The Wednesday edition of my regular blog over at Eat, Sleep Write.
http://eatsleepwrite.net/humorme
Tag: introspective
Self Doubt on Eat Sleep Write
Today’s installment of my writing blog on Eat, Sleep, Write. Today we talk about self doubt, sometimes called ‘Impostor Syndrome,’ an all-too-common trait in creative people.
http://eatsleepwrite.net/selfdoubts
The Plastic Static
Static
Damn. How did so much time get away from us?
It’s like one minute you are standing in the middle of a warehouse in the early nineties, high on cheap beer, brown weed, teenage freedom and rock and roll; next thing you know it’s a different century and a different world, and everyone is compartmentalized and plastic and isolated.
Yes, we are getting older. Some of us, not all of us survived.
And one has to wonder sometimes, who is the winner in this game? The ones who checked out early? The ones who missed so many years? Those of us left behind? To carry on, to trudge forth even as we see everyone and everything around us crumbling.
These days I’m not so sure.
I crawled out of a cave. I fell asleep sometime in the last century and woke up here. In a museum, in a cheap science fiction movie. Here, we are both the spectators and the spectacle.
This hallway is black. Not dark. Black. Light doesn’t dare traverse it’s expanse. There are glimpses of neon here and there, but it’s impossible to tell if they are real or hallucination. The absence of light makes the hallway feel immense, long, possibly unending. That’s another scary notion. Eternity. The thought that there may be no end to this.
And then we must ask ourselves again, which is worse? The eternal shuffling toward nothing, or the exit too early; the ones we have lost, who have fallen along the way. Are we sad they have gone? Or is it only us growing ever lonelier as they one by one depart?
I looked for you. I looked forward to reconnecting.
You wouldn’t recognize the place. Everything has changed since you left.
We’ve torn down nature and put up a plastic nature replica. It will last forever, and it doesn’t get messy like the real thing. We still aren’t sure if the birth defects are a direct result of the synthetic natural plastic alloy or merely a coincidence, but we aren’t letting it slow us down either way.
The streets are emptier too. You would get along a little better with less traffic, fewer distractions to fight for your attention. You see that’s where there was a bookshop. That used to be a record store. This was a Wags before it was a Perkins before it was a Bakers Square before it was the Sunshine Breakfast Club before it was finally abandoned and left to rot away.
This used to be the beach. Our beach. I wish I could say they left this one alone.
It almost feels the same, the yellow moon peeking down through slivers of cloud. That breeze that always hints of winter, even in August, always reminds you of how cold it could be.
As if it had any idea.
Nothing that lives or breaths or moves really knows anything of the true cold. The freezing. The motionless waiting, staring. Stuck in your tracks. So cold you can’t even feel it anymore.
It doesn’t matter, you wouldn’t recognize this anyway. It is not ours. This is no longer the world we knew.
This. You see this? This passes for sand. I know. It is cleaner. It doesn’t get in your shoes and stuck in every crevice. This is static. This is electronic noise, pixels, bits of information formed to resemble the granules we knew growing up but without all the mess.
Maybe that’s how they’ve done it. Maybe that’s how the rug was pulled out from under us. Maybe they filled up all the hourglasses with this synthetic sand. It bought them all the time in the world.
There was a point I was trying to make. There was something I wanted to say to you, but I seem to be only rambling. I’m sorry to waste your time. You would have laughed at that one. The idea of wasting time. Maybe you had it right all along, you and the Mad Hatter.
Maybe yours was the right move. Maybe I’m worse off for witnessing this. Maybe it is you who escaped and I who am trapped. Imprisoned in black iron, indeed the empire never ended.
Still, I thought there would be more time. I thought we would meet again. Even if it was out here in the fringes of reality. This crumbling pier hanging precariously over the edge, over nothing, a bottomless pit of black frozen emptiness.
©Robert Emmett McWhorter
Tree of Life, Foot in Mouth, Hot Dog in the Snow
Static
Static
How to Draw a Mirror
Words are magic. I mean this in a very literal sense, not as a metaphor. Words have changed the world, some would say the world was created with a word, as was life. When I write I am casting a spell, or attempting to.
If I do it right, there is a sequence, a certain combination of words arranged in a very particular order which will effectively transform the page, turn it into a mirror.
I think as much introspection and soul-searching and self discovery you indulge in, if you never attempt to put it down on paper where it can reflect back up to your eyes, you still have much to learn about yourself.
When I moved away from learning the fundamentals and experimenting with every aspect I encountered and really started to write, a window opened up through which I was finally able to see myself and face myself.
I think to some extent this is what all art attempts to do, to draw a mirror, to allow the world to witness its reflection and possibly learn, become wiser because of it. But the combinations change and do vary from person to person, so the job is never complete.
We must continue to cast our spells, find the new and ever altering patterns which unlock our perspective, and allow us to see ourselves and the entirety of existence hanging just out of sight behind the black ink structures we have laid upon the page.
© Robert Emmett McWhorter
Expanding Vocabulary
We Chicagoans share many similarities with the Eskimos, besides our subarctic climates. The Eskimo language, they say, has sixty-two different words for snow. I would venture to bet we Chicagoans have sixty-two words for snow as well. Very few of them, however, are appropriate for use in polite company.
Fly
FLY
Oh, Mrs. Williams, if you could only see me now, a couple thousand feet above the east coast, swirling around, twisting in the clouds and probably about to die. I hope there’s something soft down there to land on…
~Fly, MEOWING ON THE ANSWERING MACHINE
Roadsong
I took my car today
and drove out for many miles
to where the road opens up
and the traffic disappears,
past seven islands of
fast food salvation,
past the edge of
radio reception,
where I found a song
from when I was younger.
As the darkness fell,
I sang it again…
There are roads branching off,
creeping over the horizon,
tracing paths into the unknown
where distant memories are held,
markers on the land where
I’ve left parts of my life behind,
let go of certain aspects,
abandoned ideas here
to be forgotten and fade away.
And I haven’t seen this
road since I was seventeen,
so sing it again…
Miles pass like the years,
each one faster than the last,
counting out the intersecting highways
like the rings of a tree.
Gravel kicks up memories below me,
the further I can get from where I was,
the closer I become to me,
so sing it again…
©Robert Emmett McWhorter
Mood Ink
My mood depends on the pen I use. Currently, I write with the blue ink of pontification. Where upon I reflect, turn inward to remember.
I save my black pen for hate mail. I could never write, “You dirty bastard batch of corporate bitch slime, you’ll burn like whisky farts in hell,“ with my blue pen, except of course in retrospect.
I save calligraphy for paying bills and writing checks. Cursive only when writing in the bath.
When I occasionally wait tables I use a shorthand hieroglyph system that all the line cooks seems to intuit and easily recognize. I spend most of my time carving woodcuts which I stamp on the back of postcards and drop into the confession box. The best thank you note is wrapped around a brick.
©M²XIV/REM
The Overpass
Anchored to this parking lot,
Where crisp snow piles on window ledges
Like kaleidoscopes of sunlight,
Or a spectrum for your head.
You’ll look out from your bedroom,
as I stumble with the keys.
Will you walk me to the overpass
when I’m crumbling to my knees?
Staring down the frozen river,
You’ll elevate the spectacle.
And I’m not going to argue,
It’s like they’ve always said,
When it rains, you see red,
When it snows, you’ll see where you have been.
Pull through and see,
That these seas aren’t quite as black
As the mud inside your head,
And you’ll never walk again.
Snoring and ignorant,
You refuse to meet me,
Our words are whispered into lampshades,
Growing dustier and yellow.
Go home and scream.
There’s no one here you can tell it to,
And what do you do?
But hope the rocking chairs
Don’t turn to reminisce.
Rolling and rolling,
Out of controlling.
You spin,
You begin in your spin,
To begin to retrace,
The face you’re replacing,
Pasting new memories within.
And once it would have worked,
And yes, I guess our stars,
Still happen to align.
And I know, and I know, and I know
And I hate to remember how that song went,
The one they say we sung,
But I can’t recall it any longer,
And you never knew the words.
But we tried to sing along.
And I’ll try to recognize
Your handwriting,
Against all the works of history,
And masterpieces forged.
Dreaming of the frigid water,
You’ll celebrate the evacuation.
And I swear I won’t get sick again.
It’s not like they never said,
When it goes, it goes your way,
Until you blink and it goes away,
And it’s the only thing you’ve known.
Angled into this unmarked spot,
At dawn the snow begins to melt
Transmission from our yellow star
The buzz informs you who you are,
As it creeps in through the window,
and I crumble to my knees.
Will you walk me to the overpass
Where we can drown this old disease?
The Elusive Humors
With the Snowpacolypse we have been experiencing here in the Midwest, driving has become especially trying. I commented in a thread recently that it took me nearly forty-five minutes to get my car out of the driveway the other day.
It has been snowing all year, and there is quite a bit of it accumulated on the ground. The subarctic temperatures makes everything a little tricky, and it seems to freeze the snow into a solid sheet of ice. The following day more snow falls, adding a new layer, and reenforcing the solid frozen foundation.
I said in my comment that I may have saved myself time and aggravation had I taken the wheels off the car and fashioned skates of some sort or possibly a sled.
A friend soon replied. She said she never knew what to expect from me, and this comment, the image in her head, had her laughing near hysterically. She noted that she is not known as the easiest person to draw a laugh from, her son had told her she only laughs ‘once every seven years.’
So I was flattered, I take that as high praise.
Later in the thread there was another note from the same friend. It seemed she was rethinking her reaction, and she wasn’t certain I had intended my words as a joke, and thought she should maybe apologize for take my comments as a joke.
I was able to reply that it was, indeed, a joke. I said I thought it was a defense mechanism of sorts; no matter how terrible I feel, no matter how bad my day may be going, I am usually able to find something funny, some tiny little aspect I can twist into the ridiculous or otherwise see an opportunity for humor.
When I can’t, when I stop smiling and cracking wise, I said, that is probably a good time to turn around and run away.
I’m really not sure where this comes from.
People have remarked on my writing. A lot of my stuff is comical and filled with one liners and comedic occurrences and situations, but even in my most dry and somber, deep and reflective, serious efforts, there is almost always at least a little glimmer of the light shining through.
Readers do remark on this. Some writer friends have said they wished I could teach them how to write ‘funny,’ or how to develop their sense of humor. And believe me, I do wish I knew how. For many reasons.
Believe me I wish I had a marketable skill I could pass along to others and provide a decent living for myself. It’s one thing to be funny and make people laugh, but if you could teach humor and make people funny… I almost relate it to the ‘give a man a fish, teach a a man to fish’ proverb. Plus, if I could teach a good portion of the population and instill my sense of humor, I would probably personally find the world that much more enjoyable.
But I’m really not sure where it came from and I’m less sure how to pass it along.
I will sometimes say I was exposed to Monty Python at too early an age, but if was all it took, there’d be an island of comedians, comic actors and humorous writers when in fact these currently make up barely a majority in England.
I sometimes say the circumstances of my early years forced me to find the humor in the small details around me, but in truth –while I have had a few rough patches over the years– I haven’t had anything close to a tragic life, I definitely count myself as one of the luckier ones on this random and confusing planet.
So I’m at a loss. It begs the question, is your sense of humor something you are born with or something you develop or maybe a combination of the two? Nurture or nature, if you will. I can’t say.
I never intentionally learned to write a joke, but I did read hilarious authors and can usually only stand a movie or TV show that makes me laugh, and I certainly take note of what works and what doesn’t.
But I never took a class to develop my comedic styling. I never had any routine for working out my funny bone, other than reading, watching, and sampling, and then trial and error with paper and pen. I was mostly too shy in school to be the class clown, but I usually sat next to him and fed him lines. At first this was great because when the joke failed, it wasn’t me that was met with that hot, red silence.
The only thing I can really do is hope it’s contagious, and sometimes it seems like it might be. Sometimes it appears like my twisted sense of humor may be rubbing off on friends, a wry remark or snarky line comes out that I doubt they would think of, speak aloud, or find funny prior to meeting me. I hope so.
If I could consciously teach the world to laugh a little more I know I would. But maybe the best I can hope is some of it seeps in through prolonged exposure to my funny little tales and osmosis.
©M²XIV/REM
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