I write often and alot about abusive husbands and violent men. Why? I never witnessed anything like it. My Dad never beat or hit my mother, nor she him. No one in my immediate family or experience did any domestic boxing, that I knew. I never saw one punch, despite witnessing many squabbles and yelling matches.
It’s possible I absorbed this anger from society but I don’t recall watching TV or movies with outrage. Nor was I indoctrinated by my Mom. She never whispered dark resentments into me.
Formative experiences included very little violence. There weren’t even many fist-fights or scrapes, and what few there were ended in farce.
None of my friends complained of domestic violence. There were broken homes but no shattered bones or splintered furniture. No one came to school visibly bruised or missing teeth.
Where I got this visceral, abiding hatred for brutes and bullies, this implacable determination to capture violence and its consequences in words and images, I cannot figure out.
Maybe it grew from the times I was bullied. There were quite a few incidents when I was ganged-up on and knocked around. worse was the unrelenting disapproval some kids focused on me. They hated me with political talk-show passion. They derided, sneered, and lived to see me having a hard time. I never knew why and in fact didn’t even interact with most of them. They were baby trolls and flamers before the internet gave them a bridge to dominate.
I got this treatment mostly for being smart, I think. And for not fitting in anywhere. I had long wild hair but wasn’t a head. I was good at sports but hardly a jock. My clothes and being poor kept me out of the society circles, yet my manners and speech could leave the rich kids feeling like rubes when I felt the urge.
The exception to all rules and a self-ostracized outcast, I drew fire and accepted it as part of the deal I’d made with myself about pursuing writing and avoiding as much compromise and complication as feasible.
That could explain the pain that became anger but it doesn’t convince me. I just didn’t suffer enough. I preferred being alone. Solitude works for me.
And I wasn’t a loner, necessarily. People came to me. I never went to them, but my small circle of friends kept after me. They were outsiders like myself, for various reasons. Not sure any but me chose to be, but still they resonated enough to form a kind of bond. They were drawn to me. Maybe they sensed I wasn’t fake. It wasn’t a pose with me. I really had thought it through and had accepted the consequences of not even making a pretense of fitting in to the cliques and circles at school.
What they wanted or got from me I don’t know. Ask them.
Standing up to the ramifications did not make me an outlaw. I was not interested in what they had to rebel against. I focused on my art and let them live as they wished. No judgments. Some did drugs and I warned them it was stupid. Some did crimes and I told them it was stupid. Some just sort of hung, others tried seduction, enticement, and temptation. Some got banned from my presence, others were put into Coventry. Didn’t matter. They kept coming back.
My high school aptitude test came up Music, Writing, and Art, as in painting, with all else a distant fourth. Having neither the interest nor the money, I sidestepped college without a qualm. Didn’t even blink.
I didn’t learn to drive until I was 18; no need. I did not „date¾ or chase anyone; too busy writing. Girls did take me to concerts and movies and such, though. Again, they came to me. Yet I kept being serious. Learning my craft. Honing my mind on the classics and the wild new things. Too busy being to become someone else’s focus. Well, until my wife and I found each other.
I traded a bottle of Jack Daniels for her and have never regretted it.
Unlike most writers, I’ve had exactly one day job. Held it for four years. I was a checkout clerk and department head at Jamesways’s store 21. Quit to get married to my sweetheart, who’d enlisted into the USAF. 22 years later she’s a retired Major and I’m still writing.
Writing is all I’ve ever done.
Music sloughed off fast, in a conscious decision. The group I tried to organize in high school never took it seriously the way I did, and one day I realized I had no stomach for the music business, much as I loved music itself and making it. I knew it was a cutthroat business, vile and venal.
In my naivetÈ I thought writing was civilized. Too many old attitudes and articles influenced me. I thought publishing was a gentleman’s profession. Can you imagine?
Art, which I’ve used for relaxing off and on over the years, continues to compel me. Being nonverbal after all the writing is a relief at times. It was never serious for me, although I did put 85 hours into a miniature landscape the week my maternal grandmother taught me some oil techniques in exchange for me painting her living room ceiling. We used acrylic for those lessons and it remains a favorite medium, but the best is watercolors and sumi painting.
My paintings tend to be peaceful and Zen, while my drawings and cartoons are surreal, bizarre, and often obliquely humorous. No anger in any of them.
Angry music compels me at times, but my favorite music is Baroque. Counterpoint lures me and holds me fixed, fascinated. J.S. Bach is my favorite. Of later composers, Beethoven consistently nails me. He had much anger, too, and used it well.
I also enjoy BeBop jazz. Miles, Dizz, Bird, Trane, that ilk. Cool jazz from hot players.
None of the preceding explains why I want to write stories that knock people over. I’m left thinking it’s not me at all, but the stories themselves. They come to me unbidden and often fully-formed. I’ll hear a line, write it, and the rest flows.
Other times I cobble bits and pieces into fragments that grow organically, fractally, towards a whole that can be weeks, months, years, even decades down the long line of ink.
I drain pens and ink cartridges. I wear out clipboards and keyboards both. I write every day. I write always for publication.
Whence the anger in that writing?
Fuck if I know.
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