Essay on Essaying

Writing is often listed as the pursuit of truth by those people who like to deal a hefty trade in truth. They are, however, probably wrong. Truth is an un-malleable substance at it core, a substance that must exist in only a very few forms for it to work whatsoever. Writing shares none of these characteristics. Writing is an art; it requires knowledge about the steps and styles, the forms and choices, in essence, the craft. Writing is a craft, a craft that has a number of highly precise tools and a fine assortment of hammers at its disposal. Learning to write well requires years of practice and a practical dedication to doing things the way they should be done over the way you want to do them.

Writing is rarely about what you say; it is all in the delivery.


Day 1
Opening the Book

When I first entered the Non-Fiction class at Southern Utah University I was coming back from one of those breaks where everything that I did amounted to the sum total of nothing. The most stirring accomplishment of my Christmas break was playing Legend of the Five Rings for 33 consecutive hours. Excitement. Entering the classroom I was staggered by the group of souls within. Nearly thirty students were occupying a room apparently built for ten. I clutched my closed-session add slip in a white-knuckled hand. I glared about the room, looking for holes in the people. Some of them, I hoped, would not be here by the next class. I took a seat upon a table and waited for the opening spiel. The class instructor Melissa Frateriggo is a younger woman with an ethnicity that is hard to place. She had brown hair that hung just below her jaw line and wide set features that left a smoothness to her face. She carried herself well but wasn’t precisely outgoing in any particular sense.

She explained the rules and regulations of the class including the attendance policy, which was understandably strict considering that most of the class was dedicated to discussion of outside and inside works. I felt like her eyes were boring a hole in my chest when she announced the “no late work clause.” I have always attempted to be a good student in life, and until the past three years I have been. Perhaps the shift had something to do with my getting tossed out of a university abroad and forced to seek shelter within a less than prestigious institution of higher learning. Or maybe it was because I had shifted something in my own personal paradigm. Regardless of the reason, I was committed to working whenever it felt like the thing to do and flinging far fetched excuses the remainder of the time.

Of course I had a sort of thing for her too. Most of the students did. Maybe it was because she was new and young. Maybe it was because she was pleasant and witty. Maybe it was because she was a writer, and I’m always a sucker for an artist.

Class ended, I skulked out, intent to make my decision to join the class on a later date. Melissa figured that I should probably seek another class herself, as she sent me an e-mail the following day explaining that it would probably benefit me to have a class that required less attendance and perfunctory dedication to the subject matter. I balked at the e-mail and decided to prove her wrong about me, that I really was a dedicated individual locked in the midst of a hellish life that I had not chosen for myself but was forced to deal with anyway.

That or maybe that thing I had for her was larger than academically acceptable.


Day 10
Emotion

Exercise # 3 was due. I had put together a piece based upon a five-year weekly recurring nightmare. I was trying to show something of what created the entity that I inhabit to the other students. The purpose of the assignment was to show emotion in writing. The most important emotion out there, to me, is fear. Love has problems in being an emotion that controls you, hate is too linear to be useful, desire is a strong emotion, but is ultimately an emotion born of something else. Fear is where I stake my claim for the first impetus for human activity. Other members of the group read their pieces; I cannot remember the names of the students, regrettably. One person wrote a rather silly piece about their truncated Mormon relationship with a guy. In case you have never lived in Utah, I’ll explain. The typical relationship in Utah features a couple that meets somewhere in the first three years of college, decide that now is the time to get married, and regardless of how much either person means to the other they are engaged in three weeks and married in six months. They make terrible writers as their life experience is so convoluted towards one set of events, which I refer to as “the pattern”, that you cannot read more than one of them without starting to repeat yourself in a sort of organic two-step.

Keith Ben Stein was the next to read. Keith is a great guy, full of wit and a strange self effacing quality that tends to buoy the people around him by putting himself down. I often feel uncomfortable talking to him about anything more than a surface matter because I don’t want him to tell me how great I am. In fact I might appreciate a large number of people telling me something about how great I am not. Then again, maybe I’m just saying that.

I read my piece and watched the faces of my audience. A look formed in their eyes that I have seen before. A sense that whatever world it is that I have come from is not on their list of vacation spots, and sometimes, they are sorry they even flipped through the brochure.


Day 13
Essay #1

At the time I had been struggling to write a single coherent paragraph for five days. I don’t get writers block, I disassociate. I lose it. One half of me disagrees with the other half of me and I spend hours to weeks spinning in a circle waiting for an outside influence to shove me one way or another. Writing on deadline, my passion, my dream, becomes a dark torment, a nightmare constructed of too much stress about a test, a sick pleasure like cutting up your mothers couch just so that you will get in trouble. I told Melissa that I had nearly finished the assignment and would get it to her by 5:00 in the evening. I sat down at 4:30 and cobbled together three journal articles into an essay. The essay had no point save a brutal reflection of me talking to me about me, but I figured I had to get something in, and knowing the human algorithm it would probably be heralded as a gripping and fine piece.

There are days when the lying becomes to big for you and you feel that you must tell the truth to one single person, the whole truth, as you see it, whether they understand or not. I got my piece in at 5:00 as promised and returned to home. It was a Monday, and if I am not mistaken I played Devil May Cry for the PS2 until 1:00 in the morning. I did not feel good, but I pressed on.

Somewhere in my not too distant future, or my recent past, the keys to success were waiting for me to do something with the mess that I see as my life.


Day 15
Unnatural Defense

They were talking about my piece. The thing that I had cobbled together. The thing that reflected opinions I had two entire years ago. Opinions that I had given only a cursory glance to in the ten minutes it took for me to slap it together. I sat back with a little grin on my face. Inside I was laughing; outside I could barely contain myself. They took the whole piece seriously. They thought that what I had written was interesting, and deep, and useful. I knew that it was nothing. It was me ranting to me. It wasn’t valuable it was stupid. It was something that I should never have done. I should have taken a zero rather than subject my fellow students, and writers, to this false art. This horrible project that amounted to nothing more than a guy taking crap and displaying it in a way that people who where too in touch with the art world and nowhere near reality could proclaim its brilliance. Proclaim because it was placed in front of them and they didn’t understand it but thought that since it was there they needed to.

I felt cheap. I felt used, even though I was using. Then I started to feel something else entirely. They liked what I had written. They liked this incredibly personal item; this record of my thoughts in the grips of a depression that spanned four months. Four months that found me joining the Air Force briefly, being tossed out for mental instability. Four months, one of which was spent with Wendy. Whom I had loved. Who I still love, who I was not joking too when I proposed to her; even if she thinks so. They were seeing something in my words. Something that I had placed there. Something that I had put between the lines because it was what I was doing. The emotion of life.

Not one simple emotion, the whole complex spectrum was there. I just hadn’t seen it.


Day 16
Aftermath of Technique

Saturday. I sat about the game store in town and listened with half an ear at children that thought I was god. They approached me with a sacred reverence and begged for my attention with offerings of food and drink and cash. I allowed them to continue on, benevolence flowing from my feet to wash away their sins.

I have always reeked of conceit. And with good reason. They tell me that I am greater than they. I know that I am worth what I am worth. But they see something different. They see something in me that I can only guess at. So I begin to want to become whatever it is that they see. I can live the life that others think that I should, because it is important that promises be kept, even when you are not the one that made the promise.

Justifications for my behavior circle through my mind. Ways that I can convince others of my true purpose, of my true self. Nothing presents itself. The packaging is all wrong. My style, my sense of self out-weighs my words. If I broke down in the middle of the quad screaming people would merely assume that I am doing a Rodney bit. They’re all Rodney bits.

I am worshiped like a cult figure by people I have never met. They may not always like me, in fact I am hated as often as not, but never for me. Nobody sees me, they see the visage that I have created, the visage that has me trapped within.

So I sit down and ask myself what writing is supposed to do for me, and I get this idea of a way of presenting myself. A way that will be about me, that will cut down the visage.


Day 21
Beginning Again

Essay #2 is due in one hour. I’m something like 400 words away from making the six page minimum. I want to list other things but find if hard to go back and change what I’ve already laid down. It would be wrong to delete the words, to make them disappear from the record of existence. They only live by being read. They only breathe if I say that they do.

I ask myself questions, sometimes direct, other times not. Will the readers see something here that I did not place here? Will they laud my skills above their actual existence or will they miss the most important part.

What begins as a dialogue about writing ends as a dialogue about being writing. The words that are printed are and are not me at the same time. I give them life and they walk out to find lives of their own. They carry within each of them a meaning that is singular and part of the whole.

Childhood Horror: One of Many

Back in the early 80's when I was in 1st grade we had a little story time segment. The children would gather around the teacher, sitting on a little stool with her back to the crowd pressed up in a corner.

A decent strategic move for keeping an eye on some 20 rowdy mouth-breathers with a penchant for clumsy mischief.

There, a story of some twenty pages would be read to the earnest faces. Milk and cookies were not served, kindergarten being a fading memory in the minds of the little tykes. But the idea of story time and the special niche it filled before recess was an important one to me.

This time became even more sought after when after a few weeks the teacher announced that students could sign up for a section of a day and read stories they brought from home.

The ritual was meant to encourage reading in us wee ones. But it started me thinking down a sinister road.

A naturally shy and painfully introverted youth with a scowl setting in at age 5 that would later in life cause me to wear glasses for a astigmatism that formed in my left eye, I waited to sign up and determine what kind of material the other students were bringing with them.

It was amazing how many different tiny books that Golden Books was publishing when I was a child. I must have heard The Pokey Little Puppy poorly sounded out by 15 out of 20 children before I decided to bring material of my own.

Now, reading long tomes about sailing and sailors, desperate and thick material that a child can barely lift let alone read, to a group of people that struggled through The Pokey Little Puppy made me reconsider Moby Dick.

Not a joke, I was reading it at the time as well as David Copperfield, but in the case of the latter I was reading it because I thought it was about the magician. I may have been a genius of a six-year-old but some things you learn much later in life.

Incidentally I had a much finer respect for the magician for many years, seeing how crummy his early life was and all...

As a compromise I brought in my very own copy of The Pokey Little Puppy. But rather than read what was there I made myself little sheets and taped them into the book and created a short story about a talking plane that had a problem with crashing into buildings.

George of the Jungle was my favorite cartoon at the time, but in retrospect it has become sinister to even consider planes and buildings, even though apparently a creative 1st grader could come up with it as a plan.

It didn't take the teacher more than a few pages to sweep in and take my little home-made book away. Though I had captured the attention of the student and was reading only what I had written on my poorly crayon-illustrated pages, the point of the exercise was to read, not make things up.

Laughed at and ridiculed for being told off by the teacher it would be some three years before I sat down to write anything again. But the lessons of youth are always remembered.

Know your audience, and avoid getting caught doing anything the authorities will not understand.

Pscyhologic Blankets I Have Known

Throughout the course of my dramatically problematic life I have encountered an abundance of interesting things that soothe me when times seem the most dire or in the aftermath of yet another life destroying event.

Sometimes I found solace in books, tomes of great wisdom from people long dead that experienced their own shares of real and imagined trouble. Sometimes from music, people who cry out with lyrics and voices that stab at the throat of my issues or wrap me in their sullen tones and lull me to a place inside where its safe to be numb.

Repetition of imagery and smells are the next most powerful drugs that have sustained me. Vanilla, the scent of fog used in a high school play in 1994, still fills me with fond memories of times when I wore a compilation of black clothes and did my damndest not be seen during scene changes.

The individual components of a psychological blanket don't seem to hold up under close logical scrutiny. The threads part, separate, unwind and blow to the wind as they are observed. But solace is not a product of logic. It is not held to the whims of the thinking mind, it holds up in the primitive portion of the emotions and soul.

There, in the center of any given person, is a little factory that takes in stimulus data and converts it into simple components of like and dislike. And once something has been marked it rarely changes.

There is no great conclusion to be drawn from this process, no single defining event that takes a sight or sound and produces comfort. It is a gestalt of a lifetime of tiny iterations that creates an effect that ultimately has no bearing whatsoever on what insect is flapping what where.

But in the end everyone has a happy place, and the doors to that place are labeled so that no one else can enter in quite the same way.

Lessons Everyone Knows That I'm Learning Late

There is a fundamentally wise saying, Work Will Set You Free, that contains an interlaced wisdom that is sadly overshadowed by its inauspicious location above the entrance to Auschwitz.

It isn't just that working provides a level of freedom and stability, it's also a matter of distancing one from their problems. As long as you have something in front of you that needs to be typed, or a hole to be dug, or a call to make - what have you - then there is a mental/emotional distance from your life that is achieved.

I have found from a life of avoiding jobs and employment that given enough space in your head you will find ways to attack yourself for things that cannot be as much of an issue as you can make them.

There is something reassuring and calming about having the mental space to think about a problem or situation. There is a firm and life-assuring quality to closure. There is something fundamentally wrong with taking a mental sledgehammer to the insides of your mind and remodelling your perceptions of events ad naseum.

So, here I am, coming to the end of a week spent frantically applying to every job that requires no experience, is located within a 400 mile radius, doesn't involve driving (because I just cannot do that), and doesn't require me to know anything except how to read, write, and speak.

As you might imagine, its going slowly, and there is an eerie whistling wind sound and visions of tumbleweeds in my non-existent bank account.

So for all of you out there that already work, I salute you. And for those of you who live comfortably without needing to work, I suggest that you find something to do with your time before the time, to be quaint, finds something to do with you.

Time apparently is a fan of poorly conceived melodrama and reality television.

Starting Roughly from Somewhere in the Middle

Starting out on such an auspicious project, such as this, its difficult to live up to the grandeur of the title and still dodge the label of pretentiousness. The following stories and events are almost certainly embellished, coming as they do from the mind of a person who is not sure that anything that has ever happened to him has actually happened in the way he remembers, but they are laid out plainly for the reader to make their own judgements.

It is my hope that this collection of tidbits from a life lived clumsily and with an increasingly skewed perspective of its own purpose will assist all who read it in dodging the ominous pitfalls in their own lives. It may be asking too much of the writer to carry through on these hopes but that falls in line with the very substance and fibre of the stories themselves.

At times the stories will be humorous, at times horrific, but rest assured that all conclusions were reached poorly and all morals and lessons are inconclusive at best.

You have been cautioned, dear reader, you have been told that what you are about to face is real, fake, frightening, a pack of lies, the convoluted thoughts and machinations of a self deluded prick. But they are told to you honestly and without reservation by someone who feels it cannot have been that bad, and it cannot have been for nothing.

Thank you, and enjoy.

Or don't. That's entirely up to you.