A Voice in the Choir

“Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

I haven’t written anything in a while, perhaps because I’ve been reading a lot of David Sedaris and feel my words are Cheerios to his Rice Crispy treats, the ones with the actual rice treats chunks in them (my personal favorite). Everything I do in life seems to filter through this consistent lens, “How would David tell this story?”

Not a healthy lens, I know, but my lens for now, nonetheless. I have to accept it. It’s at least better than when I went through the phase of imitating the poetry I didn’t understand but wanted to associate myself with. Maybe it’s the same with David Sedaris, minus the poetry part. You’ll never find out!

This is not new to me and maybe it’s not new to you either. But, I have a problem with wearing other people’s glasses. Especially if they are studded with glitters – as Sedaris’ glasses would be.

My glasses are not necessarily bad, but sometimes I get a little giddy and think, wouldn’t I look better in these as I proceed to pick them up, oblivious to the fact that they make my nose look big and my eyes look like a cow’s. Oh well.

I hope that, like the movie Limitless, I’ll adjust to the new eye-sight and mystify the world with my rendition of so-and-so. But, more often than not, I end up under my comforter wailing at my inabilities, both at looking like Bradley Cooper with and without clothes on.

That’s the problem of being a writer – not the Cooper part, though. Maybe it’s like what the teacher said in the book “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” and I’m too much of a sponge when I need to be a filter.

The easy answer is that you have to be yourself. But, Fitzgerald said that writer’s aren’t people. Really he said it. Look it up. Or literally, look up! I posted it above.  Gertrude Stein would cringe at all the exclamation marks I put in here. So many name drops in here, I know, but I’m trying to subliminally prove a point.

Maybe that’s the problem of reading one book at a time. You get throttled with an uppercut to the jaw of raw of whoever you’re reading and in the numbing aftermath all you can do is respond with a few garbled(ha, I just love this verb) sentences in praise of him/her or an exalted being of higher sexual/spiritual/emotive consciousness. This process recurs ad nauseam. Infatuation begets art, art begets infatuation, blah, blah, blah.

My point is that I hope that I can fight to develop myself with all these voices in my head. Every new book adds reverb to the chorus ringing, ringing, ringing.