TRACKING THE MUSE
Thomas Cooper | What Is This?
Bar none, this is the worst sentence I’ve ever written. I should be ashamed. Somewhere, right now, there’s a committee of sentence assayers, arbiters of all things mellifluous, judging other sentences like these. My sentences, foisted thoughtlessly and selfishly on the world. It’s only a matter of time before I receive a notice in the mail. “Congratulations, you are currently a finalist for the worst sentence in the world. In the meantime, before you receive word about the winner, do everyone a favor and please stop writing. Thank you.”
How long would it take to become an X-ray technician? An anesthesiologist? An environmental lawyer? I want a business phone and a business suit and a business plane but I don’t want to do the business that goes with them.
Who am I kidding? I’d end up dead in a gutter. In my business suit, clutching my business phone, in my business diapers.
Okay, let’s open the front windows, get some fresh air and light. Time to live like a normal goddamn human being instead of some albino cave creature, some Morlock. I hope the neighbors don’t see me here on the couch, hunched in my pajamas over my laptop. They probably think I’m challenged in some way, eking out a pathetic existence on disability checks. I’m a grown man in his thirties who spends most of his day writing things like, “Bar none, this is the worst sentence I’ve ever written.” Or, more precisely, putting off writing things like that until the last possible moment.
Come to think of it, maybe I am challenged.
The process piece for Blackbird, yes. I can’t believe I’ve been here on my pajamaed ass for an hour and have only these few anemic sentences to show for it. I had something pithier in mind, something quaffable and quotable. I imagined the Blackbird people saying, “This is fucking amazing. We’ve never seen anything like this.”
Instead, the Blackbird editors will send an email asking, “What is this? You’re doing it wrong.”
Bar none, this is the worst sentence I’ve ever written. It has. It was. There were. Today is a. He thought, scratching his.
What about woodworking? Scrimshaw? Cabinetry? I bet those are gratifying jobs. You have a tangible result at the end of the day. When something is a piece of shit—say, a piece of shit chair—you know it’s a piece of shit chair. I should have worked with fucking wood. When people ask what I do, I could say, “I’m a fucking woodworker. I make shit. Tangible shit. Out of fucking wood.”
Bar none, this is the worst sentence I’ve ever written. As I sat on the. The day was. Wearing only my. Blaring over the stereo.
Don’t you dare reach for that iPhone, you goofy sonofabitch. No, you don’t deserve a family-sized bag of remaindered Halloween candy just for writing several sentences. There are twelve-year-old children who haul boulders up hills all day in 120-degree heat, and you think you deserve a trophy for sitting still for an hour? Keep going. Don’t look up. If somebody plows a car through the front of the house, don’t stop. Don’t even flinch. If you suffer a critical injury, just tourniquet your head with the couch throw and continue onward.
How is it afternoon already? Are the clocks broken? Here I am, lying on my side, legs tucked up into my body, fetus-style. I need a power nap. I should have never stopped after that first paragraph. I rummage through a potato chip bag, shove one after another into my mouth.
The Blackbird people are waiting. They’re on the way.
Bar none, this is the worst sentence I’ve ever written. Wading through the muck of. After a trying session. Potato chips. The day was almost. Period. Comma.
Two paragraphs now, and I’m wading muckily through a third. Not bad. A decent day’s work. Yes, go ahead and check the mail. You’ve earned a few minutes of fresh air. What’s this? How dare they, these people from this teeny-tiny no-name journal with the flaming teepee on the cover? What do they mean, the protagonist is wooden? Well, aren’t wooden people human beings too? It doesn’t matter. Face it, that acceptance the other day was a fluke. You should be in a park right now, basking in the sun, getting some color on your face. Your talentless and glue-colored face.
But look, they couldn’t even get the rejection slip right, these people. A pathetic wisp of paper no bigger than a business card, scissored in jagged lines. Who’s responsible for this? Time to learn a little something about right angles, asshole.
Hey, stop being so mean. Besides, none of it matters. Nobody cares. It’s only a game. Remember that.
The Blackbird people will soon be breaking down the door.
So it goes, ad infinitum, this perilous tightrope act on the thinnest of lines between abject demoralization and lightning-quick elation. One moment you’re a ne’er-do-well, and the next an unheralded genius. Then there are the rare moments between, the slippery rope itself, when you exist purely in the limitless white space of a page, somewhere between thinking and feeling, trying not to fall back into yourself.
Contributor’s
notes
Tracking the Muse
Introductions: A Reading Loop