"EDNOS"

"I realized something this morning," Kay said over coffee. "I'm not happy with my weight right now."

Emme slowly flipped through the sugar and artificial sweetner packets. "Have you ever been?"

"No, of course not," said Kay. "But I had this epiphany--I need to start working out during the day. Like that should be my job now." She smiled, but her eyes were dull and tired. "I mean, I can't control the economy or my crappy ass job search, but I can control my weight."

"Kay." Emme pressed her lips together and then sighed. "Kay, that is like a textbook example of how people with eating disorders think."

"So?"

When Novelists Sober Up Stephen King says he cannot remember writing “Cujo”, he was so loaded; but after his family staged an intervention in 1987, emptying the contents of his garbage onto his living-room floor—cocaine, beer cans, Xanax, NyQuil, Valium, marijuana—he quit, and the result was a marked slackening of tension in his work. One of the things that made “The Shining” such a great novel about falling off the wagon was that King didn’t know that was what it was about—it was written from inside the belly of an obsession. This is dead-on about The Shining--Jack Torrance is a magnified Stephen King (teacher with a drinking problem and in denial about it), and King didn't figure it out until he sobered up. However, I think a bigger problem with his later work is that he's Stephen Fucking King. Earlier in his career, an editor could say, "Look, we're going to trim this, I don't think this works, do some rewrites on this chapter". Now he can do whatever the hell he wants because there is nobody out there who is going to tell one of the bestselling authors of the last century what to do. Being fucked off your tits is associated with creativity, but I assume most creative types are like me: I've been able to write while rocking a buzz. Sometimes my brain has even worked its way around a difficult plotting problem while getting soaked in alcohol, but anything that doesn't immediately get written down is usually lost for good. And I'd say somewhere around the second or third drink, that's it. Any creative energy is getting channeled towards acting like a jackass.

As for anything more illicit, writing has never even occurred to me. I've certainly used one experience in particular in my writing, but I don't even want to think about what sort of gibberish I would've scribbled in the moment. Maybe I just fail at TRUE ART.