Consequences

This one seemed easy enough to write in my head, but putting it down is proving to be a challenge.  It is complicated by an admixture of emotions and rational thought, always a direct path to obfuscation.  I must simply begin.  

I am going to have to reveal "the man behind the curtain" here a bit, not wanting to, preferring to remain obscure, knowing like an outlaw in disguise that sooner or later I will be found out.  

So let me give you the anatomy (or, perhaps, the physiology) of how I write.  It is not morning yet.  The sun will not be up for some time.  I've read the news on CNN and The New York Times and perhaps gone through the online version of Vanity Fair and/or The New Yorker.  Reports, reviews, and stories are swirling around my drowsy head.  Some days, nothing comes to me and I'll have to cut and paste a poem or a passage from a novel with minimal comment.  Other days, I mention something directly (as today I planned to talk about the cloning of the Wooly Mastodon by Russian and American Scientists along with another story on human genetics).  But sometimes things just begin to fall into place like the tumblers on a lock.  Those are good days.  I don't revise anything and barely edit, so it is just the straight telling from me to you as if we were sitting together having a conversation.  

Yesterday's post was one of those amalgams, and I feel the need to explain how it came into being.  On Saturday, the fellows who have two big spaces behind my studio had an anime festival.  They do this most Saturdays and the parking lot fills with cars and the kind of people who hang out together to watch several hours of anime straight from Japan, the boys/men dressed in black, the few girls/women costumey.  That day, someone had taken a champagne bottle that I had left sitting on the loading dock behind my studio and had broken it in the parking lot.  The fellow who runs the anime festival and I had words about it.  

On Sunday, one of the artists with a studio in the back was talking about the crowd that comes to the festivals.  They are in the main a quiet and furtive bunch lacking in some of the basic social skills, he noted, and suggested that many of them suffered from Asperger's or some other autistic disorder.  "Bullshit," I said, "they make Asperger's look like a party."  Bad, I know.  

Sunday night, my friend refused to post a silly comment I had written in response to one of his blog entries about other people's racism, especially visible with the coming of the M.L.K. holiday.  Monday, I decided to post that here myself.  I thought the post a wonderful piece of writing.  It was irreverent, satirical, and just funny.  It set my buddy off, though, so that he posted some vitriol in the comments section which, among other things, denigrated my talents.  We were officially in a pissing contest.  

Monday night, I shot with a model who had driven two hours with her boyfriend to shoot with me.  They were wonderful people and we had a good time, and after looking at the photos, we thought we would shoot together again.  I noticed that the boyfriend, though, looked eerily like one of my cousins. Funny when that happens. 

Tuesday morning, I read an article online at CNN about the deleterious effects of too much gaming.  It engenders depression and anti-social behavior in some, it said.  It made me think of one of my cousins who games excessively.  He has become difficult to talk to.  He doesn't like to leave the house and gets irritated easily.  He doesn't look at anybody for very long, his eyes darting about as if he had only peripheral vision.  I have said to my mother that it is a sort of game-withdrawl.  He doesn't like to be too far from his source.  He is obsessive.  He reminds me much of the crowd that gathers behind the studio on Saturdays to watch anime.  

When I began to write on Tuesday morning, I wanted to write in response to my friend who was still going on about other people's prejudices like he had just found Jesus, so I carried on with the hooker/barbecue line a bit more.  I had told my mother on Sunday night that I was going to get hookers and have a barbecue and in the morning had written her a joking email saying that the rain had kept the hookers away.  And that is where I started--with the email to my mother.  I added the stereotypical bit about the Colt .45, a nice touch, I thought.  But sitting in the dark, after turning my email to my mother into a single paragraph, I was stuck.  And the tumblers began to click. . . click. . . click. . . all the elements came together--the argument with the fellow behind the studio, the conversation with the artist about Asperger's, the shoot with the model who's boyfriend looked like my cousin, the report on excessive gaming--and boom!  I had another paragraph.  

The entry was becoming a narrative, of sorts, and they are easy to carry out if you stick to a timeline.  After the shoot on Sunday, it was too late to make dinner, so I did something very atypical for me--I went to Chick Fillet and got a full meal.  But I didn't want to say Chick Fillet and remembered that my father had always referred to a place called Chicken Lickin.  I googled it and came up with the other place, Chicken Liken.  Crazy enough, the menu was advertised as "soul food." What a stroke of good luck.  What a bonanza.   I was back on track with the poke at my buddy.  M.L.K, hookers, Colt .45, the rain--it was all part of the story again.  

A final tag and I was finished.  The sun was coming up.  It was time to get ready for the day.  

I felt glorious.  Two days of Gonzo writing that had gone pretty well.  I was on a roll.  

That afternoon, I got an email from the model I had shot with on Sunday night.  Adrenaline shot through me like fire, like ice.  What the hell!  She had found the blog, she said.  Oh, my. . . I hadn't imagined her reading this, and not the day after we shot.  No, no, no.  I couldn't read her email.  I looked at it with one eye quickly the way you might look over to see if anyone was mangled as you slowly passed a bad wreck on the highway.  I got a word here, a word there. . . enough. . . too much.  How in the hell could I explain this to her?  I couldn't.  I could try, but you know. . . .  It is a bit of creative writing, I said.  It is what I do, or try to.  It was not a report or an article.  Those people were not you.  

I thought of Hemingway and the problems "The Sun Also Rises" caused him.  He lost a lot of friends.  Everyone speculated about who from their crowd was whom in the novel.  Harold Loeb, who felt he was the genesis of Robert Cohn, angrily confronted Hemingway about it.  He had been a wrestler in college, not at Princeton where Cohn had been a boxer, but at another Ivey League school, was a jew, and had an infatuation with Lady Duff Twysden whom everyone took to be the basis of Lady Brett Ashley.  Hemingway responded to Loeb by saying that he hadn't written a biography.  If Loeb was Cohn and Hemingway was Jake, Hemingway wouldn't have a penis and Loeb would be able to beat him up, and they both knew that neither was the case.  

And so, here I am this morning, trying to explain.  This is not my Facebook account.  This is a creative space where I can make up things.  I hope no one is taking this as a guidebook to reality.  I hope no one thinks that the persona who narrates this is equal to the person behind it.  I hope my mother never reads this.  Etc.  

Faulkner said that everybody hurts someone from time to time.  It is inevitable and we must be sorry for it.   To do so deliberately, though, is a sin.  

I didn't mean to hurt anyone's feelings, just to poke some fun at my buddy with a little of the irreverent gonzo style writing he is so capable of which he is for reasons known to him eschewing.  

If I were not involved, I would think this painfully funny.  With distance, maybe we all will.  

Not so much this morning, though.  

The model and her boyfriend were sweet people.  I hope they can . . . can what?  Separate me from the narrative voice on this blog?  I don't know.  

I just keep thinking, "sorry, sorry, sorry."  

I hope I can keep working without a net.