Barman gets to end of week. Trudges home in snow, sleeps. A week of listening, being wine shrink, letting people talk, humoring whatever conversation comes along.

It's not so bad. Just that there's no one to talk to when you come home. No one around at 2 AM to humor your own problems, listen to your perceived problems. Like 'how come I feel like a BIG F-ing IDIOT being a writer/ how come I get taken as, like, the BIGGEST F-ing CREEP?' You go through enough hell just to be there enough to make what effort you can do toward it. And yes, writers may have become completely irrelevant, but try believing that in your own heart.

So you write, as a way of shrinking your own head. You try to work through that sense of creepiness to back to where it's honest and ennobling to write. That's the kind of lonesome straits you get in. Writing as a form of self-defense.

And sometimes at least, it works miracles, and you feel justified again. You are what you are, and didn't have the choice at birth not to be a writer.