something new...perhaps something longer
February 21, 2009
I don’t know what the next project is. Not yet, but I really like this little 500-word snippet. I can see it going someplace. There’s a sort of witty, cool tone to it that I find interesting. And Buddha knows, as a writer, you have to be intensely interesting in your stories, your characters…We shall see.
TALK TO ME
Before we begin, I need to clear up a couple things. First, I’m an idiot. Oh, not the classical Dostoevsky idiot, or a pure Darwinian idiot like someone who drinks heavily for six hours and then goes for a ride on their snowmobile in the dark and runs into a barbed wire fence. Decapitation. Never a pretty thing. I’m an idiot because I have, throughout this life of mine, mostly followed my heart. It’s not that I don’t have a brain. I do. It’s just that I ignore its all too correct advice, more times than not. When I say I follow my heart, I don’t mean to say this is a love story. Ya, first paragraph, and every single guy out there who happened to be reading this wonderful novel, reads the words “love story” and the book is suddenly alone on the bathroom floor – two squares of toilet paper shoved in at page 56 as a deception. The sound of some sport coming form the television. God, did I just make a broad generalization about men? Did I just lump all men, quite unfairly, together in an unromantic lump on the couch in front of a TV? Sorry about that. Broad generalizations are bullshit. I know men who love watching hockey, for instance, and have season’s tickets to the opera, and they love the opera. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it and denying it at exactly the same time – because you’re a good person and you try to have an open mind, and you try to stay away from broad sweeping and idiotic generalizations. I said opera. I mentioned a man who loved opera and you immediately dismissed the hockey and thought “gay.” Am I right? You see, we’re programmed to think a certain way. We watch TV, we go to movies, we listen to the radio, we have conversations with co-workers, we poke around online. I know you already know all this. And I’m not qualified to give a lecture on culture anyway. Anyway, this fictitious hockey loving, opera loving guy is me, and I’m not gay, not yet anyway. Okay, I said a couple of things need clearing up. Do you remember that? Oh, you careful readers. The second thing is, I’m going to do this quite a bit – talk to you, I mean. Oh, listen, I know some of you are probably wondering about the decapitated snowmobiler. Forget about it. Forget about him. It never comes up again. That might be a pattern, something worth paying attention to. There may be things in this book that are complete and utter red herrings. Like life. Like that young woman in Starbuck’s this morning who seemed happy and was truly pleasant – I mean, this was no act. She smiled at you and something hard in you melted. You almost wanted to ask her why. Why was she happy? How was she happy? But you didn’t. You took your coffee and went on your way to work without entertaining the adventure.