Friday 2/14/25
My last couple years in college and then after I graduated, I worked a bunch of jobs that never lasted long. I was a bouncer--that went poorly--at the Rattlesnake on Boylston. I worked at a hardware store. I worked at Barnes and Noble at Downtown Crossing and got fired for hiding the bad books and putting the good ones in their places. You don't need that Jodi Picoult book--try Tristam Shandy.
I worked at a vintage movie poster store across from Pizzeria Regina housed in a space where the mob executed a number of people (the store even had a local mob history book with photos from the very room where I'd sit alone in the middle of the night trying to get caught up on orders) that was owned by a husband and wife criminal duo who would have rather gone to jail for the rest of their lives than pay a penny in taxes (they were frequent guests on Antiques Roadshow). I worked at a library and ran into the same problem from the Barnes and Noble gig.
I'd stay up all night working on my writing. I smoked back then. Drinking coffee, smoking, writing until the sun came up. Working to get better. In the morning, I'd stumble out to wherever I had to be.
There's your MFA program.
I knew this guy at the time who knew the drill, and he'd ask me, "Are you doing some prose?" and it's something I'll say--with a wink--to a friend of mine now who knew about this back then, and sometimes the odd person or two with whom I share this anecdote.
It doesn't mean quite what it did. What it means now, when I use it, is that I've written something no one else could.
Anyway. I've been doing some prose. This is from "Hero of Mine," which will be in The Solution to the World's Problems: Surprising Tales of Relentless Joy.
Sometimes heroes feel like there’s no such thing as hope for them or that it’s a joke made by beings not of this world for their personal amusement in whatever world they inhabit.
Were it revealed that here are the results, this is how it all ends, there is no avoiding the outcome—so says God, so says the universe, so says the all-knowing beings we cannot fathom—heroes would still do what they were doing, whatever it took to keep doing it.
If no one saw them, and they didn’t receive any credit or attention, they’d behave in the same manner as though the entire world sang their praises and they were rich and famous and regarded as a person everyone knew they should look up to and definitely be as nice to as possible.
And if they were the very last of their kind in a world which couldn’t recognize them if anyone in it wanted to, a hero still wouldn’t choose to stop or give up—to have it all be over.
If it was them against a gargantuan, monstrous force, without assistance, and only themselves to count on, the gargantuan, monstrous force would still have an opponent.
Whatever that force was couldn’t truly claim, “There is nothing but open space for us between here and there,” because that would not be true.
What is that worth?
It’s worth all there is, which is why the hero gives everything they are and why a hero is hope itself. They are the beautiful proof that there is someone who always can—no matter what.
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