National Novel Writing Month: "Tick Tock," Mocks the Clock

Less than 6 hours to go. My jitters have descended into vapors of ennui. No longer do I worry that I can't do it. Rather, as the reality of the novel writing approaches, I'm struck by an equal yet opposite impulse: why should I do it? I'm young, industrious, working one job and starting another and applying for still another. I have a gym membership, a Netflix membership, a safeway card. I could just do it next year, or the year after. There's no rush.

Except there is. For much of the past year, I have often been struck by the truth of my own mortality. I can feel time floating away from me. I can feel it every morning when I wake up too late for breakfast, every evening I spent at fraternity parties or row houses. I think this might be the brazen shock of adulthood. Yet I also think of Monroe Stahr, Fitzgerald's unfinished hero. In some ways, Stahr is the hero America never had - a man who knows that he will not live to reap the fruits of his labor, and so labors for the mere sake of laboring. A man who works to work. That's Scrooge McDuck, in a way, too - he lives long, but never settles down.

I know that I will probably live an unnecessarily long life. I am always the last person to leave the party, even though I usually enjoy it the least. I will be a lonely old man at empty funerals. I will remember things the world has forgotten. But who knows? My best friend once told me that she wouldn't live to see 30. There's a season for everything: marriages, divorces, births, deaths. All we have is the time given us by God and science.

I need to write this motherfucker.