Risky Fuel

On the right: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Asshole

Previously:

The Drowned

Eating The Rich

Million DaysMillion Days

Birthday Boy

Fire in the Head

At some point in late 1997, I finally got over my wretched obsession with Joseph Conrad and ran straight into the equally dead white male arms of James Joyce. I spent the first half of 1998 reading Ulysses and screaming at Ulysses and going to the few parties I was invited to as a highly unpopular homeschooled teenager and talking about how much I both loved and hated Ulysses and when I finished it I declared that James Joyce was the greatest influence on my young life and that I would write the next Ulysses yes I said yes I will Yes.

This is not to say that I became a great modernist writer. Or even that I experimented with any modernist tendencies whatsoever. The thing I loved about James Joyce above all others was that he was a petty and vengeful writer. I read that he used to get drunk and sit in the corners of pubs, threatening to write everyone he knew into his books — and that the bumbling and awful character Private Carr in Ulysses was, in fact, based on some poor sod named Henry Carr who once had the temerity to argue with Joyce over a pair of pants — and realized that I had never admired or envied another human being more.

So when I stopped subconsciously working through my breakup with my best friend via stories about murder, death, and guilt on the shores of Lake Erie, I started consciously writing even worse thinly-veiled tripe about her and what I considered her “totally fake” personality. That is why this sad little story exists. Even the the musical inspiration was a shot at her, because “Smile and Wave,” from 1997’s Headstones album of the same name, was by her favourite band.

I don’t suppose Tom Stoppard will ever get around to writing a play inspired by this epic literary burn.

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