The writer laughed and smashed his keyboard. “Dammit, now I need a new one,” he muttered to himself, cursing his rashness. “Now I will actually need to go to the store to buy a new keyboard. I will have to spend real money now, replacing this, because I gave in to the heat of passion. Might as well bust it to bits even more, huh? Might as well bust it to bits with a hammer!” But he didn’t have the heart to. The chimpwave had passed. He stood up and paced the room. It was dark. It was the middle of the night, in the middle of the woods. He had rented a cabin to try to finish his current writing project, titled “The Unapologetic Racist.” He was right wing and obsessed with politics, a circumstance that had brought him nothing but misery and anguish.
“If the guys on X knew what I was really like the whole jig would be up,” he thought to himself bitterly. His account Lothrop Stoddard Enjoyer was hugely popular, and every day he tweeted downright dark and mean-spirited things.
He grabbed his broken keyboard and pretended to swing it against the wall like a baseball bat. He wished he had the heart to smash it up for real, along with his computer, but he didn’t. A million modes of self-destruction flashed through his mind. He wanted to bust things up in the cabin, then send the owner a photo of himself with a cartoonishly large frown and shrug. He wanted to send voice memos of himself squealing and shouting “I CAN’T THINK,” “I CAN’T WRITE,” and “TOTAL AND UTTER FAILURE, TOTAL AND COMPLETE FAILURE,” to his closest friends and family members in an attempt to force them to lose some respect for him.
“Eeeeeeeeeeee,” he whimpered instead, crumpling against the wall. “Eeeee eee eeee,” he then said, laughing, thinking of the Tao Lin novel. “They ain’t never gonna publish my shiz,” he thought, sitting down on the couch and reading through some pages he had printed out. “My Goodness, the plot’s not just forced—every sentence is forced! It’s like every word was forced to line up next to the other in shackles, like in some kind of chain gang!”
“Nothing’s smooth, nothing flows,” he thought to himself. “Nothing’s smooth, nothing flows.”
He thought of burning his book in the backyard like Nabokov. It was probably a similar situation—what he was writing was probably as good as Lolita. “Yeah, would probably be a similar level tragedy if they lost this,” he said bitterly, kicking his manuscript all over the floor.
After a moment the thought actually began to calm him down, and he sat to read over a page, taking deep breaths. “Okay, okay, maybe it’s not so bad. If Nabokov could hate his work so much…” As he read the page his eyes began to light up with confidence. “Maybe I’m just like Nabby, and I don’t even realize how good this is. Maybe the fact that I genuinely want to destroy it is a sign that it’s genuinely good, and I’m just an overly self-critical artist, like David Foster Wallace…”
A huge smile spread to his face, and he sunk back in repose on the couch. “Even if people hated it, it’s possible they just didn’t get it. It’s possible people wouldn’t get it for 200, 500, 1000 years.” He smacked his lips and yawned, patting his belly with my manuscript. “I’m writing for the future generations. Thousand years from now it could be some futuristic looking society, everyone looking like fish… they’d all get exactly what I was trying to say…exactly what I’m tryna say…I’m writin for them, not people nowadays… I’m writin for the future…”
With these thoughts he fell into a deep, restful slumber.
Relatable on too many levels