On Hiding My Book From My Teen-Aged Children

I'm on a lot of medicine to keep my blood pressure down and I think it might be making my brain even more sluggish than it usually is. In any case I haven't been able to come up with anything that I particularly want to write about. But then last weekend it came out that my older children were aware that I had once written a book, after a fashion; and though neither of them are great readers, the idea of this seemed to interest them, perhaps because they have never seen me engaging much with the world of serious adults, even within my immediate family, and probably are hazy as to what function I am supposed to serve within it. I had a copy of it printed and bound some years back, in two volumes as it was too long for the vanity press I employed to make a single volume of it. A few years after acquiring these copies I grew embarrassed by them and hid them away in a linen closet lest any adults who happened to come to the house should espy them on the shelves and make sport of them; however my wife found them one day while re-arranging the closet and returned them to the shelves, by which time I realized no one besides me who was likely to come to the house ever looked over bookshelves anymore anyway. So when my sons inquired whether the story that I had once written a book was true and asked if they could see it, I took these copies down and showed them to them, having no anticipation what they would make of it.


They were impressed to see my name on an actual printed book, not being able to distinguish it from something published by an esteemed commercial house, and they were amused by the black square on the back of the dust jacket where the author photo was supposed to be, as I neglected to include one, thinking it unlikely to help boost interest in my work. They were very curious about the website link I provided next to the blank picture--which was to this very blog--and I assured them that the site referred to was long inactive. They also opened to some random pages, none of them fortunately among the most potentially embarrassing ones, but they still read examples of my overwrought narrative aloud with great mirth. My second son then expressed an interest in reading the whole thing "someday", though I don't think he will--even my wife was only able to get through a few pages of it--but as I remembered more of the kinds of things that were in it, I felt that I didn't want them, at that time, even taking the book down periodically and reading random pages. Perhaps I won't mind it once they have had some college or are adults, but I don't think they have the background yet to appreciate that many of the more unsettling or depressing aspects that they might come across in it or intended to some extent as jokes, or are referencing other literature. Much of the book concerns a young man who may or may not be like me who is a complete failure at everything--sex, education, work, physical prowess, personality development, who in the end due to his inability to be competitive economically and socially has to move away from his native Mid-Atlantic region to a less strenuous part of the country, though this latter at least is the story of a lot of people in my generation and even more so in the one following. There is supposed to be some ludicrous humor in the idea of a man who nominally has some advantages in life growing up to find himself so utterly inferior and dominated in almost every situation in which he finds himself, but I don't know that teen-agers who haven't read very much will get that. I definitely don't want them yet to read about the various sexual problems of my protagonist, hilarious as I imagined they must be to the generations of brilliant young lovers of literature I regarded as the audience for my writing.




In truth who did I think I was writing for (indeed who do I think I am writing for now?) Doubtless at the time I imagined it would be younger people who would find the travails and longings expressed in the book relatable and who would form a smart and interesting enough group to make it culturally significant. One of my main motivations for trying to write after all was that it seemed one of the few possible avenues open to me to try to win the respect and interest of attractive women (in which case it might be posited that in the annals of human endeavor few have failed more spectacularly in pursuit of a goal, when the time put into it, etc, is factored in). I expected that the Baby Boomer cultural elite, who in my general view never demonstrated great literary sensibility, would not find my writing to their liking and dismiss it, which would have the added effect of cutting off any budding competition for the public's attention I might have hoped to get in on at the knees, but I held out hope that the older generations, who at that time still had a good deal of influence and power, would recognize my book as a necessary work of its era and firmly in the great mainstream American tradition. I spent a ridiculous amount of time arguing with myself whether I should accept a university faculty position if one were offered to me or maintain my artistic respectability by remaining outside of the academy. I thought I would go to a lot more drinking parties and be friends with a lot more alcoholic geniuses than has proven to be the case.


I had an odd, I won't say experience but sensation today that I wanted to write down. As part of my recovery from my heart incident I am taking a rehab/exercise class with people who had similar episodes. I am the youngest person in the class by about 20 years. While at first I took most of these older people for run of the mill lifelong New Hampshirites, and indeed almost all of them have lived here for decades, it seems like about half of them are originally from New York City and grew up there in the 1940s and 50s. One person mentioned having grown up in Brooklyn a few blocks from Ebbetts Field. I was really struck by this. In my childhood Ebbetts Field, which was knocked down around 1960, belonged to a past as mythical and irretrievably lost to my mind as the times of Alexander the Great or Charlemagne. I had also read recently that there are only fifteen men left alive who ever played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, which further emphasized the great distance in time we are from that period. So the idea that I was sitting in a room with a person who once walked down the street to attend games there, and with a number of people who passed some of the vital years of their lives in that city known to me mainly from black and white movies and books and stories by dead and fading authors that seem so hopelessly old in the online environment even I largely inhabit now really hit me. I had imagined there could not be that many of such people left, yet apparently they are still all around me.

Martin Luther King Day

I've been away for a while because I had a heart attack on Christmas Eve and once I got back into my routine more or less after that I had to take care of some other things. I'm not going to write much about this because it actually was not much of an event. My chest hurt for a few hours but not in any kind of extreme or obviously life-threatening way--I thought I had heartburn or acid reflux, and when I went in to the doctor's to get a prescription for Christmas they sent me to the emergency room, where they determined that one of my arteries was blocked and they put a stent in, after which I felt perfectly normal again almost immediately. It's possible I could live a good many years in a relatively healthy state, though my body appears to be starting to fall apart, and who knows what will transpire next apart from a heart condition. Of course there is a lot of food I am not able to eat anyone. The obviously bad stuff--soda, donuts, fried chicken, etc--is not that hard to do without since I'm afraid of eating anything like that now anyway, but I'm not supposed to eat anything that has very much salt in it at all, which eliminates most things that taste good (to me). Since going out to eat was one of the main "fun" things I had left in my life that I looked forward to, even though I haven't able to do much of it during all these years when I had little children, I still always thought whenever I was walking around some posh area in Boston or Maine or wherever, someday we'll be able to go into one of these places, and maybe I still will be able to, but everybody acts like I'm going to have to let go of these desires. Certainly my days of eating at the likes of Buffalo Wild Wings appear to be over, though if I need a jolt of that particular environment I suppose I can go to the bar, since I am actually still allowed to drink alcohol, in moderation of course.



Today is Martin Luther King Day. I had to work. I wish I had some heartfelt, righteous things to say to commemorate the day, maybe even with an accusatory tinge to my sentiments aimed at those I know to not be fully on board with the goals of equality and justice, but I don't, or at least not any that I perceive to be needed. In keeping with modern American tradition, Martin Luther King, while undoubtedly a great figure in our history and a proper hero who was the face behind really remarkable social change, is controversial enough to not be considered a hero by a substantial segment of the population, joining George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Columbus, Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, and pretty much everyone else with some claim to iconic status. Overall, Martin Luther King probably has one of the higher approval ratings with the public nowadays among the higher echelon of Americans who have ever been regarded as great. It is obviously difficult even for the admirers of such people to try to live up to what they represented as they go about their own lives, and as Martin Luther King is the nearest to us in time of these lionized figures, his principles and causes are the ones we are most frequently exhorted to live up to, and are perceived to be the ones which we are falling short of the most constantly. To me, the point of having such national holidays is foremost to remember monumental accomplishments and events and hard-gotten wisdom that have contributed positively to what we are as a society now. That our society is still not what we would like it to be or is even regarded as a disaster by many is in some sense our particular problem and will probably require the emergence of other great leaders and figures to produce another shift in the consciousness or spirit in the people.


This is a rather rough sketch of what I think about this holiday, but the subject kind of demands that it be posted tonight. Anyway, I want to get the blog going again, hopefully this will be a more productive year than I have had lately.