I wrote my morning post today about how my brain felt dull due to staying up too late watching Instagram reels about Noam Chomski and the future of AI, both of which I’m perpetually fascinated by. I’d like to tell you that i took a solid nap after that, woke up to 3 cups of coffee and a nice chicken soup and my brain started working.
I hadn’t looked at the 30 or so pages I was into this memoir for a good few weeks so i decided to open it up and do a little tinkering with what was there, adding some things from the blog (with improvements), and coming up with new content just for the book. I got into it for a good 3 hours and i’m glad to say we are now on page 51, with about 14 thousand words. I would like to share the foreword i wrote today, to maybe give an idea of where things are going
“Preface: April 2020, New York City:
Every day was the same. I woke up on the cold, harsh streets of New York City. My first thought was not of food or shelter, but of air duster. I would stumble through the city. Toxic fumes fogged my mind, and my heart pounded irregularly in my chest. The warnings of doctors and EMTs echoed in my head. I was playing Russian roulette with each breath. The danger was far greater than any fleeting high. The awareness of my impending doom was both terrifying and oddly comforting.
I wore my hospital wristbands like a badge of honor, a grim reminder of my struggle. It was my way of asserting my identity in a world that had forgotten me. I often thought about dying alone on the streets. It would be behind some forgotten building. This thought was a haunting reality that never left me. But I also didn’t want to be a nameless corpse. In case the inhalants did what the doctors said they’d do and stopped my heart. I wanted my people to know I had lost the battle, at least.
The cycle of addiction was a vicious one. Each day, I’d tell myself it would be the last. But, as the sun set and the city fell into darkness, I’d find myself drawn back into its deadly grip. All the while, something else had the whole city in its deadly grip, with as many as 730 deaths in one day on April 7, 2020. I was the walking dead, in an eerily empty city, living only to shoplift more air duster and huff it. I imagine I went through 8–10 cans a day.”
Now, i know it starts off really dark, I know, but i think that sets the tone for the kind of dark humor that starts coming through as i detail how i got to that point, 4 years ago. After the foreword I literally go back to the beginning (when and where i was born), and explain how I became the hopeless addict living on the street during the deadliest pandemic event of any of our lifetimes.
After some tweaking and some writing i decided to feed it into a very useful editing website i discovered, called “Hemingway” which helped me make it a lot more readable and less redundant (though there’s still a lot of work to do). As I look through Hemingway’s recommendations, i’m also learning to write more effectively, it’s a beautiful thing.
I’m getting excited about the project, maybe i won’t leave it alone for another few weeks on end and really start pulling it together. I’m shooting for around 25k-30k words, as i don’t want it to be longer than it needs to be, to get the story out. It’s not like there’s any deadline or anything, but i do want to get a first draft done, because of all of the folks telling me to write a book, and how much I’ve really wanted to for a long time now.
SO, if you want to help me keep working on this memoir, with an ample supply of the comforts like sandwiches and tobacco products, please consider donating to my KO-FI page, shit, i could use all the help i can get. plus my cell phone bill is due on sunday, and i am worried about it:
https://ko-fi.com/evr0ck17/goal?g=0
