Monday 10/31/22
I am loving this story, "Your Story." Working on it some more tonight. I changed some things in the parts about the wine snake and the defenestration sequence. Nothing like it. Nothing nothing nothing. So different. I don't think the people in this industry could begin to understand invention like this. Not on their own. They'd have to be told and want to believe it. I've been working on the film book, too, tonight. Anyway, after this part below, it picks up with Rolphe and Cartagena again. Sometimes I read these works back and I think, "How the fuck do you think of these things?" but I don't really think of them at all. They're just here. Does that make sense? It's all just in me, and what I'm made of. All of these galaxies of invention and these forms of narrative and these people and these ideas and these rhythms and these sounds. This story can go into Become Your Own Super Hero: Modern Fiction in Select Easy Stories.
***
I have realized that no one gets anything right. Once a year I might hear someone get something right. I mean totally right. And it can be a simple point about a simple subject.
A little while ago I saw where someone typed a comment that this particular pro football coach was going to lose his job because he couldn’t relate to the hip young teens on the team. No one in the league is a teen. The coach is going to lose his job conceivably, but you see how the statement wouldn’t be totally right? And that’s such a simple thing.
The friend I mentioned was talking to me about my hard life and miserable existence. How I don’t take anger out on people.
“You’re a good guy,” he said. “You haven’t done anything wrong,” which is usually synonymous with “you don’t deserve this.” He kept going. “It’s not like you call me at one in the morning every now and again drunk out of your mind and screaming and telling me I’m a motherfucker and you’re going to come for me because I haven’t been a good friend to you and you hate my wife and call her moronic trash, and I’m like, ‘hey, buddy, sleep it off, I’m in bed with my kid, she’s having another nightmare, I’m trying to comfort her, I’ll call you in the afternoon.’”
And as he’s saying this to me, I was thinking, “Hmmm…why not? I kind of like the sound of this iteration. Alternate me. No nonsense. Works some stress out on occasion. Vent. That seems healthy. And he’s tough.”
“Go on,” I said.
My friend’s like, “With what?” And I said, “Continue your pitch. I’m sort of liking this guy.”
In fourth grade I read this biography of Sandy Koufax. He threw a lot of no-hitters. One a year. And the writer of the book, when it came to Koufax’s last no-hitter, said, “It was time for Sandy to crank up his arm for his annual no-hitter.”
Every day of my life I have thought that was great writing because of how I felt about it when I first saw it. Obviously it’s not. It’s fine for a bio of an old pitcher written for a young kid who didn’t see that pitcher perform.
We believe, though, in the value of what we experience when we experience it. We can know it’s wrong. But we will still believe what we experienced then has truth now. Someone we looked up to said a statement about nature. The weather. How clouds form. What makes the tides do what the tides do. Even when we encounter the truth, the correct science, we don’t outrightly discredit that other person. We try to fit them in. Or, at worst, they’re a dissenting voice. The pendulum might swing back their way.
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