Insanity 101
Sitting down in the ruins of what was once a proud black office swivel chair, I tap the keyboard before me, which shares the chair’s dully obsidian shade. An inexperienced and unsure finger slowly surrenders itself to gravity, and falls with unbridled destiny towards its fate. This ebony appendix happens to be my index finger. I know that, in the blink of an eye, electricity is pulsing with a purpose towards the CPU, the awesome brain of the device, my computer, which receives the external output, and transfers it to the binary code, “01001001.” Then it is sent through more wires and silver linings, up to my monitor, and the resulting Arabic character shows itself behind the blinking cursor, which is waiting for my next move.
“I.”
All of this happens, seemingly instantaneously, as if the “I” was there all along, and was just waiting for me to give it permission to come out from beneath the white sheath behind it, the seemingly blank “page” on Microsoft Word. Now, I won’t lie to you - I don’t sit here all day and worry about every single key I hit (I type fifty words per minute, so I wouldn’t have time to think about every one if I wanted to.) Sometimes, however, when I’m in one of my philosophical moods, my mind can’t help but to wander and in my dreamy state I find myself thinking in detail about what I’m doing when I tap the keys on my keyboard.
That “I” is like an old friend of mine, and over the years has performed many an operation for me. It’s the fifth and sixth letters in “Calvin Riley,” one of my favorite characters I’ve made, who has been a werewolf, an emperor, and is now managing a four hundred pound wrestler named Prometheus. “I” is the first letter in “Iambic Pentameter,” which I’ve used to concoct the heart-lifting music of the word, poetry. Most importantly, however, “I” is the one lettered noun in the question “Why do I write?”
Why do I write?
I’m crazy. When they were busy handing out the sanity, I must have been out getting a burger or something, because I honestly don’t recall ever being “all there” really. No, its not the “shoot-em-up bang-bang” kind of insanity; it’s the more docile and passive kind. It’s the kind of madness J.K Rowling must have had when she logically deduced that a sport could be played on broomsticks, or the kind of imbalance Katherine Applegate probably suffered from when she told millions of little kids that grayish alien slugs were going to crawl into their ears and make them into their slaves. See? There’s nothing to worry about, right?
But we have to be crazy – we writers that is. Besides, some of the utter crap that we put down on paper has no place in the minds of normal people, right? At least that’s what my mother says, which leads me to believe that she’s beginning to think my own sanity is starting to wane (but how can I “loose my marbles” if I never had them in the first place?) I hate to get metaphorical on you, but when I think of what writing is, I think of all the possibilities of the pen as clay, and the writers as the sculptors. Sure, we all have the exact same materials, but none of us can possibly come out with the same exact statue in the end. We mold it into something wonderful, something brilliant, and something nobody else can ever touch, or claim ownership of, because it’s ours. Our fingerprints are clearly all over the damned thing.
Okay, that’s a little vague. It is time to stop with the metaphors, and tell you more about myself, as a writer, because I can’t speak for everyone.
It all started way back when I was a
little kid, I suppose. I was the only five year old on the block who was
writing short stories, as moronic and incoherent as they were. My first
memories of writing take me back to twenty-third and Wallace streets, on the
floor of my tiny room in our tiny second-floor apartment in
“Blah Blah Blah, and so they lived happily ever after, the end.” Oh my God, I wrote a book, I wrote a whole book, all ten pages of it, it’s not my sister’s, or my dad’s, or my mom’s, its mine mine mine, all mine, and maybe I’ll get candy for writing this thing, or maybe mom’ll let me watch both episodes of Power Rangers, even if she thinks it violent or whatever, or maybe I’ll get it published and it can go in the library, and I can be famous, and I can have millions of dollars, and maybe that cute girl Lauren from class will marry me because she sees how smart I am, and they won’t send me to that scary psychiatrist guy again, and my sister won’t get all the credit for being the smart one in the family for going to Masterman, and mom’ll let me write on the wall all day, or buy me a whole new special wall so I can use it just for writing stuff on and-
“That’s nice Kyle,” were the words that came out of the mouth of my mother, tired from a long day of work, on her feet even though her knees were worse for wear these days. She barely glanced at the flimsy looking pieces of loose-leaf tied together by string. She threw it back at me flipping on her TV, the thought of my writings passing as quickly as it had come. “Now, did you clean your room like I told you to?”
I ripped the book up, and I cried that night.
From that point on my mom, who thought I was wasting too much time around the house drawing on the walls, started putting me in stuff. There was the tap dancing, then the boy scouts, then the peer mediation, and so on, and so forth but never had I felt as proud and as enthusiastic about anything like I had been on that chilled autumn day nearly seven years ago.
All that time while my mother kept pushing me into things that I didn’t really want to do, I found quiet solitude and peace in writing. I enjoyed science-fiction in particular, and I remember every single thing that I wrote while I wasn’t busy practicing for my tap dance recital or accepting the fact that the Boy Scouts meetings were held in a church when my doubts in religion were starting to form. There was the series of short stories about Agent 10, the proverbial Sherlock Holmes of the twentieth century, chasing around a crazed maniac simply named “Jack” who was crystallizing the entire city of Philadelphia (for reasons unknown,) and there was the other series of short stories depicting me and my friends as near-omnipotent superheroes saving the world from shape shifting aliens. I wrote all of this nonsense and kept it to myself, as a little secret. Nobody - not my friends, or my mother, or my teachers – could share these worlds and characters that I had molded out of the clay that is general thought. Maybe I thought I was doing something wrong for some reason, or maybe it had to do with the fact that I was already shy in a purely social sense, but if I could go back in time and look my fearful younger self in the eyes, I’d berate him for hours about how stupid he was.
My mother wasn’t in the wrong when she put me in all of these activities I never asked to be in though, and I am mature enough to fully grasp the reasoning behind her desperation to get me involve in something. She saw a chance in me to be what she had not been, and did not see me as she was, trapped under the blankets on her bed where she spent most of her time. She wanted me to do something with my life, other than break even and yell, something that her own mother had not aspired for her to do. Nevertheless, I don’t understand why she thought she had to put me into something, and why she automatically assumed that I was just going to be some lazy bum, another black face behind a prison cell. I don’t understand why she didn’t trust me to develop my own creativity, and my own voice and personality. Maybe she thought that if she was controlling what I was doing, she wouldn’t ever have to let me go, and I’d never have to become an adult and leave her.
But mom, what you didn’t understand was the fact that I had already found something to keep me off the streets. You didn’t understand that I had already gained my individuality many a year ago, in that stuffy apartment in North Philadelphia, and you were so busy trying to make a better life for me, that you never stopped to think that the only way I could make that “life” mine was to find it on my own. One has to find their own voice, and if their kin speak it for them, then it’s not really theirs now is it?
No.
Writing for me is such a wonderful thing with so many innumerable possibilities, potentials, thoughts and emotions that if I were to write down something explicitly stating why I write, it’d be a lie, because I don’t really know myself. Maybe it’s my escape - an extended dreams of mine that you call a story, wherein there exists a world that I long to be in. I want to exist in a place where I can be brave, save the world, or get the cute girl in the end. I want to exist in a world where I’m interesting, and fun to be around. I want to exist in a world, where, in a few sentences, the world can turn from its chaotic state to one of perpetual tranquility, and I want to exist in a world where wishes and dreams come true. My characters reflect that, and so do my thoughts and opinions when I write. I don’t write to be famous, or so I can brag about how I’m gifted in something, or to make my family happy and proud. It wouldn’t be until I was about fourteen years old when my mother would see one of my papers, peer at it through her coke-bottle glasses and say that I write pretty well. I write because it’s the only way I can get some of the things that are in my head out, and somewhere where other people can share them. God knows I can’t draw.
Maybe its just getting my emotions and thoughts that I can’t make heads or tails out of, and just throwing them onto a page, like some abstract painting with a vague hope that somebody will be able to interpret it and tell me what I’m feeling. There are things that I wish I had written about so I could savor my emotions about them, like the last time I saw my father, and staring for long silent hours alone outside of my window waiting to see his familiar wrinkled face, and hear him say “Hey buddy,” again. There are things I wish I hadn’t written about, like the school year in which I managed to write ten love letters to ten different girls in under a week and get rejected on the same day. There’s times when my writing made me laugh, and times when it made me cry, and even times when I sat there staring blankly at the blinking cursor on my computer screen resisting the urge to type in “What the hell am I doing” on the page, hoping for a response to write itself back at me somehow. I don’t know, maybe its just the pride I feel in knowing I’ve created something.
Maybe it’s...
Perhaps one day you’ll read about me somewhere, sifting through the shelves of a bookstore, coming to a thick three hundred page novel with me on the cover, in all my glory, with the phoniest pose and look on my face ever. Maybe my name will be the name your children and your children’s children curse when they receive their summer reading lists in the mail. Maybe something I write in the future will be the next Harry Potter, and people will go see million-dollar-budget films about it, and walk away with the feeling that “the book was much better.” Hell, maybe the name on the cover of the book you throw down in anguish with an “I spent my hard-earned money for this crap” look on your face will be my name. Who knows? More importantly, who cares? The only thing that really matters to me is that that book, no matter how good you think it is, or how bad you think it is will be there on the shelves of a bookstore, a hidden treasure in the mass of words beside it, that share the same spelling and font size, but can never in a million years mean what mine have to mean. In the back, you’ll find a list, perhaps as long as the actual body of the text with every single letter and character in it, in boldface under yet more words, but these words meaning more to me than money of fame ever could:
Property of
Kyle Jordan Martin-Burgess