***
I can't bring myself to feel as young as I am these days. It gets tougher.
Steve Irwin dedicated his life to complicated animals only to have a stingray puncture his heart with its tail spine thingy. How many of us will get to prove we loved our jobs as much?
***
Okay, so let's start it like this because we have to start it like something before this coffee shop closes and I have to slush-trudge back to my cozy apartment with its cozy wife and dog:
I took the class, yes? We mentioned that. The class is over now and I got a 90 and mom said that if I got an 'A' she'd buy me a new pair of sneakers in the spring and I want to speak to you guys about it because for the life of me I can't determine my shoe size.
It's like this...everyone liked all of my contributions and they were supposed to because I'm a visionary without an audience, apparently. I'm some sort of idiot. Remember how I said that I submitted a blog-like piece to all of them and they hated the formatting? I think they were okay to say that. I wouldn't say that I hate the formatting. Once it got going, I rarely thought of the formatting. I always preferred this style because I assumed that people didn't really want to take the time to read, even when they were reading, and that short, clipped sentences in a line-by-line style would flow as fleetingly as our attention spans tend to. I still think I'm right, frankly, but there is something to be said of the paragraph. I mean, Dickens used the paragraph to his heart's content, until an editor would say, "No, you gotta start a new one. It's been twelve pages of this. Time for a new thought." Stephen King uses paragraphs and he wrote a book about AN EVIL ST. BERNARD. Something to think about.
In truth, when I tried to edit the blog over the summer I ran into one of two snags: I'd either get too sad because Sarah's dead, or I'd be embarrassed because I was embarrassed. That brings me to our present day in our present pants because the blog has always worked just fine as a space where I can talk about me while being me. We all know that. If it just so happens that this involves ruminations on sitting outside of lingerie stores because I'm a hipster pervert, that's okay because the world needs hipster perverts and I'm willing to admit that I'm one of them to a mass audience. The thing is that when I look at old posts only one word tends to come to mind: juvenile. Everything feels a bit juvenile and it's cleavage this and it's throwing up off of a balcony that and it's supposed to be tongue-in-cheek, but sometimes it reads as tongue-through-mouth. Yes, the blog is a great place for me to be me, but here's the thing: I tend to get on my nerves sometimes. Isn't that the way with you? The problem is that it's a bastardization of how I really want to write. I have to wrestle this stream-of-conciousness, let's-go-to-the-mall(!) approach with a more literary, high-brow approach. There are ways to write funny stuff without having to put in all of these asides and my little obvious jokes.
Here, lemme show you something. This is a piece I wrote about Portugal that had been sloshing in my head from the moment we left until the moment I wrote it. Consequently, it flowed out of me like so much water, quick and easy, and it ended up sounding exactly as I wanted it to sound. I still think it reads like a blog post, but it also reads like a polished piece of writing, and that's the difference. So here, here's a snippet. I won't upload the whole thing because I may submit it to publications and then they'd get mad at me:
Porteugese Water Cog
Ah, Portugal! Land of barking dog and hanging laundry, where
people yell things that you certainly can't translate.
The
pre-wife and I pranced about there for a sojourn during our pre-honeymoon, or
whatever it was.
What a
land! Truly a place of bodacious derriere and casual beauty, where taxi
cabbists drop you off in front of this beautiful fountain or that distinctly
different beautiful fountain. The very streets themselves are puzzle-pieced
together with intricate tiles you might find in a rich person's bathroom.
Oftentimes I'd find myself looking just past my deteriorating shoes, wondering
what sort of fellows had the patience to pave an entire city with squares one
inch in diameter. Is it 'diameter'? 'Area'? Either way, they were tiny and
probably needed to be cut with some sort of saw that hadn't yet been invented
at the time. They fashioned fish into those tiles, these long-dead men. Fishy
characters splishing about our feet, looking up at us as if to say, "Ours
is a history of artisans. Yours, of concrete."
I made sure
to look up sometimes though, otherwise I'd miss all of the violet trees and
perfectly defined bottoms that seemed to make up the country. Everything had
roosters on it. It's all roosters in Portugal, as if a grandmother's pantry was
the basis of design for their infrastructure. Is it 'infrastructure?' Wherever
the shops are. All roosters.
The
buildings themselves could have used a spackling, maybe, as the façades all
seemed to have walls similar to those you would find in the bathroom of a YMCA;
sprawling with cracks and chips, looking like a space that people really gave a
shit about 40 years ago, but not any more. However, unlike a bathroom full of
old men getting changed, the Portuguese structures had character. These were
bruises and scrapes earned over decades and centuries of decades. Who was I to
judge, in my plaid shorts? Besides, the fissures and dents were overshadowed by
beautiful tile etchings, blue-on-white and stately-looking, like the sort you
see on Nan's finest tea cups. Y'know the tea cups that some old biddy uses when
company comes over before some visiting appraiser appraises them to be worth a
fortune? The tiles were like that. Darling, gleaming squares that seemed to be
fastened to the sides of the city with caulking. Perhaps they were.
Okay, compare that with what you know of the blog so far. Now do you see what I'm getting at? See how it still sounds like me, but it also sounds like something that a writer might write? That's...it's time I start sounding like that all of the time, so that the public will have no choice but to associate me with this balance of prose and mild misogyny. It's time I start sounding like a big boy and I write some stuff that I can be proud of, rather than what's 'good enough'. My effort through life so far has been 'good enough'. It's time I start believing I can do better. I'm proud of this snippet on Portugal. Now, in the realm of the blog as a whole, I'm proud of that too, but going post by post, I'm proud of about 3% of what I've produced over eight years. I'm not a homogenized milk kinda guy. I'm a coffee cream kinda guy. Eight years from now I want to be able to say I'm proud of 18% of the content.
Ultimately, this means I have to use things like description and imagery and yes, paragraphs from time to time. You guys can handle that, just as you've handled all of my non-decisions in the past.
***
I'm happy to wear jeans almost every day. However, if I had the resources, I think I'd be just as content in slacks.
"Heretic! Burn him!"
