Textcalibur!

It’s Thursday, which means the weekend is starting here. Don’t ask me why, but Friday is the only day Syrians have off. Seeing as how I’m a stuck-up European, I take Saturday off too so my fragile psyche doesn’t become overburdened and shatter in an orgy of workplace violence, but that’s beside the point.

It’s been a long week. The venture is coming along and we’re working on a few large projects now, which will hopefully pay off in the end. They have required a lot of time, energy and compromises however. I am finding that it is really quite impossible to do any sort of business here and maintain your integrity. I suppose it would be naive to claim that’s something unique to this region or country; I’m sure it’s the case all over the world. Here it’s just a little bit more obvious. Ironically enough, it’s the corruption that is transparent in the developing world.

That’s why I think the Endlessness means so much to me. Now, I like to think of myself as a fairly decent, if inexperienced writer. I know you don’t have much to go on at the moment, and that which is available would suggest otherwise, so you’ll just have to take my word for it. So I was thinking I’d like to add more to this admittedly ill-conceived project this weekend, and decided (against my better judgement) to read over what I’d put up so far. It’s really quite awful, I thought. It reads like a schizophrenic, pseudo-intellectual social critique with no apparent point. For a moment I thought maybe I should just stop writing it and hope that nobody saw it.

Something nagged at me, though. This is what it’s like – writing, I mean. You write horrible tripe at first, barely legible garbage that looks as though someone vomited a mixture of Webster’s, anti-depressants and vodka. It might be shit, but at least it’s honest. You can still see the half-digested pills on the bathroom floor. In that unrevised honesty, it’s the counter-balance to the bullshit inherent to ‘getting by’ in the world – a refuge from the half-truths you swear by and promises you can’t keep.

It’s the ultimate therapy. For all the words that I cannot speak during the day I find vindication in writing. I know it doesn’t excuse it, but it sure as hell helps me cope.