The Caged Tiger

‘Blackadder’ seems as good a place as any to begin.

Yes, I’m just another pissy unpublished writer, pushed to the breaking point by the publishing community’s perpetual insistence that, no, in fact, another novel dedicated to the travails of a naive, young Brown graduate discovering life and love in the big city is much more viable than any of my literary excretions. Though in fairness to the overpaid, underworked, and creatively bankrupt that, like cockroaches after a nuclear holocaust somehow manage to maintain a toehold in an economy that has reduced the best of this generation to madness – yours truly excluded, of course – I haven’t taken the idea of being published even halfway seriously, until recently. So as long as I’m entertaining deluded pipe-dreams of getting published and whoring myself out on Oprah, where no doubt a comely young Northwestern intern will lovingly work my balls before the show and a naive young Brown graduate after, I may as well start by pretending I have a voice and personality in the form of a blog. Sounds like a good idea, no?

Of course, I’ve also begun to view lottery tickets as a viable alternative to ever finding a job that pays a slightly better hourly rate than the post of apprentice shoeshine boy – and I was, once, a shoeshine boy, therefore I remain aware of industry trends – so perhaps my judgment, regarding work, publishing, and everything else, is not quite what it used to be. At the moment, blowing two bucks on a scratch ticket feels only slightly more foolish than once again foraging deep into Craigslist for the entry-level clusterfuck of a data-entry position of my dreams.

But enough of this incipient negativity. Best to accentuate the positive. For whatever reason I can still put a sentence together. That’s something, isn’t it? Not bad for five years and thousands of dollars of government money to be repaid over a ten year period.

Yet this frustration is not going anywhere, anytime soon. When I look at how I was just a couple years ago, I wonder when things stopped being easy, and when they became difficult. The tipping point came and went, I’m sure, and I didn’t notice. Now here I am, in Boston. Sweaty, stifling, humid, ugly Boston. My home town. The place where John Adams once practiced law, before being forgotten by history. He had a rough time in his 20′s, as well. John Q. Adams, as well.

They were both consigned to live in Boston for a while, as well.