Chowk Rant

Want to know why I write? Read on.

For as long as I’ve known...I’ve been telling stories. When I was five, I had distant relatives who’d see me a few times a year and each time I’d have stories for them. I’d cut out the funnies from the newspaper to make other people laugh. It was after all…sequential art. Storytelling.

Why do I write?

I write because I am compelled.

Because there are people living in my head who want out.

They live there and they’re sick of the smell. It’s a crowded, filthy and unpleasant place.

I am not controlling them, giving them a script to act from. I am only another puppet. A 3d manipulator manipulating 2-d manipulators only being manipulated by a 4d manipulator. I may claim "I actually wanted to make my character consider misogyny as a choice" but I know it’s the little green men who’re giving me those signals that I call my “ideas.”

I’m only chronicling just as I am being chronicled.

I give birth to entire worlds. Make people laugh. Make them cry. Think twice about the choices they’ve made. I’m the weird guy who’s screaming in public about how the Kennedys sold the world to blind aliens with no arms. I’m just a fiend hunched over a keyboard, tapping away into the quiet night, whoring my brain for a compliment or validation. When my quotas up, I can tell all these people who love me to “fuck off and die quietly.” I don’t need your praise or acknowledgment to be qualified or be worthy of the meaningless label “genius” to be one.

I am not writing because someday I’ll have my name over a few bestsellers and weirdos like you or your children will be analysing my thought-bombs and the bloodied ink on the page on Chowk Version 5.9. How will that make me great? A bunch of intellectual twats discussing me while half drunk or half mad? I write because I want to kick people’s head in the way several have kicked mine in. I want to pull someone’s heartstrings and snap them off, hoarding my power. I want to lead to emotional devastation the same way Dickens made me feel when I read “Great Expectations” at age twelve. I want them to feel the unconsolable sinking feeling that I drowned in when I read “Kidnapped” age eleven. My complete shock and hurt as I read the autobiography of a lesbian written on toilet paper in “V for Vendetta” age nineteen. I want romance between words. I want to write something and post it into a future when I may be dead and people read about times long past. Times long forgotten.

I want stalkers. I want the obsessed to obsess and I want to disappoint them and teach them that nothing means anything. That whatever I’ve said to everyone has no value, that I’m not an improvement over the man who slaughters their chicken in the name of his and my imaginary friend. I know nothing. Taking every shortcut when no ones looking.

I write because I am compelled. Because when I have peered into the perversity and beauty of the human spirit I cannot return to the world and work 9-5 smiling and shaking hands with everyone. Faking my concern for their dying children or parent’s cancer. I cannot believe that the system is worth fighting for. I cannot look back. What I have seen compels me. I cannot stop tomorrow if everybody tells me I’ll never publish a book just as I can’t stop today when people are looking at me weird and the misunderstandings that are attached to the art and the artist.

I have to tell stories while you and me can still pretend that the show needs to go on. That the curtain with its inevitable falling, is still far away and my words make a difference. That I can light up eyes and break hearts.

It’s the void. I am afraid of the void. And I won’t return to it without screaming until my lungs fall apart.

That’s why I fucking write. I don’t write because some fucking poet who could never have the imagination of Blake could only wank over “the flight of birds” and “passionate sunsets.” Screw the poets. Haven’t you had enough?

And I will continue, at times trying to mask the unsophisticated and the uncooked.

But not today. I won’t pretend that the poets shouldn’t be publicly lynched. For every good one, there are three thousand acclaimed ones not worth the shit on your shoes. If you feel the same way…write. Don’t fill the world with more happy lies and whore prose.

If you continue to write shit...I’ll make fun of you and spoil you for everyone who made the mistake of liking you.

Write because no other choice is acceptable.