comme d’habitude

I’ve been doing a lot of reading these last few weeks or so. I came across something by Ayn Rand in some compilation book about comparing yourself to others in your career. She said it is not necessary to compare yourself to others, just do the best you can do. That was not the most eloquent way of paraphrasing, but you get the point. She used the career of a writer as an example. She said a writer should not choose to be a writer because he is the best writer in the world. A writer should choose to be a writer because he has something to say.
Queue epiphany sounding music.
Look at the cartoonish light bulb above my head.
By the way I chose to omit “he or she,” because I’m purposefully avoiding the androgynous form everyone uses nowadays. It’s just this idea I have, but I digress.
I’ve started writing some short stories, well I guess a single short story would be more accurate. I think the reason I never tried to publish anything was because I always thought I had to be the best god damned writer in the whole fucking world. The problem is I want to live a life with the least amount of regrets as possible. I find that I’m more prone to regret the things didn’t rather than the things I did do.
I used to read Henry Miller in high school and I had to look up a lot of the words he wrote. People always tell me I have this stellar vocabulary. Again, “stellar,” used by choice. Most of the words that people get so impressed by are words I learned from Henry Miller. I mispronounced a lot of them. For years I totally said voluminous and polysyllabic incorrectly. Now you can get the MP3 pronunciation on the internet—That’s so much better than Webster’s dictionary. There’s still shit in that book I don’t understand because some of it was written in French. I understood common terms like cul-de-sac, or c'est la vie, but I didn’t get things like “comme d’habitude.”
Having an extensive vocabulary is not as difficult as it seems. All you have to do is read books by authors that have great vocabularies. In high school I had to keep a dictionary besides me, but now we have the internet. Now, with the internet, the answers are at my fingertips. You can highlight a word on you kindle or kindle app and the definition automatically pops up. What could be easier?
Henry Miller wrote Tropic of Cancer in France. It was published in 1934. It would never have been published in the United States of America at that time.
It was deemed obscene until the supreme court deemed in not obscene in Miller Vs. California (1973). Rappers can say Mother Fucker because Miller dared to write “international cunt.” I can’t say international cunt. I’ve only used it in a sentence maybe one time before this. IT just doesn’t flow right for me. I can’t think of a possible practical application of this phrase in contemporary America. I can’t use the word quim. No one knows what that is anymore because no one uses the word quim. They say Va-J J. Everything is vanilla, people are too afraid to say what they are really thinking.
I don’t have to emulate James Joyce. I don’t even like James Joyce. I can just have something to say. Having something to say doesn’t mean you have to use words like somnambulist. I don’t have to write like Henry Miller. In fact, reading it again, I wouldn’t want to. Anti-Semitism is not cool.

I haven’t written a short story in years. I’ve been looking at it all wrong. I don’t have to have the biggest vocabulary or be the best writer. I just need to write well with my own purpose. I don’t need to find my own voice—I already have that. I just need to say what I have to say.