I was just thinking a bunch of negative thoughts about the waitress working in this hotel lobby--"Why isn't she asking what I want? Why is she only paying attention to these rich people?" Then she brought me a to-go cup because she remembered that I left midway-through my tea last time. Then she called me 'hun'. I find that sexually degrading, but it's still a nice sentiment, isn't it?
See how quickly and shitty you become when you just think about yourself?
I don't know how much material Hemmingway wrote, but I'm going to read all of it.
You hear that, Hemmingway family!? I'm coming for your trunks in the attic! I'm coming for all the scraps and loose leafs.
I need to write more regularly, you're right. There are fewer readers than ever and I can feel that. I haven't been checking the blog's stats because I'm back to never checking those, but I can feel it. Makes sense, really. Why should you all give a shit if I don't give a shit? It's the same reason I'm not on billboards right now, causing jams in the traffic.
I threw a woman's cardigan in the garbage. Not my finest hour, I'll admit, but I'm smiling at it in spite of myself. I wandered around the Chicargo Fairmont where we're staying--I wander in hotels. You never know when you might happen upon a buffet that no one's paying attention to, or an attractive oil conference delegate by their lonesome. I wander in hotels. You should, too.
You shouldn't do the following, though. I saw a cardigan draped over one of those easels they use for holding the sign outside of the ballroom's entrance (it's cheaper than hiring a person to do it). It may have been expensive, I don't know. There are a lot of expensive-looking people in this lobby, so the odds are somewhat good. It doesn't matter. I took it.
Now, me taking a woman's cardigan isn't totally out of the blue. Cardigans are sort of like pens; they come and go. There are people out there wearing cardigans I have misplaced, I'm sure of it. Here's the weird part, though: it wasn't my style. I had no intention of wearing it because it was gaudy and I may wear women's cardigans, but I don't wear gaudy women's cardigans. Even I only need so much attention. I took it because I didn't want the person to find it again. There was a satisfaction in knowing that. Perhaps Americans still make me feel a little uppity. I mean, they're nice. I have American friends and I know there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who are good people. It's still really easy to hate them, though--especially the white ones, fat and successful; laughing; having the best day of their lives, complaining. Putting their flags on everything (everything), like they couldn't be more proud. I can't believe how many times I've seen the 'no guns' sign down here. This is a 'no smoking' sign, but the cigarette's replaced with a gun. Any place that needs a sign telling you not to bring your firearms into a zoo is a fucked up place at its core.
Anyway, whatever the reason, I took the cardigan, put it in my shopping bag. I walked down the lavish ballroom steps and dropped it into the garbage bin attached to the janitor cart once I reached the bottom. It felt great.
I wasn't planning to share this with anyone, not even Andie. However, this only happened an hour ago and I'm already telling you. I don't really care how the act makes me look. I'm sure I've done worse. You have too, haven't you? We've all done something worse than that, haven't we? (I appreciate that a couple of you are saying "No, Paul" and you mean it.) I guess I just figure that I need a little more honesty coming out of me. We all do, and I'm right about that one.
I didn't throw a woman's cardigan in a trash bin because it may have belonged to an American. I did it because I miss Sarah. Sometimes that feeling makes me angry at alive people. Later, I told her about it in my book that I have, and the intention was that the deed wasn't going to go beyond those pages.
Yeah, I have a book. It's black and I write in it and tell her what needs to be said ("And your legs. Baby, your legs were phenomenal") when I need to say it. I scribble in it and try my best to tell myself that I'm not just writing to me, and that no matter what her manifestation may now be (even if that's just ash), it's important for my well-being to maintain our dialogue. It was the strongest part of us.
When a year has passed I will read back on what I have written before beginning a new year, and so it will go. It's important for the writer and the bricklayer alike to express their grief. However, there must always be a time and a place; that's a responsibility of the mourner, once enough time has passed at least. The brick layer can take a few weeks off, but he can't blubber and sob once he's back laying bricks. Salt corrodes and construction guys find crying men incredibly uncomfortable (or so I have read). The writer, on the other hand, can express their strongest emotions as they're working, often to the benifit of their craft (I feel like a dick using that word). However, there still has to be a time and a place, right? I mean, there's gotta be.
...
...
This was all her idea, y'know, as I gesture around. She thought I should start a blog, though she never did say why, exactly. Perhaps she thought I needed an outlet. Perhaps she thought I needed attention. Perhaps she just thought it would be good.
I can't remember the day I came up with the blog's name, but I remember once, not long after starting it, when she said, "You are the tragic hero." I think that at the time she meant it in an 'unlucky in love' sort of way. I probably meant it that way when I began using it. Yet I'm white and laughing and complaining, so who am I to say who's unlucky? Who were we to say?
I'm going to publish this book of poetry. I'm going to compile the words and figure out a cover and set it all up for the printing press in some sort of file format they require that I probably haven't even heard of yet (layout will be the hardest part). Then I'll pay to print it, just like all the other writers without a deal, and I'll distribute it and maybe sign a copy or two. I'll do all of this because I want to do it and it's important to want to do things and it's even more important to do them, and it's wise to express your grief. Then, I'll go back to my black book and I'll try to keep my black thoughts in there going forward. Because there's a time and a place, and this blog was meant to be funny. It was meant to be a haven for all of the thoughts that no one else seemed to be having. No one except her, of course.
If I want to be a writer and a comedian (and I can at least say with certainty that I don't want to be anything else), I'll have to promote myself. I've always hated doing that. I hate the idea even now and I hate the need for social media more than anything else in this business, these days. No matter how much I want people to pay attention to me, I don't want it like this. Cause now everyone's a comedian, and what we do is no longer special in the same way. Now we need fan pages more than we need fans. Now it's a popularity contest among all of the kids who came last in popularity contests. I'd kill to do it in the eighties, when it was still a special thing at a performer's level. But kill who? This is the reality I'm in.
The blog must always be at the heart of these aspirations because, as my soon-to-be-wife pointed out once, it's my life's work. I'd never thought of it that way before. If you turn your back on something like that, you're a necktie. You're a nothin', in my books.
However, perhaps if I'm going to rebrand myself, I should rebrand the space as well. Maybe change the name. Would it matter, really? It's hard to think of what I would change it to, exactly, but maybe I should make that move anyway. Besides, I'm hardly unlucky in love these days, am I? And no matter how the rest of my life goes, the fact will always remain that the tragic hero, in the end, was her.
I know. I could go fish the cardigan out of the bin and hang it back on the easel. It was a fresh, empty garbage bag. However, I'm not sure the owner would still want it. I mean, who wants a gaudy cardigan? Probably why she left it on the easel in the first place.
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