Pittstown Point, Crooked Island, Bahamas

0 nm
Wind: E-SE 15 knots

Everyone should read the book Julie & Julia, if you haven't yet--you'll read it in two days, and it will make you happy and make you think that I’m going to get a book contract. I wish. I keep thinking that an advance is what would solve all our problems. What I need is to be able to work to a deadline. I’ve always been awful at self-imposed deadlines. Today I’m alone on the boat again, just me and my computer, struggling to create. How do artists do it? The blank page is a devouring animal, seeking to destroy, and the electronic blank page is even more nightmarish.

My depression (or whatever the hell you want to call it) has not abated. Whenever I go into this phase, I think I should just snap out of it, just pull myself up by my proverbial bootstraps and start accomplishing things. You know, turn that frown upside down, all that crap. Tomorrow, tomorrow, I love you tomorrow. It’s a lot easier said than done.

I’ve never felt myself adequate to accomplish the daily tasks of an every day life--things like emptying the trash, doing the dishes, cleaning the toilet, sweeping the floor. All those things that “normal” people, whoever they are, seem to accomplish so effortlessly. My dishes accrue a film of grease no matter how hard I try to motivate myself to do them after every meal. Have you read The Great Gatsby? In it, Fitzgerald describes Daisy Buchanan as “one of those people who leaves things strewn about expecting other people to pick up after them” (or something like that. That classic is one of the few missing from my onboard library). It’s his cruelest moral indictment of her and the set she’s part of. They are completely useless as human beings, unable to perform the basic requirements of responsible personhood.

When I look around the boat, I feel like that might be true of me, and that’s the last thing I want. What went wrong? What didn’t I learn? Why can’t I pick up after myself? Lately I’ve taken to defining happiness as having someone else to clean your toilet for you.

So that’s what’s going on with me. What about you? I’m going to go drown my sorrows in prose.