Dear AAl,
Otto makes me crazy. Who did you know that had any resemblence to this boy?
When’s the last time you said goodbye to someone you cared about?
You kick anyone in the balls today? I just hit their car instead… and carved my initials in the door. They totally deserved it.
— Mrs. Silvertongue
Dear Lyra:
Ah, yes. One of my groupies from the “lost years” I spent dispensing my sarcastic wisdom on an internet message board. Only when I say “groupies,” I mean “people who indulged my ceaseless attention whoring by occasionally asking me questions.” And when I say “wisdom,” I mean “the same half-baked pop culture references and vague semi-jokes I’ve been telling on this website, slightly reheated for a new audience.” And, of course, when I say “internet message board” I mean “place where people come to discuss comic books and eventually divide into so many insignificant splinter groups that it makes Christianity look like a united front.”
See what I did there, where every element of that statement actually had a different meaning? Everything I say has hidden meanings like that. I’ve taken the science of sarcasm far beyond its initial purpose of “lying and being funny” and elevated it to an art form in which I can masterfully disguise all sorts of messages, propaganda and (perhaps most of all) pathetic cries for help.
My first novel, Fish Stories, to which your first question no doubt refers (the only other Ottos I know are a toad in the game Zork Zero, a vampire in the Terry Pratchett book The Truth and Kevin Kline’s Oscar-winning thug in A Fish Called Wanda), is a perfect example of this sort of clever subterfuge. While you think you’re reading about an indecisive would-be writer with no self-esteem, who spends more time moping about ex-girlfriends than actually living his life, you’re actually reading about (check this out) me. I know it’s hard to imagine this, but that whiny kid is meant, in a completely abstract way, to represent me. His whole struggle to emerge from the shadows of his talented but slightly overbearing friends to become his own person represents something in my life, but I’m not going to tell you what. Because what’s the fun of writing symbolically if I just hand you the secret decoder ring? Perhaps if you’re nice I’ll tell you which cereal features the ring as a free prize. But only if you’re nice.
And judging by the content of your third question, I can’t imagine you are particularly nice. No, I haven’t kicked anyone in the balls, that I know of. Though since I started my terrible new job, I’ve really rather wanted to a few times.
I’ve alluded to this before, but I’ll go ahead and spill the details, in the interest of shedding additional light on the question of ball kickery. I’ve been in Seattle nearly a year now, and despite my kickass resumé and my goddamn irresistible fucking charm, I’ve not had what I’d exactly call “luck” in the search for a decent job. So out of necessity, I took what I could get: working filthy manual labor from 10:30pm to 7am down at the train yards. (You know those creepy folk you see in all-night grocery stores at 3am? Those are my people now.) Out in the elements. For Spaniards (which itself is not so bad, but for the fact that much of the material I work with is not written in my native language). It’s hard, it’s cold and it’s all around one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had.
It’s not even so much the hours, or the cold. It’s the fact that… well, it’s hard to explain without a proper frame of reference. Geek boys in the audience will understand the following metaphor, though I fear the females among you may not. To you, I apologize in advance and hope you can ask a dorky male friend for guidance if necessary.
You know, when you were a kid, how your dad would make you come out and help him fix a car or something, and he’d ask you to hand you, I don’t know, the “three eights metric framistat”? Then you’d give him this sort of blank look because nobody ever taught you what one of those is? And then he’d get really angry at you because nobody should have to teach you this stuff? Apparently it’s ingrained on the Y chromosome.
My job is kinda like that. Part of it involves inventory (counting, ordering, organizing), which I’m actually pretty good at. But most of it involves guys asking me for three eights metric framistats all night, then getting really mad at me when I give them a blank look. Which doesn’t do a whole lot for my self-esteem, much like that little weenie in my novel.
What it does do, however, is make me really want to kick somebody in the balls. But then I realize that maybe that’s what happened to my dad, and somehow it messed up his chromosomes, resulting in the gene not being passed on to me. Except that he was actually my stepdad. Also I’m pretty sure sperm gets manufactured really fast, and unless you go conceive right after you got kicked, the damaged batch probably doesn’t even enter into it. (And I don’t know about you, but I generally don’t feel like anything groinal after a good swift kick in the nads.)
Ah well, I almost tied this all together in that cool circular way that every humorous essayist aspires to. Except, too, that I completely ignored your second question. Let’s see… I care about my dignity, my self-respect and the faint glimmer of masculinity that I thought I had. I said goodbye to those things when I started working for the trains from Spain down by the plains. Does that count?
Thanks for writing!
