Yes, I am a poet (playwright),
two hundred years too late…
I was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around my neck, choking me. When I made it out alive, on first sight of my father, I urinated all over him. That’s the way I began. I was the most planned-for child ever in existence. My brother, 15-years-old at the time, requested me. And a sibling he was given.
I was born to a salesman who was often gone before I awoke and home after 6pm. He was a very funny man, who turned down college to go on and make a living in the world even though he was academically brilliant when he graduated high school. He was a wonderful father. My mother was/is a cosmetologist who took her GED and went to beauty school, eventually marrying a man ten years her senior about whom she once said, “I will never marry that man!” A whopping 53 years they lived together before Dad’s death. My brother was an outside guy—athletic, hard-working, had a different girlfriend every week until he married at age 26 to a lovely woman. He became a fireman after realizing he couldn’t be kept inside. Has done it a quarter century.
Those are the plain facts. In an area where everybody was encouraged to play sports, my mother and father took a liking to my adeptness at mimicry, joke telling, and impersonations. My mother began to have dreams of sending me to the Alabama School of Fine Arts (ASFA). Ever since age 5, I dreamed of being in the movies, but I switched to the theatre upon entering ASFA. But that leaves part of the story out.
I was raised in a private Baptist school and was baptized in the Southern Baptist Convention when I was eight years old. A highly religious child, I began even then being enthralled by elements of the old world. Theatre eventually became a part of that as itself began as religious rites. But my love of history (my favorite early school subject) and my distaste for people my own age (I always aspired to be forty; I have made it, have no opinion yet) set me apart. I’ve grown religiously from my beginnings, but I would still consider the Baptist Hymnal to be a real influence on my life.
I was a child who always wanted books near me but could scarcely get through one. I’m certain if I’d been born a few years later, I would’ve been put on medication for something for my reading comprehension was poor and my one claim to fame on the left side of the brain is a healthy degree of skepticism and an A+ in Algebra II, seconded only by my constant and incorrigible 75 average in Geometry.
I began life in a private school in a cul-de-sac neighborhood with very few children nearby. I didn’t get on the school bus; I was driven to school. I remember my childhood as being largely solitary because even my brother was rather physically exhausted by school athletics and was an adult by the time I turned three. I turned inward, voicing my puppets and action figures all the while Dad recorded my “home movies” on a very early, very expensive VHS camera.
My inner life became important to me as I had to imagine school as a seven-hour television show that I was starring in. School it was called, and my best friends were the co-stars, my arch nemeses the “also starrings,” and my current love interest was given a special “and” title. My first friends were all girls, but I was an early bloomer and, as soon as the libido started working, my best friends were guys and women became something else.
As I was nearing forty, the question of a woman in my life was the most pressing thing on my mind. I know several of my friends on their second marriages, my young nephew has married before me—and I remain straight, but unaffiliated. Of course, the woman who would be interested in me would have to deal with various inconsistencies: that I am, on the hand, extremely religious, but also like my fair dose of the profane being the one closest to mind.
There is a story of me as a baby where I cried for a straight twenty-four-hour period. My parents tried everything—food, diaper changing, toys. Nothing worked. Finally, Mom closed the door to my room, leaving me in my crib and the crying stopped. She peeked in and I was entertaining myself by watching whatever gadget hovered above me. There is a very real part of me that wishes to remain alone, but in the wee hours, I wonder how much my life would have been different if any of the objects of my affection had said yes or the ones who did would have changed it if I had stayed.
At any rate, I never knew how courageous I could have been in that department. I was born with a confidence that most mistook for cockiness and likewise made me a bookworm to try and gain that intellectual status people thought I had, but only aspired to. But, as for women, the confidence wasn’t there. I felt defeated by them and there was also something a) about how creativity is sparked when you’re in love and b) how creativity is sparked after coming out of that daze: a rather different creativity can show its face, potent also.
As a practicing dramatist and poet, albeit two hundred years too late, I can rarely write plays not in love. But poems come bounding out in the spaces between these one-sided rendezvous. So, I must be grateful for the gift of both. The gift of occasionally being in love and a woman deigning to spend a little time with me and the time alone where I can pursue my interests unheeded.
My teens are a blur. I was a practicing actor, studying at ASFA, in one show after another. There was no time for adolescence. I knew there was drugs and drinking and smoking around, but I didn’t partake. I was up on a career ladder, which became very unshaken and uncertain by the time I left college.
On reaching my twenties, I was rather comfortable—I knew I wanted to be a playwright, I was in a stable relationship, but I was bored. I don’t know why, but I was bored. Near the end of every chapter of my life, I consider dumping everything I’ve done and trying something new. At the end of high school, I considered studying theology (which, eventually, I did do as a graduate student); at the end of college, I considered throwing my laptop of plays in the nearby like and starting fresh or going to law school. I considered these things, but there remained a through-line—a writer trying to understand himself through his work. I suppose that’s all it really is, even if this might seem a bit glib.
My twenties turned into an awful morass. I was the prototypical millennial—I went into the real world, unprepared for it, and ran back home, screaming. It didn’t help that the bubble burst a few years after I graduated college, and the times were hard. I could have just as well roughed it (in New York, say), but I didn’t. I went into the time of self-analysis that should be the prerogative of teenagers. With our generation, everything was mixed around. People started saying your twenties were the time you should experiment and try to let stick anything on the wall that will, but this isn’t true and is, in fact, dangerous to one’s development because we only have so much time down here, you know?
Thirty was another milestone. After another degree, and a half-hearted attempt at a career in public education, I realized most everything I had ever thought was wrong or misguided. That’s what thirty does to you. As a kid, I loved old movies and music, but when I tried to watch Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill, or tried to listen to a song of Neil Diamond, I was bumfuzzled. At thirty, it all made sense. I could explain more, but I won’t as my thirties were full of heartbreak, though they ended with some sense being knocked into me as I became a caretaker to a dying father and had to start looking toward the future.
The last couple of years have been good—perhaps not this one, but that’s because forty was looming. My father locked himself in a room for a week when he turned forty. I did this as twenty-two, so I guess I matched him on a different plane; I just had what the millennial generation ushered in: a quarter-life, as opposed to, mid-life crisis.
Since turning forty, I’ve had no desire or time to lock myself in and/or waste any more time. I must celebrate writing something to publish every week on this blog. I must celebrate a life that could have been aborted twice, with my then self-inflated sense of doom. I must be thankful to be alive and continue.
Before Jimmy Buffett died, I already had the title to this piece, though I hadn’t written it. His song about a drug smuggler, “A Pirate Looks at Forty,” is cogent to the argument. There are many things to mourn about being forty now. This is not a complaint, but 80% of the prizes, awards, contests, and submissions I can submit my work to are no longer open to me. One must be BIPOC or LGBT to get a hearing in the theater or in poetry nowadays. I’ve had my fair share of publications this year, but I consider them flukes, based largely on blind juries.
I cannot help what I am and yet I must live on, doing what I believe I was put on Earth to do. So, there are still some plays to finish, one was finished this year—There Will Always Be a Fire—and some poetry I wrote many years ago has finally had a hearing in a couple publications. For that, I am grateful. But, if God is willing and the creek don’t rise, I could be around for thirty or thirty-five more years, and I would like to see some dreams come true. Everyone deserves it, regardless of their color or other particularities.
I have watched the same two stupid political parties have the same arguments repeatedly. I have watched the film industry turn into a franchise machine. I have watched the decline of the novel, except for the Young Adult variety which are all too often read by people who should be reading something that matches their age. I have seen the theatre also turn to franchises to keep afloat. I’ve seen six Presidents come and go and each is stupider than the last. I have always voted my conscience, never prescribing to one ideology or another. I have loved and been loved. I have eaten and fasted. I have had times to mourn and times to rejoice.
What’s better than that? Does the alpha male who has three children and a mortgage have a better life? How would I know? Does the Yankee or Midwesterner who believes they can leave their home ground and create different families in New York or L. A. live better than me? How would I know? Would my life had been different if I had settled at any time? How could I be sure? Do I want to be sure? Or should I realize my life has been, at least at times, extraordinary? That I have touched people. That I have loved more than I’ve hated. That I have given more than I’ve got.
Yes, I am a poet and playwright two hundred years too late. People like me always believe they would have done better in another century, another time. Who’s to say who’s right in this regard?
What does a writer do at forty? He continues to write. I shall pursue this, even if the dreams always remain at bay and I encourage the same to all you dreamers.
More love. More joy. More dreaming, even if it seems pointless.
Yorumlar