To be one of the greatest

Lately I've been sitting around and watching beautiful sentences and powerful ideas appear in my mind. They just appear, and I sit there looking at them, thinking "Holy shit... Well, that is genius." Then I try to write and it all turns into shit.

For a couple of months now, I've been trying to continue writing my book. But I can't do it anymore. I can write and write, but it's just so forced and bad. It's almost unreal how bad it is. It feels stupid to even try to keep writing it, because I know that all of this material has to be deleted later.

I don't know how I'm going to get out of this. For several months, I was writing something great. And now I'm very bad. I suck at writing now. I don't know what to do about it.

And yet... I know that I'm going to be one of the greatest writers of my generation.

It's completely crazy, of course. It doesn't make any 'sense'. There's nothing rational about it. But I sometimes think about this thing Charlie Chaplin (apparently) said (I can't find a decent source for this quote so I don't even know if he actually ever said this):

"You have to believe in yourself, that's the secret. Even when I was in the orphanage, when I was roaming the street trying to find enough to eat, even then I thought of myself as the greatest actor in the world."

Now that I quoted Charlie Chaplin, here's Buster Keaton. Simply for trolling purposes. And what sense would it make to always make sense?

How did Chaplin know? Do I 'know' too, or am I just being idiotic?

When I was younger, I had a lot of illusions about myself and the world. Lately I've been losing my illusions, facing the way life, people and the modern world really are. It has made me more depressed than anything else ever before in my life. I used to be an optimist, but I don't know about that anymore.

But that one ridiculous feeling never goes away. It stays. I know I'm going to be one of the greatest writers of my generation. (Perhaps nobody will care, you know... but here I am, thinking that way.)

We'll see if that kind of magic exists in the universe. We'll see. If I do have genius, then (s)he's shy and highly eccentric and doesn't want to come out. Days go by and I don't really do anything. I go to bed in the morning and wake up in the evening, and then I waste time. I've started watching Sex and the City on late-night TV. What interests me about it is that the episodes are from 1999; the world looks so much like the world of today, and yet slightly alien. (Of course, the whole show is demonic in some way. I mean, Samantha is okay, she's a good cartoon character. But Carrie! If I remember correctly, in one episode Carrie dates a politician with a pee fetish. Then they break up and she just randomly decides to try to destroy his life and career by writing a column about his pee fetish. What did I miss here? Maybe I'm just remembering it wrong.)

Another picture of Buster Keaton

I guess human beings just want to feel alive. In the past months, I've felt mostly dead.

I feel alive when I read a book and suddenly realize it's great and get into it. I felt alive when I rode my bike very early one August morning. I got lost, I was tired and hungry, and suddenly I had entered this insane flow state. I kept cycling and cycling and cycling, and I had no idea where I was, but every single place, every single road, every single area, every single lake I found blew me away. Life was an adventure and the world was new. Words are useless here. It can't be expressed, stuff like that can only be lived. I rode my bike for 8 hours, and for 8 hours I was purely and absolutely happy.

All the happiest states are flow states. To feel alive you have to get rid of distractions, as often as possible. The distractions entertain you, but really, being entertained is just a shitty substitute for feeling alive.

I was born in -94. Buster was born in -95. I am 21 years old now. Buster is 20.

From when I was 13 to when I was 19 I had zero friends. Now I have friends. I mean actual, living, real-life-people friends. I guess I have quite a lot of them, actually. I haven't even counted all the people I might consider my friends.

I haven't seen any of them in months, though.

A couple of times I've tried, but it's gone horribly wrong, so I'm not really trying anymore. I find antisocial behaviour entertaining and I love taking this joke too far, so I'm living like a friendless person again. Hahaha! For some time this was very enjoyable, but now I'm starting to realize that it's very difficult to write anything good and breathing when all your friends are Buster Keaton and some dude living in the basement of the opera house, and other people who already died or never existed. Besides, I kind of love many of the people I know... Maybe that's a good enough reason to see them again.

I need to get a driver's license. I know that driving will be the right way for me to exist. I wish it weren't so unecological. I will buy a used RV. A nice little home that you can just move from one place to another whenever you feel like it. I don't understand why people are still living in houses.