Because I read this today, I found out that Quinn Cummings and I both love the book Geek Love by Katherine Dunn. Because I found that out, I thought that maybe I might not become a womanizing, drug-addled, mentally unstable, critically-acclaimed, poverty-stricken, lonely alcoholic writer by the end of next week.
Some of you may understand exactly how all of that makes sense. If you do, then I feel for you, because you have a brain like mine, and that isn’t always fun, even if it is entertaining. For those of you who don’t, allow me to explain the finer points of Being Tom’s Brain.
In the past few weeks I’ve been reading a lot about dystopian fiction. This is an area relatively new to me, and one which I’ve previously known about mainly through popular works such as Farenheit 451 and 1984. I love to do research, though, and while recently doing some Wikipedia research on 1984, I came across a list of 175 novels with the theme of dystopia. That’s a lot of grim future, my friends, and I dove into it with glee.
I started to make a reading list. In the process, I noted various authors: Jack London, Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells plus many other lesser-knowns. One that rang some sort of vague bell of recognition was Philip K. Dick. I knew only that he had written the book “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” which had become the basis for the classic film “Blade Runner.”
As I plowed deeper into the list of titles, Dick’s name appeared several times. His wasn’t the only one to do so, but I noted on several occasions, that when it did, it was accompanied by fervent enthusiasm on my part. It seemed that every idea this man had flipped an exuberant ON switch in my brain.
I was piqued as to the background of the man. What was he like, this machine that seemed to be able to not only crank out numerous novels, but come up with ideas for stories that I wished I’d come up with myself? This guy was on my wavelength. I mean, I was really digging his stuff. What was his life like? How similar might be we two? I clicked on the link to his biography.
Me reading: Hey! Hey, look! He won a Hugo Award. Sweet. He won a John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Nice. Thirty-six novels and 121 short stories! Damn – Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, Minority Report – all that stuff is his! It can be done! Here’s proof of literary success! He was awesome!
He was awesome, and…and divorced…five times.
…and lived most of his life in poverty.
…and…never lived to see any of those movies from his books.
Hmmm…history of drug use.
Uh…he thought he was…taken over by the, uh, spirit of the prophet Elijah.
Thought he was…living a double life? And the second one was as “Thomas,” a Christian persecuted by the Romans in the First Century A.D?
It was about this time that me head started to have great fun with me. Oh great, it said. THIS is the guy I like? THIS is the guy whose ideas seem like they could have come out of my own head? THIS GUY??? I’m doomed.
Clearly, my head said, I was hopeless, my path to literary greatness was predestined. If I loved the ideas presented by Philip K. Dick, it was unavoidable what should follow: My desire to embrace a life of creativity, of literary and artistic pursuit – this was all going to end horribly. Soon I would be losing my day job due to loss of work ethic. I would walk out the door with my little cardboard filebox of belongings declaring loudly, selfishly, that, “I just can’t cope with this sort of mundane existence! I must create!!!”
My foolhardiness would make itself known straight away by me not getting anything at all published for a year or two. During this period, I would boomerang between writing and alcoholic binges, turning out pages of dreck suitable only for immediate destruction and my own growing pool of self-hatred and shame. I would lose my house to foreclosure. I would alienate both friends and family as I stomped and raged through my self-involved wreckage, flinging aside offers of assistance, sure that my way was the only way and that society was ignoring me, that the world at large was against me!
Finally, when I was in darkest despair, and against even my best efforts at self-sabotage (like the time I would write to an editor and demand he publish me “Unless you want to be known for only ever printing the linings of bird cages rather than untested brilliance!”), I would be published. By this point, however, so energetically had I set about committing the arson of my many personal and professional bridges, the only places that would publish me were small rags, amounting to hardly enough for a month’s rent in one room of a run-down house in a seedy part of town.
My bitter hopes emboldened, I would crusade onward, declaring that, “They’ll see. I’ll show them all!” Somehow, good writing would still manage to come from pen, pencil, typewriter, or whatever writing instrument I could afford at the moment. My earnings would be spent on the barest subsistence of life, with the remainder thrown away on whatever libation happened to be cheapest that week at the corner package store. I would turn to the use of pseudonyms as a means of getting my work published, having managed to repel any and all publishers who might otherwise have considered my work worthy of print.
Upon death at an early age of 56, brought on notably by years of substance abuse and generally poor self-care, I would leave to my credit only a handful of known published works, most of these in magazines. It would not be discovered until more than a decade later that I had more than twenty novels to my credit, often published with houses so small that they were scarcely known to exist. Movies would be made from several of my books, and my family would profit well in the aftermath of my mismanaged life. I would become known as an unappreciated master, influencing a whole wave of fiction to come for a new generation of writers.
Nice, huh? I really know how to turn on the melodrama when I have an opportunity – and this from reading a single page of someone’s online bio! My mind works wonders, I tell you, wonders. I’m especially tickled at how I made me into an “unappreciated master.” I suppose, though, that it wouldn’t make much of a story if I simply became a drunk who wrote badly his whole life. I don’t think A&E would waste a biography on that one, nor would it merit a Wikipedia entry, and who wouldn’t want to be a Wikipedia entry?
All kidding aside, my head really does create excuses for me not to do this stuff. I vividly recall making the decision to major in Journalism in college. I reasoned that, “You can’t make any money as a writer. Well, some people can, but you have to be kind of born to that, or show some sort of miraculous gift for it early on. It’s no way to make a living. But you can get a job with a newspaper. That’s a real job.”
And so it went. You know what happens when you don’t really go for what you want? You don’t really get what you want, and you end up pretty disatisfied with what you choose. Now I don’t know about the whole “unappreciated master” thing (I’d actually like to be an appreciated one with a bank account to prove it), but I can say that I would enjoy at least having some stuff published. There is that. It may not make me rich, it may not even cover a month of my mortgage (though that would be sweet), but there’s nothing to say it wouldn’t be worth trying. There’s also nothing to say that I would become like Philip K. Dick if I pursued writing aggressively. I always seize the most negative aspects of something, which, not surprisingly, gives me all sorts of reasons NOT to do stuff. I’m kind of done with that. I’m ready to move forward and look for some positive stuff. After all, Quinn Cummings likes some of the same books I do, and she’s funny, can write well, and she has a husband, a child, and as far as I know she doesn’t believe she’s a resurrected biblical figure. There’s hope in that.
