I am cleaning house. Losing addictions left, right, and - yes, even center. In five days I've had a total of one beer and only a half-pack of smokes. No coffee. No hot sauce. I've started swimming daily, hoping to fix whatever seems to be wrong with me. Swimming and drinking water. I feel as though my life has become a BodyBreak(TM) commercial. I'm half-expecting Hal Johnson and Joanne McLeod to leap out of my closet, circa-1987, complete with Hal's (now) missing mustache and Joanne's awesome neon-nylon workout suit, and tell me that I'm keeping fit and having fun.
Well let me tell you something Hal; this is not fun for me, no matter how much fun you might be having at my expense. I feel worse now than I've probably felt in years. Drinking water makes me sicker than a mild hangover, and I end my day feeling like I'm somehow missing something. I really, really don't like being this clear-headed. Tea, tea, tea, tea, tea. It's just not waking me up the way coffee does. But as has been brought to my attention by several sources, coffee beans are (and I quote the scientific prognosis) bad. That's Latin for "Al likes it, but it doesn't like Al". Now, tea is different. Tea is supposed to be good (from the Latin: listen to your mother). I think it's called a "diuretic" and it contains something called "anti-oxidants".It's supposed to flush my fucked-up system by making me piss like a goddamn infant all the time.
Apart from spending half my time leaking like a sieve, I'm beginning to fear that whatever it is this tea is flushing, I probably need - or at least am used to. I've noticed that one of the more important elements being "flushed" is my patience. I mean all of it. I offer an example: I am currently sitting in a modern Canadian poetry class (insert your own joke here) listening to the regular crop of Trinity assholes wax philosophic on the poetics of Native writer Fred Wah, and I want to get on the phone and call up ol' Fred, go pick up a couple of twelve-gauges and correct their perceptions. These people are absolutely certain that they know everything about everything, and though I'll grant them they probably have a lot more going on regarding Modern Canadian Poetry (because that matters a fiddler's damn) than I have, there is this utterly arrogant, aristocratic, elitist intellectual undertone to everything that is said to the point where it's stinking up the room. And it makes me want to get up, Half-Baked style, and walk the fuck out.
Usually I'm quite happy to tune out and let it all wash, but given the state I'm currently in I think that particular circuit has been fused and I either have to shut down entirely or else overload. Now I'm not trying to give the impression that no one here has anything worthwhile to say; in fact, there are a few of them I could listen to all damn day over cigarettes and beer, because they're quite introspective and prescient, but those few are overshadowed by the sheer volume of ego in this little tiny claustrophobic room. They're actually palpable - I can feel them push up against my forehead when I try to lean down and write, and I hear them rub against one another - they sound like helium balloons squeaking high-pitched rubber on rubber that sets my teeth on edge.
And the damndest part about the whole thing is that I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if I were to give these jerkoffs something I had written myself (and god knows I don't write poetry) and put, I don't know, Margaret Atwood's name on it...well, maybe Atwood is a bad example because I really don't hate men the way she does, and it just wouldn't sound caustic enough. Okay, maybe Cohen or something. Anyway, if I were to put a big name on it and then hand it off to these jackals, we'd probably spend a whole class deconstructing and reading into every damn line and they would absolutely love every second. Were it my name on the page, not only would it be totally dismissed for utter garbage (which it likely is; see my above statement about not writing poetry), but even worse it might just be deconstructed again - not with the precision of a literary scalpel but with all the finesse of an ego-fuelled M80. I've seen it happen to better amateurs than me; there are entire funny-farm wards filled with writers who were given the intellectual beat-down by these fucking academic usurpers and completely lost their shit when their life's work was dissolved down into nothing before their very eyes. Tell me; who learns from this sort of treatment? Who pays for this sort of treatment?
Unfortunately, I do.
Tea, I've decided, really isn't the drink for me.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment