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The Curse of the Typewriter and the Coming of the Beast.
(5 minute read.)
Fear and Loathing in the Writing Room?
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The cursor was blinking at me again. That same fucking cursor. Blinking. Blinking. Blinking like a goddamn metronome for the mentally ill. I'd been staring at it for three hours, maybe four—I'd lost count somewhere after the second bottle of Chivas and the first faint stirrings of the DTs.
The page was blank. The page had always been blank. The page would be blank until I died or went mad or both, which in my case were probably the same thing.
This is what they don't tell you about being a writer. They don't tell you about the mornings when the words won't come and the afternoons when they come wrong and the nights when you sit there drinking alone while the cursor blinks and blinks and blinks like some kind of goddamn judgment from a God who probably can't write either.
They don't tell you about the fear.
The fear that it's gone. That it's never coming back. That the thing you had—the thing that made you special, that made you you—has packed its bags and moved to Mexico and changed its name and doesn't answer the phone anymore.
They don't tell you that writing is just organized fear. Fear of the blank page. Fear of the bad review. Fear of the silence after publication. Fear of the moment when you realize you've spent your whole life doing something that matters to no one but yourself and maybe your mother, and she's dead.
I was deep in it. Deep in the fear. Deep in the blank. Deep in the kind of existential hole that makes you understand why writers drink and why some of them don't stop drinking and why the lucky ones die young before the fear can really take hold.
And then the phone rang.
It was a guy named Bobby. Bobby from California. Bobby who always had the new thing before anyone else had heard of it.
"Hunter," he said. "You need to see this."
"What is it?"
"It's a machine. It writes."
"I write, Bobby. That's my job. That's the only thing I do that keeps me from eating the barrel of my .44 on a Tuesday afternoon."
"Hunter. Just come. Bring the Chivas. You're going to want to be drunk for this."
I went.
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