this is...
a golden age of creativity for us all. 2009 may not be 1929, but it is reminiscent of 1930. Zelda's life was gutted by the depression / recession that slowly drifted into our lives in the past year. "People in New York are jumping off of buildings," a phrase that stuck with me since the demise of Lehman Brothers last year. And then priorities changed in her life and mine. Over a year ago, Zelda had a nervous breakdown that shattered us, yet she accepted the need for her treatment. Alcohol frayed whatever remained between us. And with nothing left to gain, we departed ways. I fled to France. I started working on a boo about a man, whose potential partially realized yet still without limitations, makes the fatal decision to marry a beautiful yet mentally ill woman, destroying their relationship on the brimstone and cliffs of Northern California.
As such, me and Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald are inexorably linked. I never meant to pattern myself after anybody, yet circumstance and fate brought us together. My father gave me the novel "Some Time in the Sun" at an early age, before I even read the Great Gatsby, Brave New World, The Sound and the Fury, or The Day of the Locust, but the stories of Fitzgerald, Huxley, Faulkner and West living and dying in the heat of Los Angeles resonated beyond any word written by Tom Dardis. A day after Fitzgerald died from a heart attack (complicated by excessive drinking), West perished in a car accident in Imperial County. The other characters of the story have their own dramatic ends: Zelda was famously incinerated in a mental institution, Huxley received 100 mgs of LSD to his demise, Faulkner also crushed by a heart attack in a Mississippi Sanitorium.
I never hope to wrestle with my own sanity yet it seems inevitable. As we age, the less we question and the more we accept our fate. I won't ever come back for Zelda, but I certainly hope she won't bring me to my demise. At least not now.
As such, me and Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald are inexorably linked. I never meant to pattern myself after anybody, yet circumstance and fate brought us together. My father gave me the novel "Some Time in the Sun" at an early age, before I even read the Great Gatsby, Brave New World, The Sound and the Fury, or The Day of the Locust, but the stories of Fitzgerald, Huxley, Faulkner and West living and dying in the heat of Los Angeles resonated beyond any word written by Tom Dardis. A day after Fitzgerald died from a heart attack (complicated by excessive drinking), West perished in a car accident in Imperial County. The other characters of the story have their own dramatic ends: Zelda was famously incinerated in a mental institution, Huxley received 100 mgs of LSD to his demise, Faulkner also crushed by a heart attack in a Mississippi Sanitorium.
I never hope to wrestle with my own sanity yet it seems inevitable. As we age, the less we question and the more we accept our fate. I won't ever come back for Zelda, but I certainly hope she won't bring me to my demise. At least not now.