Writer's Blog

I can't say that writing is difficult for me, but having the inspiration to write can sometimes be analogous to making yourself hungry while watching an auto mechanic make sausage or trying to catch some sleep after doing a dozen beer bongs of espresso. Now, before the Meatmakers Mechanics local union comes blitzkreiging to my door and flipping over the economy cars on my street, let me qualify it by saying that said sausage-making would be before the Lava soap scrubbing. Now that I've over-explained myself, I just wanted to say that my muse has been AWOL for the past six weeks. To the sarcastic Earthlings among us, they might say that my muse is Godot and I'm confusing a good scratch for inspiration and naivete for talent.

Good point.

A person much groovier than me once said "Just write!" and everything will take care of itself. I have taken my own advice and produced spectacular works of nonsense. Once the writing starts, my mind just ejaculates all over the page and I'm left exhausted, hungry, and slightly ashamed. Half of the time, I'm agonizing on whether to use the word "occasion" because I don't know whether there is one "s" or two, and I'm too damned ignorant to look it up. I have rewritten entire stories because of a phantom "s". It's like the mailman hiring out a hang glider to deliver the mail to a house because of a "Beware of Dog" sign. By the time I've finished, I feel like someone asked me how the weather is outside and I ended up explaining the Doppler Effect, isobars, and the best conditions for planting winter wheat. Sometimes, "It's a bit warm," suffices nicely.

I was an English major in college and a world-class fraud of an English major at that. Never one to put effort into anything in those days, I cut every corner, skimmed every surface, and took every shortcut available. But, I did it the right way: In my Shakespeare class, I found that the newly-refurbished library just so happened to have every Bard play on videotape - courtesy of PBS - and "The Taming of the Shrew" is much more enjoyable when you can watch John Cleese playing Petruchio instead of reading the 20-lb. Pelican Edition of Shakespeare's works that was so big you could iron a shirt with it. I always sat in the front row, asked a lot of questions early on, and basically hung in there for the first month until I was able to get the rhythm of my professors and know what kinds of questions they would be prone to ask on quizzes and exams (hey, it really worked). Then, I would study pretty much only what I expected would be on the tests. Worked like a charm. However, the most effective tool in this most effective tool's tool bag was ego. I always found that if you went to visit your professors during their office hours, called them up about an assignment, invited them out for nachos and beer with the other schemers like myself, then a C became a B and a B became an A rather quickly. Does it work for all professors? Hell no; however, when you are taking Nordic Saga and Myth and Great Irish Writers, there is an excellent chance that the professor is ecstatic anyone is taking more than a passing interest in something that, at that age, generally remained only a passing interest.

In my Shakespeare class, a particularly worthless girl ratted me out to the professor when she saw me watching "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the media room of the library instead of reading it. Quickly summoning all the cleverness the Dark Lord had bestowed upon me, I explained to the professor that I was using the video to augment my studying since there was no stage direction in the textbook and I could not tell whom was addressing whom (yeah, that's probably not correct). I told him that we should have a night, each week, where the class could get together at the library and watch Sir Laurence Olivier on the fields of Agincourt or Bob Hoskins' Iago prance around in unsightly tights. Everyone loved the idea, including the professor, well, everyone except the worthless girl, who refused to stoop to my level. Then again, she doth protest too much. Go ahead and work out the tense and conjugation on your own time.

It was said that William Shakespeare never once "struck a word." In other words, he never once edited himself, which is quite an accomplishment since I'm reaching for an eraser halfway through a grocery list. Of course, we cannot prove that any more than we can prove that Siddhartha didn't make underarm fart noises while sitting under the Bodhi Tree or that Jesus came up with a kick-ass barbecue sauce in his mid-20s. It's just one of those things that has passed into legend without the bothersome burden of something silly - like proof, for instance. There are those who insist that Shakespeare wrote the King James Bible. Nice work, if you can get it. I am sure competition existed between writers of that era:

Wm. Shakespeare: "I say, Mr. Donne, how are you keeping on these days?"

John Donne: "Oh, splendid! Splendid! Just finished up a wonderful masterpiece of metaphysical poetry. It's called "The Flea" It should keep lazy college students busy many centuries from now. And what, pray tell, have YOU done lately, William?"

WS: "Um, er, I wrote the new bible."

JD: "Oh."

WS: "Well, it's been nice, John. There's a sale on neck ruffles and they so rarely carry my size. Toodles." (walks away)

JD: "Oh, yeah, well...of course." (Shouting after him) "William be not proud!"

Is it any surprise that the names Shakespeare and Superman both begin with the letter "S"? Then again, there are those who say that William Shakespeare, The Writer, never even existed, that he was just a struggling actor/playwright who had all of these magnificent works accredited to him. The Playwright and the Pauper, if you will - and even if you won't. Could you imagine a young William Shakespeare being pulled aside by a trench-ruffled stranger and handed "The Two Gentlemen of Verona":

WS: "What would this be, kind sir?"

Trench-Ruffled Stranger: "Oh, just a little something I threw together. I'll keep supplying you with plays and such and you can keep the fame, fortune, and adulation throughout eternity."

WS: "To what do I owe this honor?"

TRS: "You owe it to the fact that I am a complete and total idiot. Here, stuff these in your pockets, too."

WS: "What are these?"

TRS: "Sonnets. 14 lines. Iambic pentameter, A-B-A-B scheme...yadda, yadda, yadda. Look, you've got to be an idiot to pass this up."

WS: "...or not to be. When will you have another play for me?"

TRS: "I'm going to be busy for a while. Helping this guy with something called "The Flea". I'll contact you when I'm finished. Deal?"

WS: "As you like it."

Centuries later, we salute and curse that chance meeting. So, here's to you, Mister Trench-Ruffled Stranger. It's because of you that we have Commedia Dell'Arte imitating life, keep Kenneth Branagh from being on the dole, and learned how to use the pause button on our VCRs and DVD players to see a young Olivia Hussey's teenaged breasts in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet.

Hey, nudity in the classics is worthy of any occasion.

Well, I guess I was able to hang glide around my writer's block. Now, I'm exhausted, hungry, and a bit ashamed.