Very very true my friend. good job.

So I sit, brand names adorning my body dreaming of another life.  Paying thousands of dollars for oppression and wondering that if I really had an 18^th century Emily Dickinson life, would I really use it to my potential?

I can relate. I think you could rearrange this into a pretty stellar poem. I think poetry would be an excellent form for it because I think to really be awesome it needs some form, and you could say everything you said here perhaps more powerfully in succint, dynamic poetry.

 I think your work here really captures the power of freewriting.  I, too, like poetry, but it sounds like here you're trying to really get at the heart of some personal thoughts.  That's never a bad thing.  I like how the narrative voice is smooth and steady - you've built up a narration that we can trust through the steady references to ongoing life experiences.  The steady back-and-forth between what is (American Idol, boring literature, the uncle who collected trash as a hermit) and what "should" be (getting wasted, using freedom wisely, pursuing dreams) provides an interesting counterpoint here.  We can feel the story's conflict between embracing the modern age of flatscreen sunsets versus the ideal of finding good books and reading them for the sake of reading.  But somehow, everything's become tangled - there's the notion that one "should" be getting wasted, even though everyone "knows" that getting wasted is the last way to pursue dreams.  But reall, do we know?  Can we be sure that working hard and losing sleep and getting all the work done is the right and proper way to find the right way?  I think this story casts a real doubt over that idea.

I definitely relate to what you're saying.  The last question, especially, when you ask whether you chose writing or the writing chose you, is a constant conflict for the serious writer.  The harder and harder on tries, the better the words get, but at a certain point you have to wonder why.  Why write, when there are so many other occupations out there?  Why submit to a lifetime of stories when it's so much easier to drink booze and forget?

I like the way you got to the heart of that debate.  Your story is very personal and refreshing.

 I often like to sit back and think about why the world is going the way it is. Why people want to believe the things they do, care about the things they do, neglect the things they shouldn't. In a exponentially more "comfortable" world with so very much emphasis on the physical appearance being the end game for life, values are seriously being skewed. Long standing institutions such as marriage and community are collapsing under the weight of the expectations. Think about the odds of a truly happy marriage in America these days. How many people pass each other on the street everyday in a big city and will never see each other again. I saw this mentioned in one of William Gibson's later novels, Pattern Recognition. He had one well written scene as the protagonist roamed the streets of London and passed a man who interested her, his appearance, the way he moved, seemed foreign and intriguing. Yet she would never see him again, as per the usual in a big city. Strangers are just that, and most people fall into this category. The days of knowing your neighbor are long gone. The days of true love are dwindling. Chivalry is not dead, but it is bleeding a slow death of ignorance. (Heh, that was a play on words.) I wonder what our future holds. One way to find out.

I really like the way this starts, cause I’m immediately drawn in by the first couple sentences and intrigued because it really makes you think. Coincidentally, I’m currently also writing stuff exactly like this, where I’m asking myself lots of questions concerning my life, place and purpose in general, so it’s interesting to see what other questions and points people bring to the forefront. I feel kind of weird critiquing this, though, because I don’t know what kind of criticism you want (which is actually why I haven’t published any stuff of mine similar to this).

I like this point you brought up in the beginning:

“What I really want to know, John Gardner, is why couldn’t you and Grendel have come to me on your own accord?” (p. 1)

I think this is a really good point. I didn’t understand it on the first read, and I may not still fully understand it, but it seems to sum up the whole piece. From what I understand, it says that the world is so concerned with constantly, persistently shoving their ads and shit in your face that it obstructs from your obtaining the substantial education that you could be getting yourself if the world weren’t in your way. This makes me wonder, that, if you wrote this to relieve stress (as you said), how much you must be pissed off at the self-centered advertising business, capitalist society and the world for being ok with all that. Then I wondered: were you pissed at the ad business first and realized it obstructs from a proper education, and thus, were forced to rant, or did you work backwards, wondering first whether you were lured back to writing on your own or otherwise, and on pondering, came up with this piece? Just curious…

“I am not sure if I decided, once again to go back to writing, or if the writing, the words, the books, the analysis’s, the language, chose me” (p.2).

Interesting, how you turned the subject on itself. First the advertising world was obstructing you from reaching your goals, but then you question whether it’s the wonderful world of TV and the ad business in your way, or just you. 

You misspelled “analysis’s”, (which really irked me), and I thought there was another but maybe I missed it. But besides that, I really liked it because it makes you think and the points you bring up are easy to relate to. good stuff