So, this guy the other day told me that I suck.
He's blood in one of those hazy distant ways that's so common in these parts. Aunt Ruth's boy's first wife's kid by a 2nd cousin once removed, or some such shit. We'd gone different ways, but we were still friends and had been since we were barefoot pre-teen boys running and howling after his father's baying coon dogs under a crescent moon in the foggy, pre-dawn dark about a hundred years ago.
It's a southern thing. You wouldn't understand.
He'd mellowed a lot after losing one of his legs when his bike got t-boned, and he had also gotten into books during his last stretch at the Beto Unit. He's still a helluva bike builder, and can outride 95% of the people I know, but he's also become a pretty good reader, or at least he knows when something is working and when it isn't, and is asshole enough to tell you so.
Anyhow, he'd offered to read some of my stuff, and had more than once put his finger on a problem I couldn't sort out. This time at the end of it he just sat motionless for a few minutes.
"You wrote this? Just now?"
"Yeah, I did."
"Just fuck you man," he said, "you suck."
Shit. Now what?
He stood and the long muscles under the old-school biker tattoos on his forearms rippled as he flexed his fists, cracking his knuckles in annoyance. I don't care how long you've known someone like this or how close you are, they're still sometimes as unpredictable as a pit bull. He whuffed, and for a minute, I thought he was going to just walk away, which would be better than the alternative. He handed the iPad back to me, and lit a cigarette, and I could tell by how he was standing that he was going to lecture me. Jesus, dude, just give me a beating instead - I only let you read it to proof for spelling mistakes and stupid crap I have a tendency to overlook.
"You can write shit like this, and you don't? What the fuck is the matter with you, anyhow? I can't put two sentences together and you hand me this, and then tell me it's not enough that you can do it? Are you one of those whiny bitches that's gonna tell me how hard it is? Fuck you. You banged this out in an hour. Tell the kids in Somalia how hard it is."
He's never been to Somalia.
I wanted to tell him that there wasn't anything hard about it. A basic command of English, a couple of stories to tell; easy peasy.
But there's always something else that needs done, like real work, or my motorcycle, or the wife, or kids, or grandkids, people I've never met who drain my life away as I try to save them, and babies and kittens and hopeless helpless and - sometimes there's just no urge to do it whatsoever even when there's nothing going on.
But there's nothing hard about it.
It's just that getting my head into it that deep is like drugs, and they're easy too, but you can't be doing that shit all the time because it will screw up your life and drop you into misery even as the ecstasy keeps you hitting that pipe till you die. Fuck Somalia, what do they know about digging your heart out with a spoon while the white light surrounds you and the ripping pain of the pleasure of it all is killing you with every word?
"I dunno," I said, saving the file for later. "Who's got time to fuck with it? I got a real life."
"You still suck," he said.
He's blood in one of those hazy distant ways that's so common in these parts. Aunt Ruth's boy's first wife's kid by a 2nd cousin once removed, or some such shit. We'd gone different ways, but we were still friends and had been since we were barefoot pre-teen boys running and howling after his father's baying coon dogs under a crescent moon in the foggy, pre-dawn dark about a hundred years ago.
It's a southern thing. You wouldn't understand.
He'd mellowed a lot after losing one of his legs when his bike got t-boned, and he had also gotten into books during his last stretch at the Beto Unit. He's still a helluva bike builder, and can outride 95% of the people I know, but he's also become a pretty good reader, or at least he knows when something is working and when it isn't, and is asshole enough to tell you so.
Anyhow, he'd offered to read some of my stuff, and had more than once put his finger on a problem I couldn't sort out. This time at the end of it he just sat motionless for a few minutes.
"You wrote this? Just now?"
"Yeah, I did."
"Just fuck you man," he said, "you suck."
Shit. Now what?
He stood and the long muscles under the old-school biker tattoos on his forearms rippled as he flexed his fists, cracking his knuckles in annoyance. I don't care how long you've known someone like this or how close you are, they're still sometimes as unpredictable as a pit bull. He whuffed, and for a minute, I thought he was going to just walk away, which would be better than the alternative. He handed the iPad back to me, and lit a cigarette, and I could tell by how he was standing that he was going to lecture me. Jesus, dude, just give me a beating instead - I only let you read it to proof for spelling mistakes and stupid crap I have a tendency to overlook.
"You can write shit like this, and you don't? What the fuck is the matter with you, anyhow? I can't put two sentences together and you hand me this, and then tell me it's not enough that you can do it? Are you one of those whiny bitches that's gonna tell me how hard it is? Fuck you. You banged this out in an hour. Tell the kids in Somalia how hard it is."
He's never been to Somalia.
I wanted to tell him that there wasn't anything hard about it. A basic command of English, a couple of stories to tell; easy peasy.
But there's always something else that needs done, like real work, or my motorcycle, or the wife, or kids, or grandkids, people I've never met who drain my life away as I try to save them, and babies and kittens and hopeless helpless and - sometimes there's just no urge to do it whatsoever even when there's nothing going on. But there's nothing hard about it.
It's just that getting my head into it that deep is like drugs, and they're easy too, but you can't be doing that shit all the time because it will screw up your life and drop you into misery even as the ecstasy keeps you hitting that pipe till you die. Fuck Somalia, what do they know about digging your heart out with a spoon while the white light surrounds you and the ripping pain of the pleasure of it all is killing you with every word?
"I dunno," I said, saving the file for later. "Who's got time to fuck with it? I got a real life."
"You still suck," he said.
In Our Next Episode: I try to suck less. Or at least find something worth sucking on. Perhaps a redneck redhead, since I'm at the moment reminded of my roots.
So glad you're blogging more. :-)
ReplyDeleteI haven't dared to dig deep into everything for a long time (feels long to me), but I feel like I'm getting to a place where Imma gonna. (Still not sure about posting it online, though, because when I do I sometimes make my family worry and that's hard to get past. Ugh.)
I wish there was an option to get notified if there were comments.
Switch to WordPress!!!!! :-)
Yeah, he was pretty clear.
ReplyDeleteI write pretty good, when the mood strikes and real life isn't driving a freight train across my forehead. That means almost never. I've gotten real compliments on shit I banged out in no time too. But that still happens almost never.
So, yeah, he was pretty clear. If you can write like you do, which is about four hundred times better than I can, but you don't because it's HA*A*A*ARD and you'd rather take a long windy ride across a couple state lines and back, then yeah, you suck. Y'know?
I met a woman once who told me she couldn't write anything else until she wrote this one series of stories but she couldn't write them because it was too painful. So I said, so change the stories. And she said, Oh no, I couldn't do that. Then she said, I hate writing, and I thought, based on what you told me, how would you know? I write a lot more because she's stuck in my head as someone who's spent a lot of time organizing her excuses so she can have complete control over the experience and hold on to the writerly myth that it's supposed to be full of this exquisite pain. It is, and then there's the less exquisite pain of realizing that what you actually wrote about the most gut-wrenching thing that ever happened is tripe, makes no sense and is boring as all hell, and it will take you a year to fix it. Not because it's "painful," but because the work to get it right is imprecise and unreliable and dull and requires putting your ego in a closet and barricading the door.
ReplyDeleteI also think the hard work isn't necessarily the "going deep." Writers love that shit. The hard part is finishing, revising, and cutting out all the parts that convince me I'm a fucking genius heartbreaker and that one line about the bugs in the window screen will make you all fall madly in love with me because of where I chose to put the adjective. The work is still hard even if you're writing a slapstick comedy about juggling. And by hard I mean boring and demoralizing and essentially an office job, when you get down to the nuts and bolts of it, what with the grammar and research and other stuff that makes your writing something more than a journal entry or a tenth grade poetry assignment.
Speech over. Thanks for the space.
Hope, I just saw your response and there are two thoughts I have to share.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I read your comments as if AD wrote them (the font is so teeny I had assumed/not looked). I couldn't tell the difference until I saw your name at the end. Now that I know, it's not as easy to see how I made that mistake, but I still see it. I've always found something shared between your two voices (AD's and yours).
Second, while you say that the "hard work isn't necessarily the 'going deep,'" the "hard" you describe as possibly the real kind of hard work is the tedious kind, not the full-of-release in a more immediate gratification kind. Both aren't easy, though.
My NaNoWriMo from a couple years ago was hard in the "going deep" way. I'm not interested now (and likely will never be) in doing the hard work that I find tedious and too difficult to be pleasurable (reworking, rewriting, adding, deleting).
That is some fairly upfucked font, now that you point it out. I always read comments, but for some reason, it didn't occur to me that anyone else might. I'm not a bit self-centered.
ReplyDeleteFixed. Or at least, better. Still got my beloved clown colors that annoy the bejeezus out of a variety of people.
The colors are a bit of a crime against humanity, that's true. But if you used anything else I suspect I wouldn't recognize you...
ReplyDelete