Before I can accept the errors of my conceit

Dear guy with the deep voice talking loudly in the coffee shop,

I get it, you’re a social guy. You love telling stories and having people listen. Or perhaps you’re just lonely. But whatever your story, I’d prefer not to contemplate it instead of doing the work I came here for, which likely is the same amount important, or unimportant, as the shit you’re talking about.

Let me return to trying to write my masterpiece in the most social environment of today’s world. Let me instead choose to distract myself every two minutes by talking to the friends I came with and end this expedition with the same blank page that I can tell myself not to feel bad about later. Because the true writer’s experience for me was observing the people around me.

But not you. There is no muse in you to credit for my non-existent ideas. Only a distraction from them, and, no matter how interesting your conversation might be, or how engaged your friends seem to be in it, I can’t be bothered to accept that they might be better than anything I could come up with.

See, Sir, this problem you’re causing for me isn’t an issue of you talking too loudly, because one could argue that my first and biggest mistake was working in a coffee shop when I prefer to write in silence. And that my second and second-biggest mistake was bringing my social friends to this social environment. And that even if you and my friends weren’t here, I would be just as distracted by the TV playing Fox News behind you.

This is all true, so I admit, this is an issue of you challenging me to confront my conceit. Yes, I believe my preconceived thoughts are a level of genius above all others-especially yours-and my inability to enable this fictional genius is much easier to blame on the nature of a coffee shop, or the people that go to it, or the intent that they visit it with. So, before I start to accept that the world doesn’t exist for me to write something mediocre, it would be best for you to leave this place that you laid claim to long before I got here.

Trying to tell shorter stories because writing a book is too much pressure right now. View all posts by Ali Haider

Originally published at http://alihaider.org on October 11, 2019.