Tyler Knows Nothing

Since I was nine I've wanted to become a science fiction author. I wanted to create worlds and explore amazing things, and over the years that has grown into something not entirely unlike my childish fever-dream. Of course, now that I'm verging on fifty years old, I am now wholly in touch with my depression.

...Not that awareness makes anything better.

Said depression about everything in my life, with diminishingly few redemptive aspects that just makes me even more depressed, is significantly reductive. It saps every last bit of will out of my soul, no matter how fiery and passionate I am about a subject, like writing or social justice or racial equality or anything good and fair, and I just drive, play video games, and watch stuff. To do anything else, to create, to work hard to achieve a goal, dredges up all of those things that push me to crawl under a rock and just stop being me.

I don't know how to break out of that cycle. People will tell me they know, and some will even offer such advice free of charge, but the truth is I don't lack the knowledge. What I lack is the backbone to endure the pain long enough to reap the reward. I stopped smoking after 35 years. I did it in one day. I switched to vaping in 24 hours. No fuss. No muss. It worked because there was no pain. I'd collected enough information and just did it.

Beyond that, I don't know how to fix anything any more. But I can type. And so I will try. I will always question my words, the order I say them in, how readers will react to them, and second-guess myself at every turn, but I will try.

I will try to post one piece of anything length every day.

I hope it works.

It takes roughly 30 days of doing the same thing over and over again to cement a pattern behavior into a habit that becomes so natural you cannot imagine getting through a day without engaging in said activity.

As a writer, I've been lax. I'm going to try to change that now, and I'm going to do that through writing every day.

Something. 

Anything.

It's not like I have nothing to write about. I'm a rideshare driver most of the time. I've started a website about a month ago that I think is important and I don't spend enough time working on. The site is called WeDemandProof.org, and despite the fact that I have been ruminating on this concept for a couple of years now and it's been live for about a month, I've done little with it aside from think more on it and share it with some of my riders, all of whom said it was a fantastic idea and it was about time. Simply put, I want the WDP to hold out leaders accountable for the claims they make by keeping those claims in the public eye and requesting that they furnish verifiable proof for said claims.

I develop ideas for that science fiction I've been dreaming about writing ever since I was nine.

While driving the other day, I spotted a plumbers truck and was reminded of Mario in the Nintendo video game series. Perhaps inspired by an unconscious recollection of the ghosts in those games, I wondered what fiction about a plumber who is also a paranormal problem solver might be like. Not scifi, but you get the idea. I've been pondering my Robot Series for years now, and have even written a few short stories about an EPIC robot named Toby. I use the idea of Toby as a foil for the suggestion that Artificial Intelligence would develop like humans and how the far more likely divergent evolutionary process of robotic intelligence would interact with humanity. I'll likely post them in the near future.

Regardless of what I end up doing, it was never my intent to be a rideshare driver at 50 years old, and I have been languishing in the simple, uncomplicated process of the work for two and a half years now. Then I heard about Anthony Bourdain having committed suicide and decided that I didn't want to die without having done something I wanted to do with my life.

That would suck.

I am a writer. 

This is what I do. For a living. Well, not so much lately, but it's the single most salient job I identify with. Back when I was a kid, being introduced to new stuff like Brave New World and Dune and Catcher in the Rye, I fell madly in love with the idea of becoming a writer. 

It didn't take long to discover that it wasn't going to be easy. 

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