No Conspiracy Theories For You! Same Old Story. . .

THE MISAPPROPRIATION OF LITTLE WHITE LIES CAN MAIM AND EVEN KILL - Jonathan Swift

So Much Time

Perhaps he was the greatest writer his area had ever seen; but then, maybe not. Perhaps, at 43, this "greatest of writers" was actually a nobody, a real nonentity no one in his (or her) correct mindset would have ever have presumed him so.  

To that, the still young-at-heart man, who of course had begun to approach middle age, albeit warily and with some reserve, told himself, "You never know...."  

A telephone call one particularly unsettling and hot summer afternoon had caught his attention: "Are you alone?"  What? The young-old middleager drew the proverbial and invisible question mark in the air of his musty cabana-style box of a crib or room or whatever is proper to call a space so small the bed was a Murphy Bed, the kind that lifts via springs into a wall.  

Every object, even the rocks, he told himself, is temporary, transient.  But who was this man?  What was his name?  

Detractors of his avocation called him "Cuthbert" behind his back, and that unremarkable remark would have hurt him had he known about it.  Sure.  Writers who never made it out of the ocean, or the flow where nothing, even names, is solid until validated, yeah, yeah, often they're trolled.  

At 43, Sam Jones, who still welcomed the gift of publication of one short short story and three poems (all of them in a sort of 'zine called Gist), might as well never had had a name.  Only Atlas, a myth, lifted the world alone.  Only Hercules, another myth, cleaned the Augean Stables.  

Heroes, as some complain, are painfully absent from, like, everywhere.  

So.  What's in a name?  When much younger, still quite befuddled over how to go about making good on a dream even his own mother had decided was ridiculous and foolish, he remembered how he felt he had been mocked after reading a newspaper column by an immensely popular local news columnist who from time to time asked the question.  "What's in a name," the columnist would ask.  The intention?  Hilariity.  

Everyone wonders why their name is what it is.  Sam.  Jones.  What the heck?  What do those labels mean at 43?  At 43 in the 21st Century.  Likely, nothing at all.   Samuel?  Nope.  Samson? Nah.  Sammy?  Too weird for a possibly prominent author of no means whatsoever.  

Famous writers.  Dime a dozen.  Open the papers, scroll through an online magazine, look at the blurbs for the local literary festivals; all those names, prominent names,each heradled as the honorable, or the prestigious, the famous, the laudable.  

Sam. Jones. 

Strange events had occurred around him.  For years.  For example, after a ladyfriend of his asked him to show where he used to live--"Let's go see all the places!", she begged with her cat's eye--he and she drove all over the big city.  What was wrong with that?  

Every single home, house, apartment he'd known, places he'd made (at least in his mind) incredible breakthroughs in writing skills and creativity; every one of them:  

Torn down.  

"See that super-luxurious home next to this immense park?  That's not where I grew up.  But in memory, I loved that place.  That place--it's gone--is where I wrote some of the first stories I'd ever written.  At 13.  An entire area of my life, swept away."

"I'm sorry."  

Later: "This condominium.  I really suffered as I tried to break out of the cage of not knowing who I really am as both a person and a writer."

"It's gone too?" 

"Yup!"  

Or another.  "I'd gotten a good start at the place where this condonium stands.  I started with nearly nothing, stood up for myself, won no rewards--  No, I meant awards.  Then suddenly, I was forced out.  The place was sold out from under all the renters." 

"That's terrible." 

Even stranger, Sam Jones recalled not long after what he joked was "The Sam Jones World Tour Of Nowhere"; and oddly, it seemed as if every single time he was about to get it all together--BAM!  Unexpected tragedy.  An eviction, an assault, rejection by friends and girls. 

Sam Jones would fall apart as if some prefab "karma" was telling him: "Just flippin' give up aleady!  You're not needed here!"  

His father:  "Writers have to bear a lot of rejection. . . "  Which is true.  But what about a future where Sam Jones, a great writer who endured all kinds of nonsense but carried on in his pursuit of his truths, his beliefs, his striving for even a small semblance of genius?  

"There is the home where Mark Twain was born."

"Look at the fabulous abode of Willian Faulkner!" 

"This is where Fyodor Dostoyevsky lived when he wrote 'Crime And Punishment'!  Look how tiny it is.  No wonder the world's greatest novelist felt embittered and somewhat nihilistic!"  

Yeah, yeah: Just look at the wondrous properties.  Irk.  That's how Sam Jones felt all too often--most especially when he was emotionally exhausted.  

He'd come home, half-beaten to death by one of all those stupid jobs: Mail clerk, barista, grocery sacker; still, he'd write.  A short nap after five or six, a small meal.  Then a cup of coffee and his PC.  

PC?  Doesn't that mean "politically correct"? 

Sam Jones wasn't.  Nearly all great writers aren't exactly what the so-called powers-that-be expect from them.  Sometimes a pet.  Or a court jester.  Something to chuckle over.  An outcast, a castaway, some sort of vengeance target, a drunk, doper, weirdo--anything but being an honorable individual necessary to all healthy civilizations.  

Sure.  Civilization here in Cincinati, lke almost everywhere, had gotten sick.  Money sick.  Everything had a price on it.  Sam Jones' head apparently was too resistant to the need for the two-legged label guns who, as is well known, bestow.  

"To be a toy", a Sam Jones poem had begun.  "To be a toy / without a toy store / something left ragged on the edge of / a sidewalk or near a local / chicken processing plant."  

Sam Jones had been assigned the unwanted, unsolicited status of "socialist", all because only naturally he did not go along to get along.  

Who gets along with gits anyway?  No matter.  Ignore the culture assassins.  At your own risk.  After all, if something breaks, breaks from far away, that breakage may in turn break even the resiliant.  

Sick of that dumb routine, Sam Jones began to resist in real life.  It's as if this ignominious writer wannabe, at least in the weirdo mindset of prominence in a suit, had experienced something out of the CBS TV show, "48 Hours".  A special airing of a feature the show dubs "Live To Tell".  

Tell who?  

Whatever occurs, Sam told himself, don't let freaks of nature with serious control issues get you down as they shadow box their own nihilistic and narcissistic projections of themselves.  Instead, if you have to, write for the drawer.  And name the drawer something pertinent tactics to jail the honest winners into what "they" believe is their "right to jingo others to death".  

The 43--year-old unknown was all over the place.  Apparently.  But never clearly.  Atlas.  Hercules.  This is job: Fuck off and die.  

The drawer?  He named it "in honor of chicken shits", and locked it.  

Herman Melville.  Perhaps the US's greatest and most innovative early modernists--famous for "Typee", a tale of life among cannibals, relegated by his day's critics as "a tourguide".  Novel after novel.  Either unknown or panned.  His greatest?  Of course.  "Moby Dick", a tale of obsession, a whaler's captain intent upon gettiing revenge on a whale that had cost him his leg.  His ivory leg.  A prosthetic.  

Typee and typer.  Interesting word-choice, Herman.  

William Faulkner, great novelist of the American South: so drunk after writing "The Sound And The Fury" that not only did he spend the entirety of his first royalty check, but the caring family that had taken him in, let him a room in a large Southland mansion, had to kick him out on his can.  

Greatness.  

Melville: Died frustrated, reclusive and drunk.  Writer's block, courtesy of--

Great Americans.  "Shut up or get rolled."  Typecast.  The cutting room floor.  

At one point, simply to help alleviate his frustration over rejection slips (this was early in his so-called career), began, once he received a rejection slip, set upon sending a rejection slip from one literary journal to another literary journal.  That's insane.  Of course it is. 

Even better, Sam Jones, nobody, had his own rejection slips printed out.  Nice-looking ones.  Cleverly to no one but himself, he'd "reject the rejection with a kind note": 

"Dear Goombah Review: 

"Unfortunately, we have chosen to reject

your latest contribution to your what's good

is not good enough program for 

unknown writers. 

"Regards"  

Then an impossible to read scrawl that looked to Sam to be the the residue or relic of a pigeon foot, a foot technically known as "an intoeing".  Perfect.  The irony of a polite slam.  Don't believe what you read.  Every single word is an outright lie.  

There is no truth, there is no justice, and especially, there is no equality in this world.  Don't believe the crap-chatter as seen on QVC.  The shopping network.  Who's in, who's out, who's easy, who's unknown?  

No matter.  Politics is politics. If you're "politically incorrect" to the movers of a deeply Southern city, you're likely a target--especially if you, like all great writers and poets, write against the hype and vivisect the very cannibals Herman Melville described in "Typee".  

Man.  If anyone knew how to make a metaphor work, Melville did. 

Doubtless, we readers will always remember the imposition of Sam Jones.  Uneeded, unnecessary, an artificial flower by decree "from above".  

Let us deep readers call it what it is: A roof attack.  

That was Jones' inner monologue.  

After another hard day at the avocation, Sam Smith, in tow with the sick world that surrounded him, left his room and fetched some fast food.