Postby Starfe » Thu Jun 16, 2011 11:52 am
This is a little bit I wrote called "I am a Raconteur". It basically serves as the prologue to the "book" I've written about my 998 days in wretched exile. Its a bit hard to understand, and isn't well written or edited, but here it is.
[spoiler]I Am A Raconteur
My name is W.G McDonnell. Well, actually its not. Nobody calls me that. My name is actually William G. McDonnell, and everyone has and does call me Bill. And certainly if anyone did call me “W.G” I would be confused and probably not even know it was me they were talking to. The “W.G” thing is a pretention of mine. I’ve always wondered if the reason so many people who are famous, or later become famous, adopt stage names or pen names is because some names are inherently cool. F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S Eliot, Hunter S. Thompson, J.R.R Tolkien. These are names of high quality, and in comparison my name is rather plain and probably wouldn’t look good on a movie poster or on the cover of a book in that big bold text. My name is more of the kind of thing you’d see in the small bold text, on page C5, beneath a block of text scarcely longer than this paragraph. What I can do is take after the greats in these fields and change or rearrange my name into something a little more respectable, a little more bold text ready. Just look at William Pitt, or Robert Zimmerman, or Jon Liebowitz. Who would go see a Bill Pitt movie? Bill Pitt sounds like the coach of your youth soccer team who yells a lot and takes everything entirely too seriously because he just wants to feel successful for once in his life, and maybe, just maybe, leading the Grade 5 Silver Bullets to local victory will do the trick, after all, hes been jilted in life with his subpar name, and maybe if he’d just used his middle name he could have landed that role in Thelma and Louise and his whole life would have been different, but for now making 10 year olds do windsprints is all he has. My name is a name such as that, fit for little but the norm in life. In keeping with such guides I would be W.G McDonnell, in a brighter world. Though in all likelyhood I will never get to use this name, and I, or at least my ego, will be doomed to only ever see my name attached to headings on university essays, where it will inevitably remain in the form it has appeared on so many school rosters and ID Cards.
W.G McDonnell is like some romanticized version of myself. I don’t feel strange saying that. In the modern world over exposure is abound, and it becomes harder to lie about yourself to those you barely know in order to make yourself seem interesting, as they can simply check your Facebook page after the party and find that you are actually a drunk with an outdated wardrobe. So it becomes neccesary to craft those romantic images of yourself within your own mind. Or at least this is what I assume everyone else does, because I know that I do it all the time so that when I look in the mirror I’m not just a 23 year old college student who hates his job and doesn’t cook. W.G McDonnell seems like hes probably pretty cool, or at least cooler than me. He probably wears suits everyday without looking like some high school kid who really likes The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, probably showers rarely but never smells, is able to stop himself after just the right number of drinks, stays up late, sleeps in late, and never complains about work, doesn’t have back hair, lives in a tiny apartment that is impecibly decorated, hes published and writes regularly, he probably has interesting opinions and remembers to mail his ballot on time, he makes everyone laugh but never laughs at his own jokes, has an interesting yet understated signature and in all likelyhood, looks good in hats. In short hes funny, attractive, interesting, informed, basically everything semi-intellectual 17 year old girls dream about, and 25 year old semi-intellectual girls know they’ll never find. And whats most important, at least to me, is that he has a name that looks good in bold text. And that’s why hes the romantic version of myself, because those are the things I wish I could be, and life certainly would be easier, though far less legal than it already is, if I only dated 17 year old semi-intellectual girls who thought the world of me, who thought that my dingy apartment was cool just because it wasn’t my parents house. Probably, if I could be anyone but myself, I would be W.G McDonnell.
I’ve had this far off, faded, dream since I was quite young that I would become a writer someday. I believe that this was probably seeded when I was in the 4th grade and my teacher, Mrs. Johnson, who was an actual dwarf, told me that what I had turned in for our creative writing project was “Lengthy and creative” and encouraged me to continue on my own time. The story in question was about possessed Barbie Dolls that terrorized the community, and as I recall was somewhat violent, kind of like if Toy Story and Child’s Play had a love child that was written by a 9 year old on wide ruled paper, and was just fucking awful. It should probably also be noted that this is probably the first and only time anyone ever gave me a compliment involving either of those two words. Really though that’s all it took. I became on and off enamoured with this idea throughout my life, wanting to be some published author, or maybe a screen writer, maybe a journalist. But I never quite made good on that high praise I received before I was even 10, certainly I wrote here and there but I never told anybody for fear that they would demand to see something I had written and decide, quite rightfully, that it was utter garbage. You see the truth is that I am not W.G McDonnell, I’m not some romantic, bohemian, writer who never has to send text message apologies, and in actuallity I’m quite a bad writer. I’m not even really a very good reader. Thankfully I figured this out before I poured some horrible trash fiction onto paper and attempted to get it published. I am not one who takes embarassment easily, even though I’d like to. I found, as I assume many people find after the fact, that I would never be able to write a story worth reading, but those clinging threads of that dream perhaps subconciously steered me elsewhere, towards first living a story worth telling.
Its pretty easy to suss out what I actually am, as I am clearly not an author of great rapport, though I would wish to be, and I am clearly not the character described above with a name of high quality. I have no great talents to speak of, which isn’t that depressing, I’m good at a great deal of things but just not great at anything, as I assume most evenly educated people my age have found about themselves. I have a delicate consitution, which is constantly tested by ailments, I am a public scoundrel and have been known to partake in activities both reviled and reknowned, pretty women terrify me, strong men don’t threaten me, I talk in great excess, much to the chagrin of pretty much everyone I know, I revel in ramshackle mischief, I occasionally have a total disregard for the law, I am extremely patient, and often tenacious to the point of foolishness. But above all things, above all my interests and traits and opinions, above all other aspects of myself, there is one overriding thing that defines me. I love to tell stories. They could be my own or those I’ve heard and simply wish to relate. Keeping a group of people rapt with anticipation over what strangeness or devilry was to come next gives me endless delight, and seeking those situations that can produce those tales is also dear to me. As a result I often tend to get up to mischief, often drunkenly. And this is more or less the only thing I am known for. But I am at least well known for it. So much so that I’ve often had my exploits misquoted. Just last week I received a text message from a friend of mine asking me if I tore open my scrotum at some point and never told her. I can fully assure you that had I torn open my scrotum I would have told everybody.
Allow me to step back for a moment. I mentioned above that I dislike embarassment, and cannot handle it well, and I wasn’t lying, I have not yet begun to lie. Certainly if I had torn my scrotum asunder that would be an embarassing thing. But being able to control the narrative of my life that people hear is the only way I can avoid embarassment. I hate when things feel like that childrens game telephone, I imagine that people certainly get the wrong impression when a story is poorly related, so to me its totally normal to tell a complete stranger about shitting my pants as an adult, just as long as I’m the one who relates the story.
Back to my scrotum. My friend was talking to someone who I don’t even know, and if I have met them its very likely that I was very intoxicated, and apparently I came up in conversation. Which is strange, when you think about it, that two other people are discussing you when you only know one of them and you’re not even present. What’s stranger is that this, well, stranger, was relating how I had torn open my coin pouch at some point. This isn’t even an actual misquotation of my exploits or misfortunes, so much as this is a tall tale, and even worse, it was about some greivous sack injury I had never actually acquired. This is the sort of thing that’s been happening to me since I was a teenager, and I’m partially to blame. Certainly there are many people who get up to far more zany activities than I ever have, but I delight in telling people about these things, and as such an impression of me has spread that is often far larger and overblown than my actual self. People always seem to keep their distance, maybe for this reason, like I was some kind of high grade explosive, poised to drag them into the fiery den that was my frantic existence. As such I often don’t get the chance to fully illuminate people to my exploits myself, and my tales are often told by proxy. And that saddens me in a way. Certianly there’s an interesting and entertaining infamy, or maybe even fame, in having people relate strange tales about your life to total strangers, and I won’t lie and say I don’t revel in that on occasion, but to me theres so much to telling a particular tale that I want to fight that battle myself, whether it be for good or ill. Some stories are rather mundane, and funny, some stories are strange, some stories are sad, and I love to tell them all, and every person that I am not able to give the first hand account to because they’ve been tainted by some surrogate teller, though I often tell other peoples stories without them around and don’t feel bad about it, feels to me like a missed opportunity.
It seems incredibly conceited to think that anyone would really be all that interested in hearing personal stories. Yet there is a great value in telling all varieties of stories, but the greatest of all lies in telling those that recount the events and times that shaped ones vile struggle of a life. It’s the truth, right down to the core. Likewise, there is a great honesty in releating your depths to strangers. Perhaps they will frighten off? Perhaps those depths are all to great? Why would a wise man risk it? People have their own lives and their own trials and sinister things happen to good people everyday. Why burden them with self glorifying tales, or self depricating tales, or silly misfortunes or lost love or found salvation or all these little odds and ends? Why should one make someone else endure that for their own pleasure? And make no mistake, I do find a great deal of entertainment in telling my own stories. Is this the kind of activity that romantic W.G McDonnell would undertake? To me the justification turned out to be quite simple, though hidden for me for much of my life, while pretentions exist of being some romantic writer with a fancy name. The answer revealed itself to me. A man is nothing but a collection of his trials and experience. A tightly formed ball of stories. A man is not his location, his social standing, or his job, not his degree or his wealth, and a man is certainly not his name, regardless of how it looks in bold text. A man is the life he has lived, and the tales that have formed around it, and one can never truly be known, nor know oneself, without these stories. They are essential, they are ones life and very being. One can live a thousand years, and experience countless things, but without the story to tell, it may have all been a waste, for that story, however poorly remembered it may be as one moves past those events, is the true story of your life, and to keep them within, and resist relating them for fear of some social faux pax, is the path of true loneliness.
When I get up in the morning to go to work, and I’m hungover, and my dress shirt feels like it doesn’t quite fit anymore, and my wallet is heavy with coins for the bus, and I dread the day ahead of me. In those moments I wish that I was W.G McDonnell. That I had that romantic life, that I was, to youth, an idealization of the young adult. But then I take in a breath, I remember every little wretched tale I’m about to relate, and I am endlessly thankful for what I am. I am not an artist, I am not talented, I am not particularly intelligent or interesting, I am not strong nor attractive or successful, I have bad hair, hats make me look like a reject from The Deadliest Catch, and 17 year old semi-intellectual girls certainly do not flock to me like some mysterious movie character. I am not W.G McDonnell. My name doesn’t matter at all, because above all things, I am a raconteur.[/spoiler]
I can't think of any techniques to help combat this. So, just talk with us and maybe we can help in some way.
