Most of What I Write is Trash

My presence among the writers of anything is anomalous. I don’t know anybody, don’t care about anything, and have nothing original to say. I arrange words that don’t mean anything in exchange for $$$ I won’t spend. There were maybe a couple moments when I almost broke through1, or could’ve broken through2, but I don’t know what I would’ve broken through to much less what I would’ve done when I got there.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” is alway everybody’s question. People start playing this role or that role in their early to mid 20s, and then they grow, literally and figuratively, into them. I never wanted to play a role; I never wanted anything but silence. Role-playing involves a lot of dissembling, “Oh I’m blah blah blah, whatever, et cetera”–wanting to the “king shit of fuck mountain,” to steal a mellifluous phrasing of Bob Odenkirk’s. Eventually you’re wearing these big baggy-ass Dockers khakis and playing golf with the boys or drinking PBR in a 50/25/25 tri-blend t-shirt in some $3000/mo rental in one of the “acceptable” cities while doing your best impression of Steve Buscemi doing his impression of a teenager.

I never thought I’d grow up–never minded the process, I guess, but never thought it would happen–and yet I have in spite of every indication to the contrary and now I’m shrewed/blued/tattooed because on any given day I have no reason to live. Not a reason to die, which is the sort of thing first responders and G.I. Joes and other real American heroes have, but a reason to live, to move forward, to accomplish something. And for what, y'know? So I can tell some tweedy professor that I’m publishing with such-and-such a press or impress some hipster manqué3 by telling him or her that P4K is running an essay of mine?

As for friendships and the resulting conversations, they’re no different than writing: mostly work and mostly trash. “What is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies.” Yeah, wutevz, Big Aristotle: a friend is just someone who, whether encountered randomly or at an appointed hour, will waste your time. Talking to a person, even if it’s the best talk you’ve ever had, requires such exertion that when you leave–which you’ll have to do, because everyone leaves and everything ends–you’ll never want to do it again. “Great chat bro, hopefully I’ll never see you again, even though I love you like a bro.” “Yeah broseph, it’s been real, it’s been fun, but it hasn’t been real fun.”

But back to the writing: what do we write about when we write about writing? In most cases we–meaning me and you–write literary fiction, which is just softcore porn for nerds4. At any rate, we never write nothing because we can never say no. It’s always type type typing away, with nary an idea of great import or export to convey.

I suppose I could write about the horrendous abuse that characterized my childhood and early adolescence. There’s $$$ in them thar hills, even if ain’t much, even if I’m not sure where exactly I stack up on the Publisher’s Pain Scale5. I’m a dudebro, inescapably so, with a voice and a face and a body that fit nowhere in the grand scheme of things. I suppose you might even think I’m interesting–provided that your definition of interesting is different, and much looser, than mine.

“I, I, I,” the cogito, the I’m so cool,“ is what’s best and worst about male writing, especially dudebro writing, and also why we need no more of it. I can’t pitch a piece or an article or a book with any sincerity because WTF, there’s been several thousand years of dudebro work paving the way: Cicero was a dudebro, Jesus too, Melville and Whitman…dudebros all. Plus writing isn’t cumulative the way science is, except for maybe when you’re plagiarizing somebody (quick quiz: can you spot all the phrases I lifted almost wholesale from other, better writers in this short essay? a No-Prize for the winner!). Can writing be said to have gotten any "better” in the past 100 years?6 Nah, writing can only ever be different, not better, and there’s nothing different about what I’d write-on-demand from what, say, Wallace Stegner or Richard Yates or Dan Duchaine or Louis L'Amour or Kevin “The Secrets THEY Don’t Want You to Know” Trudeau have already written.

What I mean by all of the foregoing, which you won’t read because I don’t matter &c., is that there’s no good reason for me. Based on current market conditions, there’s probably no good reason for you, either. Which makes me wonder why people kvetch about “Obama death panels” when it seems like those Futurama suicide booths could go a long ways toward thinning the herd of failed, feckless millenials.

“Abercrombie,” the “Abercrombie professor.” Lots of lawlz there. But ultimately nada, zip, zilch: just another thing that reaffirmed some preconceived notions. Good for me.
I interviewed to be on some reailty show, but nada, zip, zilch came of that, too.
Isn’t that every hipster, in the full and complete sense of this moth-eaten, dog-eared catchall term?
If this stuff were as good as what J.D. Robb, Inc. and Diana Palmer, Inc., wrote, it would sell a heckuva lot better.
Undoubtedly high by white cisgender male standards, and progressively lower as far as other identity categories are concerned. If I have any “complaints” about the abuse I received, it’s that, far from forcing me into a bunch of prepackaged & balkanized categories of self, it made me into a Patrick Bateman-esque empty shell (Bateman!), a veritable humanzee (Oliver!) among the higher primates. The latter doesn’t have as much cash value as the former, since it’s far more difficult to conceptualize and is unlikely to elicit sympathy from anyone. “So an asshole was raised by two assholes to be an even worse asshole,” readers (i.e., those brave souls who read more than 25% of a book they’ve purchased) will say. “Well fuck you, asshole!”
There’s a real Bloom-and-Lasch-y cottage industry built around describing how it’s gotten worse, and while there might be a germ of truth to that because writing demands focus and the future is one of multitasking (at which women admittedly far outshine men, on the aggregate), that work, which I read at an age when I wasn’t prepared to appreciate its deeper implications, now strikes me as a lot of elitist sour grapes.