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I am a writer that isn’t supposed to be. There have been many before. I should be a carpenter or a plumber. I should be an electrician or a mechanic. I should build things like my father, but I don’t. I am none of those things. I was born a writer in a working class family.
My American public school education was shit. My teachers were apathetic or, more often, ignorant tyrants. They tortured the imagination out of me. Or so they thought. I just kept it to myself. I let them think I was dying the way they did. But I kept my mind alive. I used it to be free.
I went to college, because my mother told me to. She told me I had to take the SAT. I said no. She kept pressuring me.
Fuck you. I said. I’m not taking that fucking test. I said that to my mother. I was that kind of kid.
She registered me for the exam, anyway, and pressured until I agreed. I didn’t study at all. I threw the practice exam booklet away—the night before the exam. I was angry at my mother for making me do this. I didn’t want to do this. I knew I couldn’t go to college. Why should I try?
I stayed out until 3 AM. I got very drunk. I had a drinking problem back then, for sure. In fact, I’ve had a problem with drinking several times in my life. I haven’t ever admitted to it. I’ve never been very conscious of the drinking problems I have.
In fact, fuck all the dancing around: I’m fairly sure that I’m an alcoholic. I’m a binge drinker. I start out drinking, socially, and it escalates fast. Within weeks, I am drinking every day. I drink to get drunk. My body buckles under the abuse. I stop drinking until I feel better. My binges go on for months. I’ve never admitted that before.
Anyway, college. There’s so much coming out of me lately, I can stray from my point: I took the SAT. I really didn’t try. I was hung over and tired. I didn’t try at all. Somehow, I got a 910–on the old 1600 scale. I was dead in the middle. I was average. I knew it.
My mother wouldn’t give up.
I’m not fucking applying to college. I was yelling. It’s pointless. Leave me alone.
I wanted to finish high school. I wanted to join the police force. I was going to live with my best friend. I was going to lift weights and have sex with a lot of women.
I applied to one college just shut my mother up. I was accepted.
My best friend and I had a major falling out. I had no job. I had no money. I had absolutely no women. I had nothing better to do. So I went to college.
I was undecided. Then I was a Communications major, but only because my friends were. Yes, I chose my first college major based on who I wanted to take classes with. That’s how little I cared about college.
And then I was twenty-four. I graduated, finally, somehow. I started to like learning toward the end, and suddenly I was out. I was in the real world.
My GPA sucked. I had no idea what I wanted to do. I didn’t know why I majored in English. It was more of an impulse than anything else. I was like a water drop that followed the natural and easy course down the side of a mountain to arrive at the English Department. And it happened that slowly.
All I’ve done since twenty-four is wander around the country, read a lot of books, and wish I was a writer. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to be. It’s I have ever been.
Now I’m writing about those years of torture, confusion, wandering, reading, loving and wishing to be a writer. Life is really fucking strange.
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Good Lord Tom. This is by the best piece of yours I’ve seen in weeks. So honest so clear so true to your person. You recall those memories and allow the reader to experience them. And you do that with so few words. Not as Modernist as Virginia Woolfe but then again, you’re a Post Post Modernist writer. Still I’m comparing you to her. Be appreciative.
Sounds a lot like my story, sans all the direct cursing to my mother.
Don’t be such a bitch all the time, Jeff. Good lord.
If I’m not a bitch to you then who will be? Patti Lupone? I think not. Can’t you ever just take a compliment and say thank you?
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look
through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in
books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
Listen to the nice gay man Tom.
It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?
The allwhite poors guardiant, pulpably of balltossic stummung, was literally astundished over the painful sake, how he burstteself, which he was gone to, where he intent to did he, whether you think will, wherend the whole current of the after- noon whats the souch of a surch hads of hits of hims, urged and staggered thereto in his countryports at the caledosian capacity for Lieutuvisky of the caftan’s wineskin and even more so, during, looking his bigmost astonishments, it was said him, aschu, fun the concerned outgift of the dead med dirt, how that, arrahbejibbers, conspuent to the dominical order and exking noblish permish, he was namely coon at bringer at home two gallonts, as per royal, full poultry till his murder. [from Finnegans Wake]
I repeat, Finnegans Wake is gibberish. It’s a joke. He has us running around trying to make sense of gibberish. It’s fucking hilarious.
Oh and fuck you, James Joyce!