I’m sorry mom but it has to be a drinking story.
Let me explain. When I first started this blog idea of mine there was much fanfare, at least amongst my friends because they would be able to see inside my fascinating and slightly morbid mind. I promised my mother I wouldn’t put anything embarrassing about my family or myself on the blog and for about a month during the summer that worked okay. But then something happened. I wrote a couple of blogs and realized my life really isn’t that interesting. So I let it go.
Recently some of my friends have been asking me when I was going to write another blog. I evaded answering that question because I knew the truth was I really didn’t have anything that interesting to say. Sure I could rant about my ultra radical political beliefs or evangelize about my ultra radical religious beliefs but I do want to be able to fly on planes in the near future and not have guys in crappy old cars sit outside my apartment listening to my every call to 1-900 numbers on lonely Thursday nights.
But still all the while I knew I had to come back to this and say something. But what to say was the question? Starting a blog and then not really going through with it (again) is like a relationship that goes bad and doesn’t really end in a break up but rather a parting of ways. And then one night you’re out and so is the ex-thingy-whatever she is and you know you have to say something profound but you don’t know what to say so you spend the whole night drinking yourself into a state of disheveled philosophizing on par with W.B. Yeats and proceed to ramble off some simplistic A-B rhyme scheme about her snowy white bosom and how it’s similar to a new born fawn and then you wake up the next afternoon in your apartment with a parcel pinned to your shirt with your tab from the night before, a maxed out credit card, and a handwritten note from your ex-thingy-whatever saying she eloped with a homeless man after leaving because he wasn’t guilty of the one unpardonable crime in her personal religion. The crime being nothing other than being you.
So I started down that path. I was writing and writing and in my mind it all seemed so clear. I was laboring over each word and sentence and my bright, shining sword of a memoir would light the path ahead for all literary minds in the future. It would carve out a new niche where we used tales of our childhood to teach important abstract concepts like love and honesty through wonderful Old Testament allusions and adjective laden imagery. My fingertips were like little pistons powering through the vast array of the English language and, by Jove, crafting a beautiful piece of prose that would make James Joyce sob at its rich text yet terse enough that Ernest Hemingway would smile and nod approvingly like if I were their bastard literary love child. Then I went to bed.
I woke up and re-read what I had written. All fifteen pages of it.
It was not a drinking story.
Somehow I had compared the smell of freshly laid asphalt to motherly love.
Let me repeat that.
I compared the smell of freshly laid asphalt to motherly love.
I deleted the entire writing in two strokes. The first stroke was to highlight the mass of gobble-de-goo and the second was to hit the backspace key. Delete isn’t really the right word. I aborted it. I eradicated it. I went Conan the Barbarian on that smoldering pile of stench and literary shit and prayed to Crom that he never let me write something so horrible again and if he did he could go to Hell. Then I watched Conan the Barbarian for good measure.
It was terrible ya’ll. And worst of all I compared my mother, my sainted mother who puts up with all my crap and is always there offering emotional and spiritual comforting and consultation, to one of those giant trucks that passes over asphalt after it has been laid. She deserves much better than that.
She also deserves better than a son who is about to write a blog about some drunk romp through Texas with three other mother’s sons. But we are who we are and the number one rule in writing is to write what you know. So I apologize in advance to my mother for what is forthcoming. And to all the rest of you I hope this makes you happy because after my momma reads this I am going to have bible verses and prayers texted to me for the next month and four hour long phone conversations about the eternal resting place of my soul. But I wouldn’t expect anything less from the woman who somehow managed to get me through adolescence without killing anybody or getting somebody knocked up. After all, she is kinda like that big asphalt thing, smoothing over all my imperfections and forming me into something useful for everybody. Or at the very least not too harmful to society.
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