Dinkaltranen

Pour yourself your drink of choice, better if it’s a spirit. Every time you write a paragraph, read it over and remind yourself you’re an idiot. Drink. Enjoy the taste, or drink every time you write a paragraph, I’m not your boss, I can’t tell you what to do, just what works. Every time you drink and you see that the drink of choice isn’t visible in the bottom of the glass you are consuming, pour out some more.

There’s a quote by the best GM who ever lived, who probably stole it from someone else I don’t care about: write drunk, edit sober. Don’t edit live. Your writing should be a stream of consciousness that reflects speech. If you read the sentence out loud, and it doesn’t sound normal, sorry, you’re not writing. See Broken Mirror for evidence of how not to write, whilst simultaneously writing, and the punching bag is everyone. This is a blog, not a journal, and the essays here are less masturbation and more a punching bag. You might be smarter than me, but you’re wrong. There is a quick wit to endlessly circling the same subjects, in different ways, in difference variances, ad nauseam.

Tautological? You bet. There’s a $20 word ($135.70 accounting for inflation).

Mental illness is the inability to change (50%) and half (1%) the fact that your brain is broken in some fundamental way. Trauma, genetics, circumstance, hell, maybe your thyroid is acting up. Far more likely, you don’t want to change.

Why is an alcoholic an alcoholic? Well, because if he was anything else, he wouldn’t be an alcoholic.

“Isn’t romanticising alcoholism-” Romanticising? Is there anything romantic about art? The best works are unburdened by ego and superego, and alcohol does precisely that. The basal connection to the self, to others, is the core of art, and beauty, and can never be mapped as a data point no matter how hard they try. Everybody loves a recovery story, a sobriety story: a redemption story.

But nobody wants to admit why they did what they did: because it made them better. It absolutely made some things worse, but, what do you care about? Do you want to make art, or do you want to be an autobiography?

Neither you nor I or almost anyone is interesting enough for that.

Autobiographies, autobiographical fiction, is pure ego, and the worst part of it. “Here is how interesting I am and the struggles I faced.”

Whether you believe in God or not doesn’t matter, stating your existence, cogito, ergo sum, does not work if you do not actually exist. If you are just a reflection of yourself, or rather, a reflection of what others see in you, you are simply a pathology on reality. You should assume you do not (or maybe should not) exist, and work from there.

“How do I write like you?”

I’ve just told you. The better question is how do you write like yourself? Why do you want to write like me, and not yourself? A lot of people have called me a rip-off, of TLP, of Egg Report, of Jordan Peterson, but the truth is I just wrote like I thought. I got blind drunk and stopped caring about what I sounded like, and just made sound. I didn’t even read TLP until people told me I sounded like him, and then I read his book, and it was amazing and the best thing I’ve ever read. I eat his lunch every day, and think, wow, I really am blessed to be alive in an age where this is possible.

And that is my voice, not his, not Egg Report’s, not JP’s.

I am smarter in pounds than you can lift, and lift harder than you can think. And given my age, my (past) (present) (recovering) (ongoing) alcoholism (future), and the fact that I am a hack, you should be ashamed that you are even considering asking me for advice.

I pity you. Not because you are you, but because you are afraid to be you. You need to be yourself, whoever that is you decide to be, and you really can decide that yourself. There is not a single patient who I have sat down with and thought, wow, this person really isn’t trapped by their own avoidance of change, lies, and defence mechanisms, they’re really trapped by their life circumstances. After years, you start to notice that. Being a psychologist or psychiatrist means that you recognise the moment someone steps into your room that doing so is avoidance of doing what they already know what they need to do.

Unless they’re genuinely psychotic, in which case, that’s not my area of expertise, but I hear they give antipsychotics to infants now so you can bet that with a call to the ER I can fix that.

I’m considering a name change. Dinkaltranen is too long, far too German, too niche a reference. 4 syllables. I’m probably going to change it to Memort, probably, because it came to me in a dream, and that’s all the reason I need. I could call myself “The Last Psychologist”, or “The Memort Report” (catchy), just to spite people. But really, I don’t care what most people think, and it’s not because I’m schizoid (I’m not), despite everyone taking that from the essay I wrote which includes a note about depressed schizoids, you can thank McWilliams for that observation, not me. Like most of my ideas it was not mine even if I do not know someone has thought of it before, the articulation was mine, and that is all.

So yes: do not “”try”” to “”write like”” “”me””. Write like yourself. You are You, and if you aren’t, you are someone else: and do not exist, because you are Them and not You. And once you accept that you realise that you can be anyone you want to be.

Including a hack writer on the internet.