(the hackish story of a long, twisted affair with mediocrity)
by jeremy, age 31½
once upon a time i used to write a lot of fiction.
it bothers me that i haven’t written a play or a script of some sort in close to 15 years now. especially because all i have to show for my work are really bad Douglas Adams rip-offs. which is kind of funny, considering that i’d never read Vonnegut or Brautigan, who would have been my real heroes in literature at that time, until i was about 24 or so.
my work then was meaningless. trite, at best.
i haven’t even written a short story in almost as long. barring my unfinished, ill-fated, and terribly boring attempt in November.
and i’ve got all these ideas… i’ve literally had dialogues running in my head for years and years now. maybe that’s why i so often talk to myself when nobody’s around. and i’ve been wanting to jot it all down. i’ve been wanting to write something more serious and meaningful.
everyone who knows me and has read my writing (even memos at my old job) is always telling me what a good writer i am, how eloquent i can be and all that. and i used to be famously (or infamously) succinct. that might even be somewhat believeable, since (i think) i do pretty decent writing here on LJ.
i wrote the eulogy for my grandmother’s funeral, and afterwards, everyone was coming up to me and telling me what a lovely job i did. and all i could think of was, ‘thanks. but you’re a git. i don’t share the spotlight, i GIVE it away, and on this day more than any other.’
i suppose they’re about half right. i think if i really put my mind to it, i could pull off something really interesting.
i used to write scores of radio-plays. i wrote scripts in the same way that a millionaire buys tiny little sporty red two-seaters for their never-ending string of trophy wives: i never even thought about it, it just happened; it was like trying to walk and listen to music at the same time… and then suddenly i’d turn around and where before there had been 2 empty months, there would be a shiny new stack of black, wet paper.
one time, i actually produced a full-on play at my church. people walked out of there that easter morning stunned and confused, wandering out into the daylight as if it were the first day ever. they’d never seen a play put on by 16 year-olds that was actually halfway meaningful, soulful.
i was so full of shit then. i’m smarter than that now.
and here i sit, thinking about how nice it would be to get to work on a serious piece of purposeful fiction.
but maybe, just maybe… maybe i should just go back to my roots and write a GOOD Brautigan-esque story. something incredibly bizarre, but with an awful lot of meaning. something both tender on the heart and spikey on the brain. and funny. terribly so, at least in the gallows sense.
it’s just that now, after having found and read really fulfilling writers like Vonnegut and Brautigan, it would just seem a little clonish. maybe i could say that i was there first in my head. i got three-quarters of the way up the same mountain they scaled, but at least it was without their help. that last 1000 feet, though… that’s the killer. it’s all marked already.
what to do, what to do…? maybe i’ll just put it off for another twelve years or so. somehow i think it would be beautiful to die with all my stories still in my head. tragedy is strangely fulfilling that way. think of all the people you know who’ve died, and how much better it was that they left so much undone. if they’d done it all, who’d honestly care that they kicked the bucket? but when they leave behind a mess of unfinished business, it gives us all something truly wonderful to lament.
and i’m all about that whole lamenting business.
maybe i need a muse, so i can get it done… but then people can be that much more disinterested and apathetic about me when i do finally take the long dirt nap. i don’t care for happy endings, but i guess it would be nice if, just for once, people in the real world could live happily ever after.
