sarcasm, wit, or rather the lack of it

Oh what an exciting day, it must go down in the annals of history...
sorry, overreaction due to excess hypomania.
But I did discover Libba Bray's live journal, and considering A Great and Terrible Beauty and Rebel Angels are two of the best books ever (and I have read a LOT of books) I am very excited. I love cynical sarcasm and find it hilarious when I am tired (well I find most things hilarious when I'm tired, but you know what I mean). So you should go read her live journal, it's very funny, and after that you should read her books, as they are funny, suspenseful, etc (continue list of adoring adjectives for lazy blogger).

So I have made a resolution to actually write (write as in begin, commit to, and finish) a book that does not involve all of the depressed, mopy, psychology-addicted sides of me (ie doesn't involve any sort of abuse, rape, or drawn-out addiction) but rather is written by the happy side of me, the hypomanic side of me, the side of me that is addicted to sarcasm and can write very sarcastically when I want to. I am sick of the depression and I want my writing to move on. Well, I want to move on with it. I want those aspects of my writing to combine with new aspects to polish my writing.

I suppose I need some sort of idea for the book, which I will think about today. I'm debating whether I want strictly contemporary realistic, or magical realism. I just need a general idea though, because as soon as I type the first few paragraphs of a book or essay or anything, it starts writing itself (quite convenient if you ask me).

I will now post the essay I turned into my English teacher when he assigned us to write something creative about a realistic or romantic story we've read that exemplifies our knowledge of the difference between the two. It is very long and feel no need to read it (why am I telling you this? I'm sure you won't), but I am very proud of it, and it contains the sort of attitude I want to diffuse into this new, unborn book I swear I will write.

The Gates to Heaven

It was a curious sensation, the darkness, retaining some sort of liquid quality, lapping at his body until the devastating actions of cytolysis slowly dissolved his very skin. There was no pain, no sudden clench of his muscles. It was a bit numbing, a bit calming, all of the darkness and his body fanning out into particles that hovered over the boxcar below where his wife clung to his hand. Some small fringe of him could still feel his wife’s clutch, her fingers locking in a rigid cage around his hand like somehow her touch could revive his pulse. He should be sorry she was gone, sorry he had lost that solid part of him, but he had always felt disillusioned. This detachment was nothing new.

It was only when a small sliver of sunlight pierced the shield of darkness above his head that he realized he must have died. That epiphany didn’t really bother him either. What bothered him was that there had been no warm milk this morning, no agony of his wife’s distracted eyes. He had slept, and in sleeping he had somehow discarded his body like an exoskeleton to grow slowly cold as the day plumped and ripened.

The halo of light surrounded him, and he could see the gates- not pearly like all of the stories, but metallic and so cold your tongue would stick with the faintest drip of saliva. He stood shivering with the snowy photons dotting his hair like peppery dandruff. A man in a tattered, puce bathrobe looked up with bleary eyes from a ledger book. Ink spots dotted his immaterial fingers, and his evanescent pupils were swirling drips of ink themselves, penetrating in their exhaustion.

“Welcome to heaven,” the man said, and his terry-cloth robe swayed from inertia, not wind. “You will enter here and remain forever if you can pass but one test. Answer this one question correctly and you will gain admittance.”

The man stood on a wispy fleck of cloud, thinking dully that he had finally lost those extra few pounds. When the silence, spicy as mouthwash, slowly bloomed inside his dry mouth, he realized he was expected to say something. He looked again at those steely doors. What was beyond them? More darkness? More numbing, confining cold?

“Yes?” he said after the long pause and the mounting sense of obligation. The man in the bathrobe swayed dramatically, clutching the steely gates. His hand stuck, and he ripped it off with the sound that dead skin might make if his hand were still covered in a glove of skin.

“You have to tell me one objective thing about yourself that everyone on earth would agree with.”

That’s simple, the man thought, there are plenty objective things about me. However, even as the words fluoresced inside his mind, he was remembering something from long ago…

***

He had been in high school once. He had blurred into the lockers, had dreamed of falling into the sky. He had no friends. The only thing that he was good at, or that he thought he was good at, was writing essays. So when, on a March day of his junior year when snow flurries brushed the contracted windows, and his English teacher assigned him to pick one object and write an objective, realistic, non-fiction essay on it, he thought that God, from somewhere beyond the pearly gates, was giving him a chance to redeem his grade-point average, or maybe his confidence. Which one mattered more in the end was an answer no one in high school could seem to procure.

At home that night, his fingers poised over his typewriter, the fresh strip of correcting tape looping around the iron arms, he sat in a straight-backed chair. A rock posed in front of him, balanced precariously on a jagged tip. He had no idea what type of rock it was. Classification and taxonomy and the divisions between categories had always confused him. It was a rock, a conglomerate of material. That’s all he cared to know. No framework he could apply to its name could ever be verified by the scientists that sat all day and stared at the minerals that replaced their lovers.

All of that was brushed from his mind as he started typing. His fingers blurred over the keys. He had large hands that consumed a piano keyboard far more effectively than fire consumed oxygen. He could type faster than anyone he knew. It was one more snatch of self-worth that he filed away in his mind, in that filing system that was so different from everyone else’s.

He knew that realistic literature was written with no ulterior motive and was meant to simply describe things as they were. So, with the preconceived intention of having no ulterior motive, he began writing about the jagged rock. He was proud of the metaphors and similes. Even if he did overuse them, his similes splayed out across the paper like small pregnant women: they were cute, fat, and undeniable. He wrote about the swirling of granite colors that tainted the surface of the rock. He wrote about the razor-sharp edge that had drawn a perfect globe of blood from his thumb. He wrote long into the night, and when he was done he turned the dial on the side of the typewriter to claim his last sheet, piled the papers together, and shoved them in his book-bag. The chance of him not receiving an A on this assignment was as slight as the chance of the moon undergoing spontaneous combustion.

For two weeks he floated through his existence more agitatedly than usual. Instead of drifting away from posts and large objects obstructing his path, he stared at his shoes distractedly and ran right into them. The acidic laughter that followed him hurt far worse than the throbbing pains. Laughter, more than any sort of depression, had eaten into his cardiac muscle, chewing his last defenses to shreds. He could not ignore it. It would not flow over him like everything else.

The tension building up inside of him, the desire to see his grade on the essay, was almost unbearable. He knew, like any good high school student, that his grade mattered far more than anything else in his life. When his English teacher finally passed out the essays, attached to the various objects people had chosen, he felt that the rock he had written about had migrated from the recesses of his memory into his throat, where it tore at the tender tissues. The teacher, her flat shoes clicking and her skirt dutifully sweeping her ankles, set the essay face down on his desk with the rock beside it. He could no longer breathe. The carbon dioxide in his lungs was diffusing and recycling itself over and over. The alveoli lining the visceral tissue could not handle the lack of oxygen. He felt his mind dissect into shimmering confusion, skating on the apprehensions that crested like waves, so he decided to turn over the paper before he fainted. There, scrawled in unforgiving, thick red lines, was the D. He had never thought of a letter being hideous before, but he had never been repulsed by anything as much as he was repulsed by that scarlet D.

The comments on the back were not vague. They were written in tiny, looping handwriting, almost illegible and gleefully flourished.

The assignment was to write objectively about this rock. You have not fulfilled that objective. The rock doesn’t swirl with granite; it is more brown than gray. The rock does not have a razor-sharp edge. That edge is slightly rounded. Your adjectives are based solely on your judgments. You are not in tune with unprejudiced reality. More importantly, I can tell you that you wrote this with the ulterior motive of not having an ulterior motive. The point was to avoid ulterior motives all together. I’m sorry that I have to give you this grade, but I have to be fair.

His eyes glazed over. He didn’t really see the paper. That night he burned the essay in an iron can and smashed the rock to bits with a hammer. Every blow felt like some sort of justice. It wasn’t fair, really. It wasn’t fair at all.

***

The man looked back at St. Peter in his tatty bathrobe. He remembered the depression that had filled him up the day his teacher passed back the essays, the depression that had still been there that morning when he slipped out of the boxcar and into the sky.

He tried to think of one thing in his life that had an obvious truth, one thing that had a single undisputable taxonomical classification. He stared at the freezing gates of heaven and the snow filled his hollow, spirit-bones, an ill substitute for marrow in his medullary cavities. His lips grew numb. Time passed the flurries of snow and left him in a motionless ether. People drifted in and out of the gates. He saw his wife pass. He asked St. Peter why she did not have to answer the same question as him.

“Everyone has an individualized question. It would be unfair to ask everyone the same objective question, because not everyone could have the same answer.”

There seemed something twisted about the whole affair, something unfair like that scrawled D so long ago, but he was too cold and too tired to find it.

As time coalesced into viscous droplets, he sat outside the steely gates of heaven struggling to think of an objective truth. In the end, he could not cease the inexorable tape of his memory, replaying again and again a life of subjective isolation. St. Peter wrote with spindly, blackened hands; ashen faces passed from darkness into light; the snow fell in filmy sheets of ethereal glory, but the man only drummed his knees and nodded his head, hopelessly lost within himself.