Q. I want to find my creative voice, but it’s hard. I don’t like the things that I make. What should I do? Where should I start?
A. Oh this is splendid. The question of the decade. Let me tell you what I think.
You should start by forgetting who you are. Or what you think you are, rather. Do you think you’re a fiction writer? You’re not. Do you think you’re a poet? A musician? A painter? An actor? You’re not. A comedian? No. A filmmaker? You’re not. You’re something else. It’s something different. Which is why, when you do find your voice, it will feel wrong at first, like a wet high school sweater. It will feel this way for a while. Or forever if you’re lucky. And that’s how you know you’ve got the tiger by the tail. (Not an actual tiger of course. This is a metaphor. I am writing. I am using visual symbols to communicate, the tiger being one of those symbols. Relax! God! Please do not report me to the tiger community, they would scratch my butt bad.)
To give you the full sweetcream here would take me too many words, too many pages. I will do a Part 2 someday. But for now, another thing to know: finding your voice is about subtraction, not addition. Basically everyone, except for I don’t know Mozart the boy at the piano? has to spend literal years first erasing their assumed creative identity in order to find their true one. Yes, daughter of Art, I am saying that finding your voice is not a learning—it is an unlearning.
See you were told at some point, as a child, that X creative activity was a fine thing to identity with, that it would give you status, self-respect, money, freedom, vases full of oranges, and access to love. Which is terrific. Pickles to gravy! You were going to be an artist. But guess what? It was the wrong activity. Chance are strong. It wasn’t your zone. It was your parents’ activity, subtly reframed as your own. It was your friends’ activity. It was your older siblings’ activity. Yes yes of course you truly loved that activity, and probably still do. Good. No very good! But that doesn’t mean it’s you. No it does not. That doesn’t mean you’re in the presence of your gift.
So start unlearning. Raise doubts about your current creative self. Get your hackles up about it. Poke at its edges, look underneath it, play chess on top of it, blow bits of red bacon into its grooves, attracting yellow birds. Allow everything to happen to it. Pain will come, yes. Allow it. You must be flexible, capable of being cut into ribbons, in order to find the real & honest voice inside of you. And you will know it’s your voice, again, because it will sound just diabolically incorrect at first. Is that me? No that is not me. But yes yes it is! Strangers will hear it. This is also how you know. Family and friends were fond of your former creative self, sure, as it made them feel special to be connected with such a creative wonder as you. As it made their world feel predictable to the extent you remained hamstrung in that category, that medium, that life. My daughter is a writer. My son is a dancer. My child is a film director, oh how they love the movies. But do you see? Who you thought you were was merely a reflection of them. And now you know the solution: the pain birds, the little yellow fliers. Give them passage. Let them drop cotton into your wheels. Drape them in diamonds. Tie streamers around their redolent flowered wings. Respect their relentless nose for bacon, thereby spelling disaster for your current false sense of You.
And then and only then will your deepest true voice appear.
Q. How can I be better at sex?
A. Oh no. Here I go. Watch me die on the page.
To be better at sex, first you must somehow believe a weird fairy tale about yourself: that you are a desirable creature in the evening light. None of us are. We smell & look insane. We are basically fish bodies full of caramel. And yet despite that, you must trick yourself into thinking: My body is good. I am REALLY good at being hot. I mean: absolutely this is a lie. Without fail your body is a fish body full of caramel. And spice. It is a fish body full of pratfalls, and silver harps. It is a wet and limited locker full of anonymous film footage. I swear it. The footage is dumb: it shows people falling through the green canopies of tulip shops, cops running in circles, dogs laughing in the snow, minor TV celebrities pussyfooting around California. Yes: your body is a dark unwritten comedy. But this fact must be given no airtime. Cancel it from your mind.
Next, you must remember your underbells. Maybe feel around down there. In addition, before you have a bit of sex, you must prepare an action strategy for your particular bell arrangement. Some general rules: if you have a Protruding Underbell, a Little Rock lizard, which will go in a hole, it is a bad strategy to stab the hole. Yes: Stabbing is bad. Shocking I know. You must not stab. You must press and grind instead. Let me say it again: you must not—and I mean this from the bottom of my screwed-up Christian heart—you must not act like a jack hammer or mountain stabber. Wait. Maybe sometimes you should hammer/stab??? Of course, ask the hameree, the forged one, the theoretically pounded Vitruvian, your partner, what they prefer. Excuse me, solider of the cross, do you want to be hammered? Or receive stabs? Or would you rather be pressed and ground? I admit this is a weird thing to ask. But it is correct.
On the other hand, if your primary underbell is a Hole Bell, a reception area, a frog of Tampa, and this is your fighter, then your options are different. You can either look at the sunset or look at the moon—you know what I’m saying. You can operate mostly on scout’s honor. However, if your partner has a P-bell, you also, sad to say, will probably have to spend a lot of your time telling them how to not be a catastrophic loon with their bell. In other words, to be “better at sex” in your case is almost entirely a matter of communicating effectively with the clueless. Telling the clueless: What in Churchill’s name are you doing? Stop. Do other things. Yes yes, like that, that’s it. The imaginary window washer. The missing emerald. The jellyfish goes to night school. The good lung Chablis.
Anyway I don’t really know what I’m saying. I’ve only had sex once and I fell off the bed in the middle of it.
Q. Do you like rats, gore, and rampage? You know, like sick cool stuff? C’mon be a man. If you are a man, you must be edgy. You are a man, right.
Oh yes. I am indeed a MAN. I love being so edgy that people are like Wow! More SICK STUFF please. More DIGITAL FILTH. Wait I do not know if I like this filth actually. This feels so sick-brain. But as a man I do feel some pressure to love it. But I probably don’t. But I should huh. As a man of my time etc.
Anyway: POWER AND BLOOD!
On second thought, yes, I am a MAN, and so I love all this grody stuff. Put a rat on my face. LITERALLLLY. Put it on my face and I will say, “A hairy welcome.” Slap some wet gore on my neck and I will say, “I bless these guts.” Then take me on a rampage. A date night with REAL destruction. And then I will say, “Marry me Gorelinda.” Because we would be on THIS side of paradise now! And then I would become a really buff hard-A (a.k.a. “Happy Ass”) from all this manly power.
Holy Cow, just imagine how strong and yucky I could become by embracing this manly power! There I am: I am nasty to my friends, disregarding their POINTS OF VIEW. I am nasty to my business partners, ignoring their CONCERNS ABOUT MY TOADSTOOL MOUTHWASH IDEA. I am nasty to my co-workers at the Wind Farm, pushing them into the BLADES OF THE WINDMILLS. I am nasty to my siblings, calling them NAMES like ADOPTED TIMOTHY which is NOT EVEN A LIE because Timothy ACTUALLY IS ADOPTED.
OK you know what, never mind. I do not like this chaos. This energy is over, passée, rinky-dink, old hat. This trash is for men of ancient times, back when the world was but a suffering song. This, I know now, is what a broken society tells men to do: to reject softness / reject tenderness / for this is how you become whole. Soft is the opposite of hard, weak the opposite of strong, and so soft is thus tantamount to weak. What twisted untruth! The soul recoils. Oppositional logic appeals to the low-caliber brain. And the big world cities buckle under the truly sour dairypowder of these ideas. Shopkeepers, firemen, secretaries, coal tumblers: everyone is crushed by the darkness of this story.
As for me? I am gentle again now, looking longingly at toy trains and cameras, in the shop windows with my Mama. Sorry I was all sick-brain masculinity a minute ago. I hated it. Sorry. I am cute again now. I am wimpy. I am clean.
This is a beautiful reward for learning to read. Thank you.