Perverse Embrace

Eating a turkey sandwich at the Cliff House restaurant

On Friday afternoon, I found a book. It was the cover that drew my attention. I love to squander time perusing second-hand bookstores, having no idea what precisely I’m looking for. It was in this mood, I captured sight of a scruffy, dog-eared, neglected looking volume. Although badly faded, the cover featured a picture of a fishing village overwhelmed by an onrushing tide. Fishing vessels lay submerged with only their masts above the water, debris riding on the waves while a woman in black stands alone on a cliff looking down on the scene, her lengthy hair fanned by the wind. It is a side view, her face hidden. Nonetheless, I was intrigued enough to examine its pages. I paid out an exorbitant amount of money to own it and headed to lunch in the Terrace Room at the Cliff House restaurant, overlooking Seal Rock in the Land’s End area of San Francisco.

If you were sitting with me, you would see it lying on the table next to my turkey sandwich. After an hour, I admit the book hasn’t any functional language, written in a ridiculously limited form, yet showing all human compassion, with all the human emotional range found in its pages, in a glaringly blunt style, taking extreme positions, better than the aesthetes who write to consider every situation, every emotion, and ending up with none. This is a good thing because if it had been written in any other style, I might think less of the writing.

I consider my own style, concluding its inadequacy, having learned no art form can fully express all that is a human being. Art can use a smattering of emotion and babble but reveal little.

Since becoming a person writing on the Medium platform, I struggle to suppose the kind of writer I wish to be. Most importantly, the anti-academia-intellectual spirit of my youth, my deadliest enemy, has been slain. I’ve come a long way to grow up. My penmanship links me to the humble, ordinary people who know their own worth and have no illusion. But, honestly, I never did belong to everyday people, and neither is my outlook simplistic.

I have come to doubt whether my simple say-it-as-it-is style is any better or wonder, in fact, if it is the right one to use for a writer who has no serious message to convey. Perhaps the only message is trying to convince myself, so I string along just to be the adult I’ve become.

I wonder what happened to the boy whose father asked at supper one night: What are you going to choose to do? You can be anything you want. What is it?

A writer.

You can’t be that! That’s silly!

Parents are shunned for such words today. But dad was right. It is silly.

I was a kid in a daze — what a dream, poor young thing. Go watch the baker bake, the fishermen fish, the carpenter carve, anything else is hardly worthy of an excuse.

My turkey sandwich is almost done.

Today, I’m an old guy looking out on the vastness of potential.

Writing, me, together in a perverse embrace.