Why Does This Suck So Bad?
It gave me poignant joy and ache. And then it made me jealous of Chbosky. Then I felt inadequate as a writer. Then I felt inspired.
This hasn’t been an easy week.
I began, sometime last weekend, with an idea for a YA novel that was getting me terribly excited. I thought, “I have the makings of something miraculous.” I wrote the first 600 words and sent them to my friend, Jann. She said that I was onto something. (Or she might’ve said that she thought I was “on” something. I can’t remember.) Then I woke up the next day, deleted what I had and tried to start over from scratch. The next day I re-read what I wrote and hated that, too. I followed this by doing the same thing on Tuesday. Then on Wednesday. And, once again, on Thursday.
I actually had to go back into my messages to Jann and reevaluate my first attempt. It turned out to be the best one I had so far. Still, though, when I reread it, my gut was telling me that I wasn’t doing anything that great.
Driving down a summer road, I went back into the book by Stephen Chbosky called, “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” About 200 pages in, the boy, who we all love very much by now, has a scene with the older girl he’s been crushing on and it took my heart deftly out of my chest, danced a jig on it and put it back with footprints all over it. It gave me poignant joy and ache. And then it made me jealous of Chbosky. Then I felt inadequate as a writer. Then I felt inspired.
I’m not an ego maniac but I know that I have the ability to evoke emotion with music and it won’t take anything besides passion and desire to do it with words as beautifully as Chbosky did. The passion that makes a person want something in the worst way and the kind of desire that makes a person never give up until they get there.
I began to realize that a young adult historical fiction book has all the potential of being incredible but only if “story” takes center stage and history acts as set dressing. This was not something I was able to stumble upon out of the clear blue. It came from countless hours of asking myself, “Why does this suck so bad?” And even then, I had to be reading like crazy, listening when I was driving and thinking when I was carrying cases of tomato sauce down flights of stairs in some of Jersey’s finest pizza places.
Delivering pizza place supplies is a part-time gig I picked up, which I am sure I mentioned once before. What I am learning is that the expression “wash women” should be replaced with the phrase “pizza supply drivers.” I have never, in my entire life, worked with such a sad group of backstabbing, gossiping, lying mean girls before. And these “mean girls” are all middle-aged, misogynistic, beer belly having dipshits. In the words of Tony Soprano, “what are you gonna do?” This Il Purgatorio is temporary and I am certain that I will have to get used to a whole other group of lovelies soon enough.
Speaking of Il Purgatorio, I have been taking Italian lessons, zoom style, with a tutor named Chiara. She was born and raised in Italia and now lives in Brazil. She sits out on her terrace in the evening and gives her private classes and, although in my current situation, it seems frivolous of me to be taking private language lessons, I need only point out that I have a track record of making ill advised decisions like this and I still have a pretty decent credit score, so quel che sarà sarà. (That’s que sera sera in Italian)
Besides that, I haven’t been eating any take-out, I’ve seriously reeled in my Amazon clicking and I have been playing gigs almost every weekend. All in all, I can afford a little academic luxury.
Speaking of academic luxury, I posted a pic of my daughter, Gloria, where she was looking particularly grown up and stunning and I wrote a caption lamenting how sad it was that she was only a few years away from being objectified by the kind of jerkoffs I have been working with lately. This inadvertently led to some person–who, by the way, hasn’t said ‘boo’ to me in five years–commenting that, in her opinion, I should stop posting pictures of my children altogether.
I go through all the trouble of writing an article about how much I can’t stand unsolicited advice and she steps into the poisonous realm of unsolicited parenting advice. The worst of all unsolicited advice. I didn’t get angry, though. I simply pointed her toward the article and figured I’d let that do all my talking.
I realize this piece has some of the feel of a dispatch from the front, but this recent chapter–this chapter of “I better find a decent gig because my family’s health insurance runs out on September 30th” feels a bit like a war. Or, at the very least, a police action.
For those of you wondering, Police Action is a phrase the war department uses to get congressional approval to kill people in countries we don’t really belong in. Essentially it’s the equivalent of saying someone “expired” instead of croaked. Same thing, softer language. And if you think this article is all over the map, next week’s will be coming from the Scandinavian Airlines terminal at JFK. Cohesion, like so many other things, is purely subjective.
I so understand getting irked on by unsolicited parenting advice... urgh. I like reading just experiences someone has, it can be all over the place.
Billy, thanks for bringing me into this story, it had me laughing. Love this one too. And, yes to private Italian lessons.