The Musings of an Idiot

Self-expression and universal expression can be called “art.”

Self-expression and universal expression can be called “art.” If one becomes very good at it, that may make one special.

Consumption of it, making art your reality, decidedly does not.

I wrote this piece many years ago, after some frustrating first-efforts at getting published. Hopefully my writing has improved since, but after all, I’m just me, so who the hell knows. By the way, I haven’t experienced “writer’s block” since. My bigger issue is deciding on which piece I should be working.

The Musings of an Idiot

Benjamin Trayne

Here's a plain and honest fact for you: I’m a plain-language writer. I tell stories. I may from time to time wax poetic, or I might paint you a lovely picture with words. I may take you someplace you've never been, and you may feel like you're actually there. But, under no circumstances will I make up words or assemble a line of gobbledegook, just to try make you think what I'm writing is "art". I remain hopeful that someone appreciates that style.

Here's how it started:

One fine Saturday some time ago, I was sitting and thinking. Not thinking and working, or thinking and drinking, or any of the things one might otherwise be doing alongside of deep thought. I was doing it despite the fact that experience had, at very least, suggested to me on numerous occasions that it was a probably a bad idea. But I did have a problem.

All my life I'd been writing things for other people, just because I was willing, and because I found it easy to do a reasonably decent job of it. And, I enjoyed it. As long as nobody was looking over my shoulder and telling me how, I've always found it to be fun to do. My desire to write things probably set my kids back, because whenever they'd had difficulty with a homework writing assignment, I'd rapped something off for them and they'd gotten an "A". A time or two my writing had opened someone's eyes. And more than one human resources person has asked who had helped me write my resume. So that's not misconstrued, I will add that one of them also suggested that I'd had it prepared by a professional. If I look stupid, that's another matter that doesn't fit into this issue at all.

At my work, I wrote up a description of our workplace, our goals, our history of meeting those goals and our vision for the future. When the piece was posted on the front page of the company website, I received a lot of compliments for it ("Dude, you can really write!") prompting my semi-literate bitch of a supervisor to cut the guts out of it, and re-post it.

Because I wasn't getting any younger, and because the know-it-alls who administered our work unit at the time actually claimed to have no idea what I did, and because I made more money than most of my co-workers, and because the economy was tough, I could see I would very likely be eliminated long before I'd be finished needing a job.

Having realized all of that, it didn't take me long to decide to try my hand at writing something to sell. If I was going to have to find a new way to generate an income, it might as well be something I like to do, and it's better yet if I can sit on my ass while I do it. Once upon a time I wouldn't have wanted that, but the idea had gradually become more appealing. It's like a lot of things that fit the model. It doesn't hurt when you do it, and soon you find yourself doing it more and more. So it's probably safe to assume that it has some appeal, of one kind or another.

So I put on my old-guy sweater, you know, the kind that still buttons up the front, made myself a warm cup of coffee, downloaded and installed Open Office, and went to work. If you think the sweater buttons down, I don't wanna hear it. I'm single now, and buttons up if I say so.

But, I couldn't think of a damned thing to write. It couldn't be writer's block, I reasoned, because I wasn't a writer yet. You don't suppose the writer's block gremlin affects you just because you're going to try writing? I thought, aha, maybe it's because...I really am a writer, and I'm the only one who doesn't know it!

Well of course that made me feel better right off, so I celebrated by driving over to Dunkin' Donuts and picking up a half-dozen glazed crullers and a large coffee, because their coffee is better than mine. That was the ticket. Sitting on my butt and eating crullers. I needed a new direction, and that sounded like a winner. Bear with me, I haven't gotten to the problem, yet.

Obviously the interlude and the crullers didn't do a damned thing to help me out, because not only could I still not think of a thing to write, now I needed a nap. I made a mental note, "no crullers to end writer's block", and I went and got a Coke from the fridge. You know, they should advertise that stuff. It helped right away. But now I had another interruption, as you can imagine, after two large coffees and a Coke.

But then I got down to it. Just kind of out of the blue, I envisioned Charles Schultz's Snoopy, sitting on top of his doghouse, typing "It was a dark and stormy night." The image made me chuckle. I'd made no progress anyway, what could it hurt to do that? Without the doghouse, of course. So I typed exactly that.

It was exactly the right thing to do.

A story began to unfold before me. The ideas came so quickly I started to jot down notes so I wouldn't forget any of them. The storm was a snow storm, the location, the top of a mountain. A picture formed in my mind. A cabin, built the old way from on-site materials. A plot developed, and the story itself took over. I wrote partly from my own experiences, I wrote from my heart. I put things down on paper that I'd never even thought about before. I did web searches to check my facts. I sat back, ruminated for a moment, and returned to writing. Adjectives just came on their own.

It was only the beginning. I was going to write fiction, and I couldn't stop. I'd once believed I'd had a somewhat narrow existence, but it turned out I'd sold myself pretty short. I understood things these 15- to 25-year-old kids were asking about, all over the web. I could see right through political ploys, and it turns out, a whole lot of people can't. I've watched the progression of technology and I understand most of it, and how and why it has happened as it has. I know why progress is or isn't made in negotiations, or in just about anything. Any facts or exact dates or locations I'm spotty about, I can easily get the straight stuff right from the internet. As long as watch my sources, of course.

The imagination I've always had to push aside didn't hurt the effort, either. Picture your boss making an ass out of himself, by chewing you out for something that he'd done all alone. In the time it takes him to make one stupid remark, you've had a great, big, knee-slapping laugh, made fun of him around the coffeemaker with your fellow employees for an hour and a half, smacked him on top of his stupid head a half-dozen times, kicked his butt up and down the hallway and got him fired for being himself. It took three seconds, and you've kept a completely straight face while in his presence. Yes, I can do that.

So I wrote up my own predictive model of the singularity, with a twist that takes you to Mars but that won't bring you back. Then I killed all of you with a surprise, and left you gasping for breath at the end of the story. I took you to a workplace, and created a story about a great man who didn't know he was great, and wrote about his victory. I prepared a story for the ages that opened in the Pleistocene and ended in the present day, with one ever-present theme. I took you to someone's deathbed that turned out to be anything but death.

I also started reading a lot of other people's fiction short stories, from books and from the web. I could see that most of it was not like my writing, although a lot of it was entertaining. Some of it I didn't enjoy reading because I could see where it was going long before I got there. A few were pure crap, such that I couldn't even put it into a category. It wasn't art, neither was it factual, or it wasn't even remotely possible - in a sane existence, anyway.

I must have come to the wrong conclusion from all of that, because I thought of my own work, "People are gonna love this stuff." And although I still think it's possible they might have, before people can love it, they have to have the opportunity to read it. That means an editor has to love it, first.

Now, I did understand there are a whole lot of people sending fiction to magazine editors, and that meant there was a lot of competition. But if the editors were selecting the best stuff, that means it should be published there in the magazines for me to see. Therefore I should be able to look, to see what kinds of masterpieces beat me out of a sale. After dozens of hopeful submissions and an equal number of rejections, I finally stepped out and bought some 'zines. Wish I'd done it earlier.

I was devastated. Many of these seemed like the musings of idiots. It put me in the mind of the trend-sucking progression of photography. Some moron, or morons, had decided that photography should be art, and made a bunch of the people that were taking photographs feel inadequate, because they were only making great pictures. So they started making fuzzy pictures, throwing arrowheads, thorns and rusty barbed wire onto toilet paper, then photographing it, framing it and calling it art. Now you see it displayed everywhere.

Well, I had walked away from photography partly because of that, but who would have thought that literature would go the same way? No doubt some moron would tell me that I don't understand. Oh, but I do. I do. You are publishing this because it sells. Not because it makes sense, or even because it's enjoyable to read. It's exactly what a photography magazine editor told me about the "artistic" crap they were publishing. Somebody out there thinks it's "art". Maybe they sit and make charts on their computers to teach people about the varying degrees of bullshit in each nuance they envision, that was never there to begin with. They think it makes them seem to be intelligent. They think it makes them appear to be sensitive. They really need to re-read The Emperor's New Clothes.

Before you dismiss me as just a cranky old fart who's gonna starve just because he's a cranky old fart, let me tell you what I did. I just needed confirmation before I applied for the taxi driving job over at the cab garage.

You see, I didn't think even one of those editors really liked the stuff they had selected to publish. In fact, in a lot of cases they didn't even understand it. But it met certain criteria, it seemed artistic. I figured I'd give 'em something like what they were looking for. So before I sat down to write, I got drunk.

As it turns out, that's a tricky business. There are all kinds of drunk, you see, and in spite of my age, I wasn't very experienced at it. If you take a couple of shots, you can begin to feel it, and it gets you started if you want to make up some weird stuff. But it's not the even "buzz" that you need. There's also a fine line between a working buzz and a time-to-take-a-nap buzz, and if you only imbibed enough to get to the first stage, it was fading out long before you got finished. You need something with a little less kick, and a little more shtick. If that makes any sense. I know I wasn't.

But eventually, I got it down, drinking about one malt liquor every forty minutes or so. It was pretty enjoyable. I realized that some of these "authors" must be smoping doke, but I wasn't going to go the herbal route, or anything else that was illegal. No, I'd found the path, so I just put away the car keys on Saturdays. It was the primary day to write, since for the time being I still had a job.

So I crafted a ridiculous little tale about some guy who was trying to find himself, was drug-addicted and between jobs, and who hated his father and nevertheless had to go visit him. The title had absolutely nothing to do with the plot, but was derived by some blatantly fabricated excuse for a silly daydream that affected him in strange ways, such that he saw things that obviously could not have been there. In other words, he was a partially-sane, semi-functioning unemployed deviant derelict without a clue of what was coming next, had no self-respect whatsoever and even less for the world or anybody in it. It would be an instant hit. Then I put it through my usual seventeen-and-a-half edits, inserting enough obscure and cryptic terminology to make the editor think somebody unusual had written it, and prepared my submission copy.

This was just too good. I didn’t expect it to work, but as a deliberate insult I felt the need to carry it out to the max. So I went to a mens’ store (of sorts), and I selected a tweed beret. I applied the techniques of "antiquing" that have been used for a few decades to make things look like they're well-worn. Soon my new beret looked like it was ten years old, and hadn't been washed in a while. Then I picked out an argyle vest, a well-worn white shirt from the Goodwill store and a pair of baggy pants. I hadn't thrown a pair of shoes away in years, so I picked the oldest pair of hole-y sneakers I had and dusted them off. To finish off the image, I deliberately tousled my beard and my hair before I jammed the hat on my head. Then I headed for the fiction editor's office at my target magazine, my submission copy in hand in a used manila envelope.

Walking through the city streets from the bus station, my specialized appearance didn't even get a second look. I thought perhaps that I had underdone it, until I entered the building. I guess it's not unusual to look weird in the street, but it's another matter entirely when you walk through the door of the office building for a major magazine.

I walked over to the wall registry and located the editor's office. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see a security guard taking a step in my direction. But he stopped, and apparently decided against it. I was now satisfied with my appearance. I got on the elevator, and pressed the right button.

Reaching my destination, I stood along the wall opposite the editor's door, hoping it would open. Eventually, a pretty young woman in a pantsuit walked to the editor's door. She saw me standing there, looking ridiculous to me, possibly like a disheveled artist, to her. She smiled a crooked smile, and she asked, "May I help you?"

"Um, yeah, well," I deliberately stumbled on my own words, "I was just hoping...to.. you know," and I held out the envelope, tentatively.

"Ohh, you have a submis-shun! You know, that's not the way we receive them here. You can mail that to us, you can email it, but you don't deliver it," she said.

Well, I had to deliver it, to convey the image, but I wasn't about to tell her that. "Um, you don't understand, I don't, uh..."

"Oh? Well okay, let me hand-deliver it for you. I'm on my way in to see her, right now."

I smiled just a bit, delivered a short and quick bow, did my best Charlie Chaplin sheepish look, and handed her the envelope. Then I hurried toward the elevator. Mission accomplished. As I turned to enter the elevator, I saw that the woman was still watching me. This was perfect. I headed for the bus station.

When I'd made submissions of my stories in the past, I had always included my contact information right on the document, so that it wouldn't get separated. This time I deliberately bent an index hard in half and then straightened it, and paper-clipped it to the front page. In pencil I wrote out an alias that I had picked, derived from my favorite television cartoon - “Sherman Peabody”. For an address I needed and acquired a post office box, and I didn't give a contact phone because us starving artists could be homeless. I felt it added something to the image, and besides, it seemed a believable scenario, depending on my employment future.

That editor bit so hard that if she had been a bass, the hook would've come right out through her forehead. The psychic energy alone nearly pulled me back into the bus when I got off at my stop. When I got home, I had to undress and check for teeth-marks. That night, I had trouble sleeping because a voice kept calling me by my assumed name. “Sherman! Sherrrman!”

So the next day, I took time off and went to check my post office box. Nothing. But the day after, there it was. An envelope from the magazine. I knew it wasn't a rejection, those take too long. I opened and unfolded the letter, and I read:

“Dear Mr. Peabody, After careful review we would like to feature your work in the May issue of our magazine. A check is enclosed as a deposit to secure publishing rights to your story. Your acceptance of this check will signify your acceptance of our standard agreement. Please come by at your convenience, in the very near future so that we can discuss further exposure of your artistic talents in our publication. If possible, please bring any other works you would like to have considered.”

May was just two months away. It barely gave me time to think. Now what was I going to do? I really didn't, for some strange reason, expect it to work so well or so quickly, and I surely didn't want to publish the other things I had written so carefully, and I thought, so well, as this guy Sherman. I realized I really hadn't thought this thing through. At no time had I considered getting back into those clothes or wearing that stupid hat again.

A famous line from, guess what, Harry Chapin's Taxi passed through my mind:

Well another man might have been angry

And another man might have been hurt

But another man never would have let her go -

I stashed the bill in my shirt.

Heaven knows it didn't apply, I suppose it came to mind because the cab company was hiring, and I knew I wasn't going to keep writing stuff like the thing that had just been paid for.

I turned the check over and looked at it. Damn. That's not even my name on there.

Way to go, idiot.

I walked back to work.

Don't quit your day job.

Now I can't get rid of these damned voices.

Hahahahahaaaa.

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Copyright 2023 Benjamin Trayne