What Do You Want

I woke up with frustration gnawing at me, the edges of a dream fading fast into an obscurity that immediately struck me as being unfair. Somehow, this dream was the answer, even though now I can't remember even the vaguest detail. Somehow, this dream was everything, every story I've wanted to write, every word combination I've stared at this screen for hours trying to find.

I hate those dreams for their fleetness of psychological foot.

Someone asked me the other day, what do you want? I've been turning the question over and over in my mind ever since, occasionally poking my head up to inquire of other people what they want. The answers I've gotten have been unsatisfactory; not that what they want doesn't satisfy me, so much as what they want is not what I want.

What do I want? What does anyone want? It is circling thing, this question, and invariably it spirals away to land on the question of my writing.

I think it's sad I want to be a writer. I think it is the beginning of something that will only end in disappointment, anger and a further upsurgence of my long-held suspicions that when you get right down to the nitty-gritty, I'm not as good as I think I am.

Delusion is my greatest fear, psychologically. I've seen too many people caught up in its thrall, good people, even smart people. I've seen them pat each other on the back, tell one another that they are oh-so-wonderful, self-sustain a thing that is in no way, shape or form based on reality or anything even approaching reality. I've been there myself, lost in self-delusion, cheerfully assuring myself that all things were fantastic when they were in fact steadily tramping their way downwards to oblivion. I've been a doormat telling myself that I'm self-assured, an idiot calling myself intelligent, completely alone and claiming popularity.

Nobody ever talks about what happens when you rip the bandage away, and I suppose in a way that's what I want. That's what I want to do with my writing.

I want to set lightning amongst the fools. I want to take the unfeeling populace and make them feel. I want to rip their damn hearts out, make them see what it is they live in, force them to face it head-on. Look at yourselves, I want to shout from the top of the very highest building, and I want them to look up at me for only a moment, then look at their own reflection in the window of a passing car and catch their breaths. I want  to scare the shit out of them, make them angry, make them sad.

Then I want to pull back from all that, and I want to make them laugh. I want to point at something, some little tiny thing, sunlight glancing off of the water of a fountain, maybe, the smile on the face of a woman going out on a date, and say, but look at that, isn't that beautiful? Look what you could be.

And I want them to look, and I want them to see, and I want them to understand what it is having to live in this world with them each and every goddamn day after day after day.

How do you do that? Riddle me this, my audience of audiences, how the hell do you take all that and fit it into anything at all? How do you achieve that pinnacle of writing, self-introspection on the part of your audience?

 It is, you see, an impossible thing, the thing I want more than anything else.

I want to make your entire species fucking think. And I have no idea how to accomplish that.


Edited to add: Plus also I want a neverending supply of cookies and my very own dragon and a chandelier I can swing on, also the BIGGEST BLANKETFORT IN THE WORLD and a place with barricades and hillocks and foxholes that I can play NERF in and, and the ability to teleport, and for BEER TO STILL BE DELICIOUS BUT NOT MAKE ME BE DRUNK.

And I want for people to not complain when I don't make EVERYTHING into a joke, because then I feel the compulsion to go and add jokes at the end of things to save them from possibly being melodramatic.  Hrmph.

...and I wouldn't mind the pointer for my tablet to come back from whichever mysterious place it has secreted itself, so I can finish the redesign of this site.