It’s 1:48AM.

Is this what you want? And by you, I mean me, because I’m talking to myself right now.

This is turning out to be some confessional blogger bullshit.

I’ve lowered the bar but hard to say if it was the right one. I swore a couple of times and I’m using colloquial, familiar language in order to talk to you, imaginary friend. Not at you, not an open letter to the world, not Ars Poetica not the best novel of his generation not any of that carrot-that-turned-out-to-be-a-stick bullshit I’ve been using as a reward circuit since I wrote my first teen angst poem.

It’s 1:52AM and I’m procrastinating. I should be doing the paid work of proofreading this high end luxury gig I’m tag-teaming with another translator (I happen to be in love with but that’s another story I can’t really get into right now).

But here I am talking to you. Have I merely invented this second person person as a pretext to talk to/about myself? Do we want my life on the page, just raw-dogging that first draft into the goddamn WYSWYG editor so you (who?) can peep in there and see the Author jacking off in private or whatever it is Authors do in their spare time?

OK, then.

I mean, not really OK, but the customer is King and the customer is always right. (You do realize what we do to kings in my country, right?)

We wants it crafted. Not too crafted, though. A bit raw, bit curated. A diary but not a boring one. We wants the precious meat splayed with insect pins and coated in formaldehyde so it stays red, almost pulsating across a bulging vasculature so obscenely realistic it looks fake.

It’s 2:01AM and I’m procrastinating. Again. I worked a 4PM-Midnight shift with the SNCF railway company interpreting station and platform announcements for the Olympic Games (which we aren’t allowed to call the Olympic Games because it’s a registered trademark and so we call them the Paris Games 2024 which really isn’t ideal when half your announcements have the word Paris and strings of numbers in them, but here we are because intellectual property) in the Saint-Denis CCR or Centre de Contrôle du Réseau (ie: railway traffic control room) located at the back-end of some industrial wasteland strewn with rotting pallets, half-blind alley cats, and broken train components. And after this job I have to proofread into the night for another job before I start it all again tomorrow.

And I never set out to write autobiographical content, but there’s just no time to layer things in my usual complex and cryptic wordplay which I enjoy a hundred times more than this because I don’t like myself enough to consider my story worth telling in plaintext.

And that’s the crux of it all, isn’t it?