What is truth? Is truth unchanging law? We both have truths Are mine the same as yours? --- Pontius Pilate song from JC Superstar
I got this email this morning offering me free daily inspirational something or other, I don’t know, I read it on the can on a smartphone. The daily thought they were using to promo the site I had to enlarge; the small version looked like a woman saying the vows “I am an American fighting man …” as she was in front of a flag in a paramilitary blue blazer holding up her right paw and what looked like a cunt cap in her hand (I know how jarring that word is, but honestly that’s what the folding dress blues hat is called in the regular army. I’m guessing they’ve revised both the vow and the name of the hat given the prevalence of women in all branches of the service.).
I could only read the all cap bold type (that’s what I need, an inspirational site that types like emphatic teen text; e.g. He is so NOT my BF!!!!). The lady just had a blue blazer and the cunt cap was a bible (I’m sure if the Christians are right about … well, anything … there’s a special hell for old dawgs what mistake the bible for a cunt cap.). The inspirational quote, however, had something to do with truth, being honest with yourself and, in short, lack of truth by omission.
I’d sure like to know how I fit that demographic. I did take that vow and I am a motherfucking patriot, but not that kind, and I sure as hell am not quasi Christian, and though the inspirational meditation of the day was neither, the picture sure was. Both to my credit and detriment I very rarely go looking for inspiration, so rarely that I’m having a hard time thinking of a single instance as I type. I can think of a few thousand instances of inspiration but not that I went looking for; I think of myself more as a vessel than a thirsty person (my apology to y’all for the American fighting man and cunt cap cracks, though I think I’m allowed not to be ambiguous about my own gender. Still, person stands.). I’m not a cup half anything guy; Maestro, I am the cup.
I almost feel like signing up for their newsletter though. I’d like to see what sort of thread runs through their “inspirations”. Yes, my spam filter is pretty broad on the one email, unless it’s a cam girl or a dating site I pretty much let it through, though I’m about to add mortgage and car loans to that short list. It’s a bit clumsy to go through that email but it has been my most constant and the one some old friends always know they can contact me through.
I used to keep a tighter grip on the pulse of the nation, and though I occasionally hold its clammy wrist and look at my watch, I’m really just checking to see if it’s still alive. I have general concerns about the economy and the environment and the state of the union, but I’ve been pretty far removed of late. The parameters of my current mission are surgical, peripheral collateral circumstance is more of a hobby and one I’ve been more lax with than, say, my pipe collection. My bad. It’s my answer to omission of personal truths; my focus has narrowed so much that the rest of the country can go fuck themselves. Yes, It’s not a complete truth, and yes, I am a harsher critic of myself than, say, you are of me, but unless a bunch of people died, I’m not that up on current events and I resent having to be for conversation sakes.
I forget the book (some Tom Robbins I think) or the quote verbatim, but it was something like this; The world’s situation was desperate as usual. It’s repeated throughout. It’s a rhetorical technique that can get tedious, like, for instance, in Top Gun when after all the shit the romantic leads repeat some trite phrase from the beginning of their relationship and whereas months have gone by to the theatre audience it’s only been an hour or so, still, you saw people trying not to cry. Although he tried a little too hard to be clever, a habit that keeps you from being an enduring or endearing author, Tom Robbins certainly had his moments.
Among the top three books that influenced me at my most impressionable, I have to admit (if I were following the mediation of the day thing about truth and shit) was Another Roadside Attraction. A year or two later it was Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, but that had more to do with the sex. Yeah, today, as long as I’m listing things and am on a journaling site, the very nature of which loves lists of shit like favorite books; the top three books to hit me at an impressionable age were,
- Trout fishing in America, Richard Brautigan. What I took from that is how sublimely subversive fiction can get, how a master hand can weave cultural subversion into the simplest of tales. It’s probably not the read I’d walk away with today.
- Beneath the Underdog, Charles Mingus. I’m not a fan of biographies, if I must read them I prefer an Autobiography. Like Trout Fishing I’d never seen anyone write about such subversive concepts in such a casual way.
- Another Roadside Attraction, Tom Robbins. Though it was not the first book I read where the author was trying to be clever, profound and funny, it’s the first one I read that I felt spoke to the generation I identified with.
This is probably a pretty accurate list if I had to pick an age I was most impressionable. I would like to add Carlos Fuentes, Borges, Carson McCullers and Nathanial Hawthorne or Samuel Clemons to that list as well. I think McCullers and Clemons were pre-most impressionable and Borges was probably the last to make that kind of imprint, the indelible kind. That’s not to say The list of my tastes aren’t broader or, for instance, I won’t pick up anything new from Cormac McCarthy or Chuck Palahniuk, or someone I’ve never heard of that one of you recommends. It’s just that I’m way past my prime for being impressionable. Jaded, I’m sort of jaded.
Um, as long as I’ve written myself into that corner; whether or not it’s a reasonable ambition (and sorry, your opinions don’t count, they are vitally important to me, but, like lists these sites tend to rife with the kind and the mean, I don’t expect an objective critical viewpoint here, if I did I would clean shit up before I posted) I see myself as a writer. So, sometimes I really don’t want to read anything that’s so fucking good that I can’t help but incorporate it into my own style. A good for instance is that it’s taken me a few years to be able to write an apocalyptic flash without it sounding like an out take from The Road.
There was a short story I read once, I can’t really remember the author, but I want to say it was Octavio Paz, which every now and again makes me want to write a story just like it. It’s from the POV of an Old work horse that, having outlived his usefulness, is set out on the road. Wild dogs snap at his withers, he thinks like a horse, and though the ending seems inevitable from the start it’s still a shock when you get to it. The idea of animal suicide is so profoundly abhorrent to the way we view the other creatures we share this planet with that this simple story sort of haunts you, in my case, for years. It’s like the Shirley Jackson story that public school systems do have kids read at an impressionable age, I mean it’s like that in the sense that the simple words, the horror being stated so casually, so ingrained into the integrity of the fiction that it becomes larger than life, profoundly disturbing. It’s also the thing that’s kind of hard to shake when you sit down to a blank page, which is the point of this paragraph and the last. At some point appreciation and creation work at cross purposes.
That’s the sort of story I want to write. It’s because I am so very liberal, borderline socialist, but the American culture so ingrained and so very democratic in my thinking (as in the choice and will of the people, not the partisan group that fronts a candidate under the illusion of a two party system) I’m more interested in a story that touches the soul of the subject, some universal truth about humanity, than I am in, say, writing Cujo, a blockbuster with little art about a supernaturally mean dog that not only doesn’t offer insight but obscures any but makes a hell of a lot of money. I am not against money. I like money. It’s that between the two major compartments of things that endure A) Popular and B) Profound, I’d prefer coming up with one piece that brushes through the hair of the latter than one that squats and shits out several of the former as, say, the author of Cujo seems too. There’s a reason The Lottery makes fifth grade Curriculum and Cujo does not. It’s a fine reason.
Ok, I’m going to try being nice and read my friends, maybe even note them.
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