Edit Me... Please!

Edit me... please!

People who know me first via my writing are in for a surprise when they meet me for real. Whereas my writing is bold, friendly, witty, polished, urbane, sophisticated, fresh, and sometimes awesomely beautiful... I am not. I would like to be all those things. But I am not.

I can already hear the amateur psychiatrists saying: "Ahhhh, he compensates for his real life lack of social grace, his awkwardness and clumsiness and lack of physical beauty, his unfunny jokes and embarrassing attempts to be accepted as 'one of the crowd'... he compensates for that by writing in a fashion that is diametrically opposed to his reality."

No, amateur morons, it's not like that at all. When I was a little child, a wicked witch named "Mother" put a curse on me. It was a helping curse. Mouthwash for my bad breath, deodorant for my stinky armpits, dance lessons for my heavy feet, oil to hold down my hair, glasses to improve my vision, braces to straighten my teeth. Like all good curses, it worked. I understood that my undoctored self should never leave the house without first applying the appropriate chemical preventives. Otherwise, I would have to endure the disaster of being perceived as I really was.

Unfortunately, I was lazy. It was easier to stay inside than to go through the necessary chemical rigamarole required to journey outside. I became a reader, a person who experiences reality through the medium of longchain verbal symbolism, better known as the printed word. The great thing about books is they don't care how you smell, look, talk, or walk. The bad thing about books is they don't care about you at all.

As time went on and I became more and more uncared for, unloved, unappreciated, abandoned, and forgotten, I realized that something would have to be done. I was losing the ability to act, to make an impression on the world. I was becoming a spectator, a consumer, a pale grubby thing mewling for its porridge. It wasn't a pretty sight.

That's when I began to write. Tentatively at first:
Look, Jane. See Dick. Dick has a ball. Throw the ball, Dick.
But with more confidence and assurance as the days passed:
Observe, Jennifer! Gaze at Ricardo! Ricardo possesses a rubber spheroid. Release the spheroid, Ricardo, and impart a trajectory upon it that shall carry it to me!

Perhaps I became a little overconfident.

Fortunately, a kindly writing coach read some of my outpourings and recognized my hidden potential. He poked me in the chest and said, "Looka here, boy. Even though you is ugly on the outside and write the worst garbage I ever read, I think I can help you realize the hidden potential that I sense inside of you."

"Me?" I said. "Hidden potential? You mean... like... inner beauty? A secret radiant self that no one knows about?"

"Exactly!" he said. "I see a sun blossom in your heart that only needs the breath of encouragement to be fanned into a supernova of achievement."

"Gosh!" I said. "That's so metaphorical. I think you could really help me."

And so began the next phase of my life, the transition to the smooth fellow of today, the guy with the liquid lines of flowing prose.

Me and my coach worked hard on grammar, spelling, semantic structure, and avoiding constructions like "me and my coach". It wasn't easy, but with a lot of effort and drink and exercise and eating and long bouts of sleep I made the transition from the dry brittle guy with the rusty keyboard into the man I am today, sopping wet with those liquid lines of flowing prose. I drip with them. Women see me and say, "Oh God, there goes a writer!"

Then I open my mouth and spoil it all. You can take the boy out of his sandbox of ignorance but you can never shake out all the stray grains of sand that lodge in the crevices between his rolls of fat. Oh sure, I could have taken the proverbial "literary bath" but who wants to throw the baby out with the bathwater? Not me. It's not my job. My job is to assemble semantic units into useful products, like contest entries, poems, love letters, letters asking for an extension of loan repayment terms, jokes, tales, fables, tables, puzzles, polls, and whatnots.

Like I say, I open my mouth and I spoil it. I need a good real-time editor, some sort of embedded microchip perhaps? Or at least a wife or a bossy girlfriend. Something. Anything. Help!



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