Celebrity Nipslips and Other Clickbait

Is existential an overused word? I still love it, have since I discovered it as a child; looking at existence, why life is what it is. My father had a stroke earlier in the year. Fortunately he has mostly recovered, but it has made both of us more aware of death: My father sees it coming close, a whistling stranger emerging from the mist, I see it for my parents within the next ten years and, in turn, myself within the next twenty. The fragility of our future often makes us nostalgic, so I have been looking back and writing about the past.

Since the middle of February I have written nearly 450 pages of memoirs. I just sit here in my living room, put on some music, and go. First I worked on The Bad Kids which is about when I was a juvenile delinquent from ages twelve to fourteen. The next book was about the breif period when I was seriously overweight in my early twenties, When I Was Fat. I finshed that and was unsure what to do with myself. I kicked around a fiction project for a few days but wasn’t feeling it like the memoirs—

So I started See The Stars They’re Shining Bright on May 18th and have done 100 pages on it since then. This latest memoir takes place in my twenties between Cobain’s death and Y2K. Like When I Was Fat, See The Stars has a romance at the center of it, a gorgeous, doomed love with this amazing woman named Monica.

Every book has a soundtrack, songs I listen to on a loop that connect me to wherever creativity exists. The more I live, the more I channel music or stories, the more I understand that creative people are like radios picking up a signal. We do not possess creativity, creativity possesses us. We’re just staring in the windows of a haunted house inviting the spirits in. How I conduct this invitiation is through music. With The Bad Kids, the key song was Secret Journey by The Police from Ghost in the Machine. This made sense as that album was released in 1981 which is when the story is set. The rest of the soundtrack was other Police tunes from 1978-81. When writing about the romance at the center of When I Was Fat it was one song, Since I’ve Been Loving You by Led Zeppelin. Writing about this woman I was involved with in 1992-3, I would sit here listening to that one song for hours, putting myself into a trance as it were, and writing page after page after page.

It wasn’t the right time for Monica and I or, more likely, I wasn’t the guy she imagined her future with. I’ve never had a real career, I’ve never had jobs where I made a lot of money. I never cared about that, jobs were simply to pay for rent and groceries while I followed my calling: Writing books. That was—and is—my life and my lack of money nor security never troubled me until I was involved with Monica. We never discussed this, but I believe she broke up with me (partly) because she wanted an adult future, a partner who made good money, was on a career track, someone to have family with—

She did not see me as that guy and it made me feel like a failure, like my “delusions" had cost me this incredible person who I loved deeply.

When Monica left my life, it utterly shattered me. I still worked with her (she was my boss) for seven months, still had to be around her five days a week. Idiot, I should have quit that job right away but I kept hoping Monica would have a change of heart.

Yeah, I see you shaking your head out there.

Those seven months were compressed into two songs: Selfless Cold and Composed by Ben Folds Five and Sonnet by the Verve. I made a ninety minute cassette of just those two songs; I played it driving to and from work then I’d carry that tape into my apartment and listen to it ore.

Yeah, my tether to the real world, to sanity, was a bit frayed at the time.

When it came time to choose the soundtrack for See The Stars They’re Shining Bright it was obvious what two songs would lead it. There are other songs on the soundtrack, including Since I’ve Been Loving You, but during the chapters that have to do about Monica it’s those key tunes by Ben Folds Five and the Verve. I am doing the best writing of my life, but I am also emotionally wrung out. I have to give into things that are a bit dodgy—

I have to just…open myself to things I buried twenty-eight years ago. I sit here, listening to those same two songs on a loop, and I am there, I am experiencing those same feelings I did in late 1997/early 1998. It overwhelms me, I’ll just be sitting here crying, unable to type just….overcome—

But I have to do this to tell the story properly, going through that is part of the process so I do it.

Monica didn’t just break up with me because I didn’t make enough money, she is not that shallow and the situation wasn’t that simple. Her mother had become very ill and between that and her career she didn’t have the time or energy for whatever was going on between us. Looking back, I believe our break up was difficult for her, as well, but Monica believed she had to do it—

I was not understanding of her situation, did not respect what she was going through, I was only looking through the filter of my own grief—it was all about what I was feeling. Writing this, I can see my own selfishness, my own lack of respect for this person I cared for so much—

I had to explain that to Monica, in 2025. That, too, is part of the process. So, I found Monica on Facebook and sent her a message.

Yeah, I see you—once again—shaking your head out there.

It was a simple message, basically what I just told you: I should have respected everything going on with her. should have understood her reasons, should have quit that stupid job straight away. 

We are not Facebook friends, odds are she will never see the message but I still had to express it to her. Somehow.

Most likely she will not see it and, if she does, she will never respond and I have made my peace with that.

Mostly…read on.

To write this book, I have to put myself back there, in 1997; it’s like time travel but on an emotional level. I have to feel what I felt back then, feel what I felt for Monica. I have not been in love with her for well over 25 years, I am not the same person—

But I can get close, close enough that a part of me hopes Monica will read the note and get in touch with me and—

Yeah, fucking stupid, but this is what I have done to myself the past couple of weeks, this is why I am working to finish this book as quickly as possible; this is easily the most intense writing experience of my life. It is emotionally overwhelming but it is, as I said earlier, the best writing of my life so I go with it. It’s my calling. It is now, it was in 1997, and ironically it was part of the reason why I lost Monica in the first place.