Whipping It Out

Never search 'whipping it out' on Google Images. Hence, pic unrelated.

Attention blog readers, Oregon Marching Band members, Taco Tuesday patrons, and assorted other friends of the library:

Some of you may have noticed my rather lackluster attendance at Taylor’s these past several weeks, particularly on Tuesday nights. I’ve been made aware of your anguish primarily by a weekly barrage of text messages and voicemails demanding to know where I am, which usually get far less coherent after dollar wells start at 9:00.

In the past, when pressed to know what I’m doing on those nights that is more important than watered down drinks and tacos most likely made from roadkill, I’ve told you that I had “a thing.” And in this regard, I was telling the truth, because on Tuesday nights I do have “a thing.” I have always been reluctant to tell what that thing is because I fear that it will make me look nerdier than my posts about Dungeons and Dragons, marching band, speech and debate, and Battlestar already do.

On Tuesdays, I attend a critique workshop for fiction writers – primarily, science fiction writers.

It’s difficult to admit this because amateur fiction is usually not associated with successful, well-adjusted people. The ‘guy writing a novel’ is usually the depressive alcoholic staring at his typewriter, bitching to his friends about constant rejections from publishers and making mental lists of the best possible ways to kill himself.

Barring that, he’s the quiet, mildly retarded janitor living in a tiny room at the YMCA, and only after he dies do family members discover a rambling 15,000 page manuscript about angels fighting dragons in space or something, punctuated with anti-Semitic rants.

Or, worst of all, he’s the guy who, shortly after his spectacular murder-suicide, is discovered by the police to have written multiple insanely violent stories detailing his plans to take revenge on the people who wronged him.*

*As if to prove my point, as I write this, a girl in the Duniway Center is telling her friend with absolute certainty that, if the people who made the Saw movies weren’t making movies, they would be “doing that stuff in real life.” The tone of her rant seems to be that anybody who writes something remotely violent is using that as an outlet to avoid going out and murdering people himself. She’s also said a fair amount about her Christian faith, but I don’t have the heart to mention that the Bible has a seven-figure body count.

None of these are stereotypes I’d like to be associated with. If my hobby were oil painting, or architecture, or teaching English to inner-city Hispanic children, there would be nothing to be ashamed of. I’d probably make T-shirts. To acknowledge that you spend most of your time making up fake worlds and situations and writing it all down for your own enjoyment is to basically admit that you never grew out of having imaginary friends and pretending that the white floor tiles were hot lava.

And then, to acknowledge that the fake worlds and situations you make up involve lasers and spaceships is to admit that even among your imaginary friends, you probably weren’t the most popular one.

And to admit that you gather with other people with the same inclinations to share this stuff is like telling your parents that you and your friends all watch porn together. And last night I submitted my first story to this group, a novella about love in the context of robot sex, which further cements my attachment to this stigma.

Sharing my fiction with others is a lot like whipping my dick out in public. The chances that everyone will be thrilled with what I’ve got to show them are miniscule; I tend to assume that they will be shocked and disgusted, and will perhaps have me arrested for it. For that reason, I seldom if ever do it, and never in front of children.*

*That said, the manuscript I submitted was really long.

This sort of pressure doesn’t exist with nonfiction blog entries, because at the end of the day this is just commentary with dick jokes thrown in. Fiction, on the other hand, is really a window into my mind, and I try to keep the curtains drawn on that window as much as possible.

This first story, I imagine, is going to be the most nerve wracking for me to show to people, because I still don’t know if it’s something to be ashamed of or not. I was recently looking over some of the Perfect Dark fan fiction I wrote in middle school, for example, and discovered that at the time I had little or no sense of propriety. In one of the stories, a character decapitates an enemy, sticks a hand grenade into the severed head, pulls the pin, and throws it at a crowd of oncoming adversaries, killing them and showering them in their departed friend’s brain matter. And that’s one of the good guys.

At the time, I had no idea that there was anything wrong with that, and what scares me is that maybe the story I’ve submitted is full of similarly reprehensible stuff that I don’t have the good sense to know is reprehensible yet. I could’ve just handed off a manuscript that paints me as a misogynistic sociopath without knowing it because the only other person to read it was a misogynistic sociopath himself (thanks again for the notes, Mike).

But that’s the benefit of getting my work out in the open while I’m alive, rather than waiting for someone to find it in a long-unopened drawer after I’ve died – at least this way, if it makes me look like I’m crazy, I’ve got the opportunity to defend myself.

Truman Capps would like to point out that J.D. Salinger probably had this same insecurity, to the point that he seldom went out in public for fear of inadvertently whipping his dick out.