The Worst Thing I Ever Wrote

I don't reread my own work very often. (Though, it has to be said, way more often than I reread anybody else's work.)  One reason is that I often come across sentences that make me cringe, that seem awkward or corny or just wrong in some way. 

Still, there's almost nothing I would change about what I've written. They are, for the most part, accurate reflections of where I was (in an emotional and creative sense) when I was writing them, and if they don't match up to what I would do now, well, I can write something new now.  I'm not an obsessive tinkerer. 

And even though I've written some stuff that was unnecessarily mean, particularly in my memoirs,  I wouldn't change it in future editions  (assuming there ever are any future editions). Because, when I hurt people I care about, the damage I did with my words can't be undone. And when I hurt people I don't care about, I don't give a shit.

But there's one sentence I hate with a passion, and one that, should there ever be any future editions, I will insist  be changed.  It's from Losing My Faculties. I'm not going to quote it exactly here because I really can't stand that I wrote it.  But basically I compared some gathering of people at the charter school where I worked to a funeral for someone who'd been murdered. 

I was trying to get at the idea that there was a lot of anger coupled with the sadness. And I remember being really proud of coming up with that metaphor. But at the time I wrote that, I'd never been to a funeral for someone who'd been murdered.  I've since been to two, (in an attempt to show support family members I know. I was not acquainted with either victim) the most recent of which was last night.

And this experience has really made me hate the fact that I used this facile, lazy metaphor. Because it's a terrible comparison.  Losing a job is to having a loved one get murdered as stubbing your toe is to being tortured to death.  You could maybe argue that they're on the same continuum, but they're so far apart as to make the comparison deeply insulting.

I seem to remember the normally odious Boston sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy renouncing his use of the "cancer in the clubhouse" metaphor after his child was diagnosed with cancer, basically saying that comparing anybody's performance in a work environment to a fatal disease was offensively stupid.  (I can't find the column or any reference to it on the internet, so perhaps it was somebody else and Shaughnessy is even more odious than I thought.)

If anybody else made the comparison between their work situation and the funeral of a murder victim, I'd probably blog about how offensively stupid they were. 

So fair is fair: I hate that sentence.  And I hate that I wrote it.  And if you've had a loved one murdered, I'm really sorry for using that metaphor for such a comparitively trivial thing.  I will take it out if I'm ever given the opportunity to do so.

In the meantime, if you read that sentence and want to slap the shit out of the dumbass who wrote it, well, all I can say is you're not alone.