Haunted

I don't know about anyone else, but I write with a smartphone. My digits need the assistance of artificial intelligence to keep up with racing thoughts generated by an overactive frontal lobe. Hypergraphia is as rare as it is weird. It's a neurological anomaly that creates a compulsive urge to write and or draw.

It's the reason you can't walk to the store for a pack of smokes without tripping over a Stephen King novel. Marshall Mathers proliferates rhymes at accelerated rates because of a sickness he just can't shake. It dates back to when rock and reed were used to write with. Ancient Roman poet Juvenal called it "the incurable writing disease." His take on it stands true today. There isn't enough data to formulate a treatment plan and there is no known medication that can touch it. It's a blessing and a curse.

I mention King because what's happening to me is right up his fucked up alley.

I'm going to try and break away from the melodic and robotic prose that comes and goes.

Please bear with me. Activity in my temporal lobe is slowed, so my frontal lobe overcompensates in an attempt to counterbalance the imbalance. The prime directive of the frontal lobe is to potentiate complex thought and facilitate speech. The result is an insatiable lust for language and I sometimes overextend my sentences. Oh and the rhyming is unintentional.

9 years ago, I decided I wanted to be a writer. I had no idea I wouldn't be able to stop when I did so. I didn't have the time, patience or money for writing classes, so I decided to wing it. I'm one of God's own prototypes. A high powered mutant never meant for mass production. Too weird to live, too rare to die. That was a fancy way of saying I'm a diehard Hunter S Thompson fan. If you're unfamiliar with him, I pity you. He was a drug and alcohol fueled journalist who had his way with words.

"For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled."~Hunter S Thompson

(That quote just popped into my mind and scratched away at my skull to get out.)

While winging it, I found out that the goodish doctor Thompson was self taught. So it began.

I've earned an unrecognized accolade I call a Stockton Doctorate. The S in Hunter S Thompson stands for Stockton. After an early discharge from the Air Force, he obtained the position of copy editor at a local newspaper. He used their typewriters to copy A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway and The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald word for word over and over. He said he did it to get a feel for what it was like to write a book like the masters. I started with the same two books as my hero and then made a stop in bat country to get a feel for his own mastery. It got out of hand.

Stephen Kings was the next mind I rooted around in. The Drawing of the Three, The Shining, and Cell. Then I devoured a giant manuscript he wrote called 'On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft.' Read, copy, repeat. I thought I was done. I decided to give it a go with my own words. I found my suddenly astute vocabulary's perfunctory nature hilarious. I couldn't stop writing so I couldn't stop laughing. It scared the shit out of me. So like anyone would do, I turned to Google for the answers.

"Has a writer ever died laughing at his own work?"

The Google search results leaned heavily towards Chrysippus of Soli. An ancient Athenian Master philosopher who died laughing at his own joke. I looked past his bust and found Letitia Elizabeth Landon at the very bottom. The number 23 is near and dear to me, so the written-in-red "1823" beside a quote grabbed me by the retina.

"They're laughing because they're mad. Too mad to be able to tell what's funny anymore."~Letita Elizabeth Landon, London Literary Gazette, 1823

I was hooked. I decided to copy one of her poems. 'Revenge'

When you copy the writing of someone, you get a feel for their pace after a while. L.E.L took hold and drug me away like a ragdoll after the second word. She even gave me an auditory hallucination. I heard the fall of horse hooves hitting cobblestone roads as I held on for dear write. I'm getting ahead of myself, but my affair with the Victorian era lady poet only got stranger.

I doubled back to Chrysippus after immersing myself in the life of Letitia Elizabeth Landon. The similarities between myself and the founder of stoicism were just as creepy as those I shared with Landon. Like the unstoppable tendency towards quoting the words of others as I go.

"You must be formless, shapeless, like water. If you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup. If you put water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. If you put water in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Water can flow or it can crash. Be like water my friend."~Bruce Lee

Everybody was kung fu writin'....

I acquired the memory and muscle memory of Stephen Hawking, Nikola Tesla, Einstein, Marcus Aurelius, the entire Wu Tang Clan, Maya Angelou and many more. Unlike doctor Hunter Stockton Thompson, I used a smartphone to gain the feels for writing with a pros prose.

°The Google We G Board°

I use dior dnA to bring my writing to life. The G Board by Google comes standard with all Android phones. It learns your habits and tracks your actions in order to assist with texting. I do much more than text with it. Some of the words that pop up in my predictive text boxes are downright scary. A slip of the finger generates an alternate word and I learn as the G Board learns. I've started thinking like a smartphone. Words I have no business knowing instinctively come to mind. When I see them in my sentences I have to stop to look them up. To see if they are words and if I'm using them correctly. They always are and I always am. Sometimes I'm triggered to tap a word that pops up in a box. I then follow with the next logical step in a sentence that writes itself at me. This isn't normal. The way my phone behaves. I want to post this but I'm not done yet. I'll be back.

Edit: 12 reads, no activity. I slapped it all together in a few minutes, but I thought it would ring more bells than that. I have a lot going on around me at the moment. Interrupting assholes keep telling me to stop playing with my phone. This isn't a game. All work with word play makes Jack as sharp as a new tack.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

“What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle"~Stephen King, Cell

Jung-le. I reD (and copied) a lot of Carl Jung. I needed help and the doctors I saw weren't working. I haven't reD this anywhere, but I know Stephen King did the same thing. I saw it as I reD his words. I have a long one beating the hell out of my dome right now.

"Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life. If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature. Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life."~Carl Jung, The Red Book

I wrote it all out from memory and I don't need to check it for accuracy. Those words are like weapons that defend my life at all times.

I got a little testy about being ignored and blurt-wrote all of that out after "Edit: 12 reads" I'm leaving it because of something you may have just reD.

Hunter S Thompson is number one in my book, but my favorite living scribe is The Boogeyman of Literature. I was misguided in the beginning. I assumed that celebrity Facebook pages were owned, operated, and reD by said celebrities. I wrote a masterpiece at King that fell on deaf eyes one day. I explained my battle plan before it began.

°The Read Read Conundrum°

Look up at that. You can't tell which "read" is past tense and which is present tense because of, well, fuckery. It can trip up even the most seasoned of readers and halt the advance into the story.

"Wait a second…has he read this yet or is he about to read it? Goddammit I lost my space."

As I told King in a post to his so-called Facebook page, I had my sights set on a demographic nobody considers. The people who wait for the book to come out. Dummies. I also explained that writing the past tense of "read" in a simpler fashion would assist real readers as well. I settled on "reD." Der, I'll have a red rum.

Then I told him about how I was going to transplant the art of battle rap into the world of literature.

"I'm gonna scare the shit out of you, Doc. Make you wonder what's lurking in the bushes for a change." ~Me

"Explanation is no fun."~Stephen King

Ha.

I've hidden my agenda and my story all over the internet. I'm a perspiring author. I don't hope to one day become a writer, I already have. I'm just sweating it out while I try to finish without detection. I don't even know the meaning of the word hope.

"Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane. It's got no place on the inside."~Stephen King, Shawshank Redemption

Insanity is next to godliness.

Hypergraphia can cause sudden shifts in writing style and direction, but I watch my narrative tie itself together all the time.

"Mr King! Can you tell us how the new book is coming along?"-random reporter

"Good. It's going pretty well. I can't wait to see what happens."-King answering random reporter

Crepes, mad mo' sell.

"An apt quotation is like a lamp which flings its light over an entire sentence."~Letitia Elizabeth Landon

"36 Chambers be out you in danger, lemme pull ya brain out ya ass with a hanger. Didn't Mama tell you not to talk to a stranger? Now you got ya neck in the noose of the strangler."~Clifford Smith, aka Method Man of the Wu Tang Clan

I've got a spirit clinging to me and I'm not sure what her intentions are. I'll jump back to the jump scares I got from researching Letitia Elizabeth Landon now.

I'm a wayward soul who suffers from bipolar disorder. I used a toy called a Speak & Spell to teach myself to read and spell at 3 years old. At 14 years old, I became obsessed with a group of rappers who call themselves The Wu Tang Clan. Well, 9 lyrical novelists spinning a web of wit and [Ontiveros] intrigue would be more accurate than "rap group." Time Out.

"Ontiveros" Derives from the Latin word "verus" meaning "true, real, genuine." It popped up in a predictive text word box when I was writing "intrigue." Did you know that there are a whole lot of English words that spell Latin words backwards? Like Tical. That's Wu Tang slang. Method Man calls cannabis "Tical." Tical spelled backwards is Lacit. A derivative of the Latin word Lacio that translates into "3rd person active indicative." Check the first 6 letters in "indicative." Indica. Indica is a strain of cannabis. Genius. Sorry, I glitched out. But it stays.

The first album put out by The Wu Tang Clan is called "Enter the 36 Chambers." 36 is synonymous with all things Wu. It became a very important number to me over the years. 36.

L.E.L is either my soulmate from another time or a predatory poltergeist with ill intention. She was known for her wayward ways and refused to keep her mouth shut like the women of her time were supposed to. She was a poet and a journalist who published her first book at 17. She chose to call herself "L" so no one knew a woman wrote it. It contained 36 poems.

L was 3 years old when she used her grandfather's letter tiles to teach herself to read. She also suffered from bipolar disorder. I was more than a little amazed by the similarities I shared with this woman I came across by accident. I fell in love with her. I became worried about those wayward ways of hers as I reD on. I didn't want her to end up alone. I was a little jealous but happy to read about her engagement to a land baron who lived on the coast of Ghana. I had no idea I'd be crying by the next page.

Less than a month after the wedding, L passed away. She overdosed on her bipolar medication. Some said it was suicide, some said it was accidental, and others said she was murdered by the mistress of that goddamn land baron. She was 36 years old when she died.

36

I cannot and will not tell a lie when I write. I decided to stop here and looked at the time for the first time since I started back. It is 3:36 am right now and I'm not surprised at all.

4:36 am.

"Fate is a sempiternal and unchangeable series and chain of things, rolling and unraveling itself through eternal sequences of cause and effect, of which it is composed and compounded"~Chrysippus