“Kilgore Trout owned a parakeet named Bill.” (Fiction?)
“Yea, that was a bad one,” Justin (not Justin) said about yesterday’s post.
“Really?” I asked.
He didn’t hesitate. “Yea, pretty short, boring, not very insightful.”
It took me hours to write that post. I wrote entire pages and deleted them completely. I went through my blog notes over and over again only to find that there was nothing I wanted to write about.
Lately it seems that instead of letting myself become inspired I’ve been allowing myself to be distracted. I’ve been making bad decisions because I don’t care about the consequences anymore. On the other hand, I’ve been making good decisions for the same reason.
I’m doing whatever I want at any given moment. Spontaneous. Dangerous. Fun.
“I really like your blog,” a friend told me the other day. “You’ve got a lot of balls to put it out there like that. Knowing the person you’re writing about could read it.”
People tell me things like this all the time – that my blog is “honest”. I think my blog is dramatic. I wonder if these things define me.
In Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut writes:
Kilgore Trout owned a parakeet named Bill… He told Bill that humanity deserved to die horribly, since it had behaved so cruelly and wastefully on a planet so sweet.
I am curious to know if this was how Vonnegut truly felt, disguised as fiction.
“I have trouble believing anything is 100% fiction,” I once told Tim. All of the fictional thoughts and experiences we read in our most beloved novels must come from some truth.
Some nights I lie in bed drunk and make blog notes. (Ashleigh’s Writing Rule #658: Never write when drunk, only make notes when drunk.) One evening, I noted how I wanted someone in particular to die. I thought about seeing the splish-splash of this person’s blood and guts on the ground. I wondered how this person’s friends and family would feel when they heard that so-and-so had expired and is on his/her way to meet our maker, or maybe just to a meat locker in the morgue before being reduced to worm food or ashes. (I’m not really sure what so-and-so’s last wishes regarding burial might have been.)
Is that honesty? Debatable. Is it any more or less honest if I create a character who expresses such thoughts to his/her pet parakeet? Again, debatable. Should it be stated that I obviously don’t wish death upon anyone? No, because it goes without saying. Should Vonnegut have clarified whether he really did or did not think that all of humanity deserved to die horribly? No. Why? Because he was writing “fiction”?
I dunno.
What is something I do know? That this blog is my cathartic release. It’s my inaudible music. My intangible painting. Me dancing without movement.
It’s me screaming as loud as I fucking can without making a sound.
It’s my heart and my brain, thrown into Jayme’s food processor and made into a meat shake for the world to drink.
August 4th, 2010 at 11:39 am
thanks for clarifying.
August 5th, 2010 at 2:55 pm
At first I thought you meant clarifying that my blog was a meat sandwich, and then I felt bad because I was like “What about the vegetarians? My blog is for them too!” But now I think you were talking about the multiple Justins in my life…
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