The Writing Bit

One of the things I wanted to avoid with this blog that I didn't avoid in my last one was that I was going to be less negative concerning my family. I had gone through the 5 stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance), but it seemed like I kept reverting back to the anger stage time and time again when I think about my past. My goal for writing a memoir, which may never be published, is that I can finally put that part of my life on paper and get past it. Though as I sit now in my Dallas apartment with my family and my history 300 miles away, I am starting to grow numb from the literal and figurative distance of my present self from my formative self. And I'm starting to grow numb from this cold weather. It should be against Texas law to have the weather be anywhere near freezing!

And I've started to write the memoir many a time, but I eventually get to a sticking point: I can't express fully my thoughts as a 6-year old in the Caribbean without stealing the Joyce's technique in Portrait of an Artist whereby he writes as if he was the child in his earliest memory. If my memoir were to be a satire, then sure, I could blatantly copy all of the great artists' techniques and say that it was an homage and a poke at the dreariness of my development. But I don't wish my memoir to be a satire. I don't wish my story to be nothing but a comedy. Comedy is created as an antithesis, a foil to tragedy, hence the comedy & tragedy juxtaposition. Comedy was my defense against the hopelessness I saw as my future. But when the hopelessness was abolished by the light of epiphany, the comedy still remained. Hence all the jokes and puns and sexual innuendos you see in my blog and writing today.

An aside: I've noticed that the better comedians started out with a sucky life.

And I guess the other sticking point I've experienced is that I feel the writing isn't good enough. My thoughts run rampant when I'm thinking about the actual events of my past. But a memoir is not supposed to be a chronicling of events, a history book of one's life. I believe it to be a selection of the more salient points of one's life intended to provide some message, as cliched as it sounds. The actual person and the actual events should be secondary to the feel-good message. But as a narcissist of the nth degree, I must insist that I should be the thing that matters most in a story of my own life.

One good thing that I've learned from writing this blog is that I've grown less wearied about my frequent use of the word 'I'. When I began writing the stereotypical 'Dear Diary' or 'Dear Journal' entries as a youth, I would become incensed at my predilection to begin a sentence with 'I'. Though this blog is decidedly in a first person point of view, the writing has grown to be more than a collection of simple sentences starting with 'I' followed by a verb and some objects and other choice words which form a predicate. 'I', though it remains a majority of the subjects of my sentences, it is by no means the only subject.

Being a solution-oriented, type-AAA kind of guy, I've devised solutions to my sticking points. I will start from my time in Brooklyn when I was around 12. This should be infinitely easier to write about because some of my most painful memories come from that time, and it wasn't just because of being an overweight nerd who was forced to endure puberty in a foreign place with an entirely new set of friends (though that did pretty much suck).

And the second sticking point, about how my writing isn't good enough? Well I guess the readers of my blog will have to endure my non-comedic writing as well. I guess I might have to supplant my weekly musings on women because as my friend very pithily put it, 'You need to get laid!' As my alma mater's motto goes, 'In Time.' But I fear that there's not enough time for all that I want... Mortality is a mother[expletive deleted].