About a decade ago my ex wife got into an online argument with some anonymous woman on facebook for leaving a simple on word note on some shit or other I had posted. The word; Awesome. Sunny lit into her with something along the lines, Really? You’re going to pull Awesome out of your ass for this chicken-shit? What if the rapture comes tomorrow, Super Awesome? Like, you know, even more awesome than the stupid funny shit my husband says?
Sunny always insisted jealousy was ugly and the likes of her and I were beyond that. Yeah, no. It takes a lot to push my jealously button, apparently it only took the word awesome from an anonymous screen name to push hers. Um, that’s not my point though. Somewhere around the mid 1740’s the French aristocracy had a Dictionary developed as a means to preserve the language and persecute peons from abusing said language. By the time the French revolution disabused the aristocracy of pissing on the peons the dictionary was obsolete. That is the point. Awesome like radical became tag-lines for the ignorant, making the power of the original meaning obsolete, even though, I’m sure, dictionary’s include the meaning of something akin to inspiring awe.
I am often guilty of bending to such common usages, though often hyper-aware of doing so and often with an implied snarkiness in the usage. Except, perhaps, when it comes to the word fan. Like most americans I use the word often to mean I like something, and almost always to describe whirring blades or even a hand held folded blade used to circulate and cool down the air. I assume with most dictionaries that’s the first definition, by the time they get to fan as in a supporter of a team, band or individual they’ll say somewhere in there that it’s short for fanatic. I’m not sure about most people, but I’m not a fanatic for most teams, bands or individuals. When I was a kid I was a Tigers fan, no two ways about it, now I like the sport and the team. I like the clerk at this local liquor store too. I don’t have the clerks rookie but my level of fanaticism is equal.
That being said I’ve liked Bob Dylan for five decades now. Not the person, he sounds like he’s kind of a dick, but, you know, I haven’t met him, but he doesn’t sound like someone I’d like. Not for his poetry either, and his music is mostly borrowed or simple. Somehow or another I think he’s a great songwriter thoug as I’ve just said any individual component isn’t very masterful. He wrote a lot of stuf like;
With a time-rusted compass blade
Aladdin and his lamp
Sits with Utopian hermit monks
Side saddle on the golden calf
Complete and utter nonsense, but rife with enough archetypes that the stoned and fanatic scratch their chins and nod as though they are in on some grand crypto thumb in the eye of authority. I can hum most of his songs though and they are catchy.
In the last few weeks somewhere between Thursday and Monday I am painfully aware of having missed a flash Friday. I know, it’s presented as a game and nobody is playing. To me it was the discipline of writing a piece of fiction once a week without obsessing over whether it was any good or not, whether my ego would be stroked or dashed by putting it to public scrutiny, whether I edited it proper or not. Ok, that’s overkill of an explanation, 95 percent of the truth is flash Friday allowed me to think of writing fiction as a sort of an obligation. It’s like the University. If you pay a lot of money you feel obliged to actually read the stuff on the syllabus, whereas if you just picked up the books you’d get around to reading them if and when you felt like it. Sure, some professors are worth the price of admission, but most aren’t.
Anyhow, I think about the flashs I’m not writing. This last weeks I was thinking about a line from a Dylan song — The only decent thing I did when I worked as a postal clerk, was to haul your picture down off the wall near the cage where I used to work.
There’s a short story in that line alone, maybe a novel, definitely a flash. There’s a flash in being a one time postal employee, I mean it’s one of those gigs you expect people to keep until they retire. There’s a whole flash about pictures at the post office. I was talking to a friend about this not too long ago, I think they’ve stopped posting most wanted photos at post offices. I tried to remember the last time I saw one; it’s been so long I could not remember.
In a short story you can actually explore the facets of one or more of either or both, in a novel you could do so on an epic scale, a generational scale. In a flash you’ve barely got time to set a match to a question; it’s what makes them both so very cool and so very frustrating and if I had sense, I’d keep my chops and sharpen my axe.
I don’t know. Good morning, how’re you? I’m fine thanks.
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