in my rented Dodge Neon heading east from Pittsburgh, I was thinking about this and kind of letting it soak in the extent to which, if I had a potentially life-transforming wish to make, I was realizing that this would be it: not to hate my writing. (As distinct � please � from My Writing, you understand.) Which seems absurd on the face of it, right, or evidence that I have lost all sense of perspective. Like I don�t have more gaping deficits I should concern myself with, even thinking in terms of this stupid Disneyfied hypothetical one wish, for which by the way I blame the redeye.

Though have you ever seen those ubiquitous women�s magazine reader surveys where one of the questions is always something like What do you consider your one least attractive physical feature?. Amid the popularity of things like Flabby Stomach and Fat Thighs and even Thin Hair, sometimes the survey editors will feel inspired to include in the published results a few write-in candidates, with the zero-point-whatever response percentage appended. And they�re always things like Fingernails Too Brittle or Wrong Color Nipples, and this makes me so irritated and angry. Fingernails Too Brittle?! Get a real problem, lady! If your self-hate is that infinitesimal, then get the hell out of my magazine and go self-burnish with Oprah instead. But maybe I am being unreasonable, maybe there really is someone out there who feels that her putative Wrong Color Nipples are in fact her main impediment to success and happiness, and maybe I shouldn�t be so judgmental and wanting to hog all the hate for myself and maybe I should post-adolescently and in sisterhood wish her the best in finding some decent, uh, nipple makeup or fighting her way to a psychological place in which her aureolar pigmentation seems not so bad after all. (Cue "Free To Be You And Me.") Or whatever. And maybe I should remove from the list of reasons to flog myself the fact that, jetlagged and speeding and engaging myself in these kinds of interior dialogues to keep myself awake, I didn�t say health insurance or decent job, I said the thing about the writing. Because maybe I am right.

PA was OK. I went bra shopping � speaking of nipples! � at Value City and one among my haul is a C cup. (Disclaimer: eight are not.) Ran into Mary H. and had an interesting little chat about possible ways to acquire value, eventually, on the employment tip, but don�t get excited, she was also giving me advice about the best ways to learn a foreign language once you are in that country, coming down solidly in favor of the Germany plan. I don�t want to write, not yet anyway, about the party that was the impetus for my visit. Read Algren, ate too much, brought Steve the sausage aficionado a brick of authentic scrapple. Flunked, possibly, or at least stunk up the midterm I took last Thursday, which was populated with questions along the lines of "Chapter 5 of your textbook lists four rules for x. Write three of them" and was not the kind of gig I prepared for; have to my pleasant surprise convinced myself that in failure like that there is no shame. Desperately want to get out of here, out of *this*, but cannot see that anywhere else, under any conditions that it would actually be possible for me to enact, would be a qualitative improvement. Feel trapped and miserable and superfluous in every way. Plus a lousy, boring writer, self-untranscendable.