Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Monday, March 08, 2004 The Pitch: It's like....It's not like anything... [Warning: following post filled with deliberate vagueness]So Friday I found out a friend of a friend was a murderer. This friend of a friend was a guy who I had met a few times, at parties. Nice, quiet guy. I didn't get the impression he liked me, actually, and I'm not sure I much liked him (I can be defensive that way) but he seemed okay. He was nice enough to me, despite the vibe I got, and I appreciated that. Gracious might be the appropriate word, I think. I thought he was gracious, this friend of a friend. Well, he apparently flipped out and killed a guy, went home and, when confronted by the cops, killed himself, too. My friend, generally unshakable, is pretty shaken up. He told me the whole story recently, and it's been on my mind, on and off, all weekend. I didn't really know this friend of a friend, so it doesn't have, frankly, a lot of emotional impact to me, other than worrying about my friend and wondering why I want to tell people. If a friend of a friend had won the lottery and become a millionaire, would I be writing about it now? I think I probably would. And one part of that may just be that it's so rare in my life to know someone (or to know someone who knows someone) who won the lottery, that's why I'd probably be talking about it. "Hey, look at me! I'm two degrees away from significance!" The other part may just be that it's on my mind and I want to write. After all, we all have our secret lives, parts of our lives that we think we can, or should, keep private, either for our own benefit or out of simple civility ("So Friday, I found out a friend of a friend..." for instance). As someone who paid a lot--if not too much--attention to literature growing up, I was always amazed at the secret lives of characters in literature. My life, it seemed, was always right on the surface, as did the lives of my friends around me. As I grew older, I discovered that people have secrets, things they don't tell other people, deeper and stranger and sadder than most literature. I have those secrets (although I've always worried to what extent I tried to cultivate those, as a way to understand literature and how to write it--and maybe that's one of my secrets, right there). So I wonder about the friend of my friend. I wonder if, when he went home after murdering someone, he thought he would just go home, and never say anything to anyone, and it would just become part of his secret life. I wonder if he knew he was going to kill the person he killed, if that had been part of his secret life, too. Did someone ask him, "You're kind of quiet today. Something on your mind?" And did he say, "Oh, nothing. Just didn't sleep well last night and I'm kind of burnt," when actually he had been imagining stabbing the person he would eventually stab? Like I said, we all have our secret lives. I think we all pay the cost of having them. That cost isn't always murder, isn't always death. Sometimes the cost is the end of a friendship that might not have ended if things had been different. Sometimes the cost is sitting at your desk at work and not really being able to feel good, despite the sun on your face, despite a peaceful morning. And sometimes the cost is having to write about it, vaguely and at length, despite being worried what anyone who reads it might think. posted by Jeff Lester | 11:19 AM | |
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