24. "If You Don't Live It, It Won't Come Out of Your Horn"
Intersection. This time around, I had the pleasure of working with lyssa027 whose companion piece to mine can be found here. Please check out her work and give her your support!
2,317 words. Approximately 11 minutes, 35 seconds. Audio version here.
People often ask me, “Sean, why are you such a genius?”
I’ll put aside for a moment that it is a poorly-phrased question (after all, which of us really knows the “why” behind our genius, as our gifts just come to us naturally with no effort whatsoever?), and will spend the next several paragraphs discussing myself and my genius. Really, these people that ask me why I’m a genius are just looking for me to discuss my abilities with them and to stand in awe of the true Renaissance man that is me.
And I’m all too happy to oblige them with this discussion, as I feel it’s important for people to really know and understand me, lest they decide that the pedestal that they have placed me on is undeserved and attempt to rip it out from under my feet, which will happen only over my dead body, because I have taken it upon myself to both constantly and consistently remind everyone how great I am. So, with all of that being said, let’s discuss me for a bit. And by “let’s discuss,” I mean please have a seat as I extol my many virtues and describe in painstaking detail my process, and why I am not yet a household name (I know it’s hard to believe, but there are few outside of my circles who know of my name, even as mind-blowingly awe-inspiring as I am).
You see, I have found in my life, that the greater the genius, the shorter the attention span. I’ve done so many things in my life, and excelled at all of them (of course), but I’ve never really been able to stamp my name on the world in any one medium, partly because I can’t handle being surrounded by mediocrity, and partly because just sticking to one thing is so boring.
I hope that you took a seat when I asked you to earlier. If not, you may want to find someplace comfortable now.
Allow me to list out all of the various things I have done amazingly at in my life and why I am no longer doing those things. Sure, there’s a common theme to all of them (I picked it up, realized I was great at it without even trying, and dropped it again when I got bored), but I think it’s really important that I be fully understood. I feel so misunderstood most of the time; I’ve heard that’s common among geniuses, but honestly I think that most of the people that say that are just looking for attention. It’s not the same with me; I’m just looking for people to truly understand me and my process, to fawn over me and shower me with the praise that I so often deserve yet so often do not receive. I’m pretty sure that people just don’t understand my greatness, and my need to really experience life and get this greatness out of my brain and into the world where it can be enjoyed by all.
So I will make you understand.
Let’s start with painting. Oh, I remember painting. The first piece I made as a young boy, it was… stunning, for lack of a word that really described the feelings it evoked. I had dipped the palm of my small hand into some tempera paint, and very carefully transferred that paint from my palm to the page. Then, using only my fingers, I added a beak and legs, creating an unusually unique looking creature. I hear what you’re saying, “That’s just a hand turkey;” yes, you’re pretty sure that everyone made those when they were children. But you don’t understand. My hand turkey wasn’t brown with a yellow beak and legs; I’m far too creative for something as childish as that, even as a boy of not yet five years old. My hand turkey was a stately green, with a purple beak and blue legs akimbo as though he was flying through a dream. Imagine that, if you will, and really let the feelings wash over you as you begin to understand my creations, my works, my art. That turkey was perfection personified, as evidenced by the fact that it graced our refrigerator door for weeks after I painted it. I’m sure that my parents sold it for quite a hefty sum after we had finished appreciating it.
But, that painting was just so perfect, so well-crafted, that it didn’t seem like I had anything more to learn about painting. I quickly produced a few more pieces (I did enjoy the way the paint felt on my fingers and my fingers on the paper; there’s nothing more delicious than really being in your art like that), just to prove to myself that it wasn’t a fluke, and then moved on to something else.
Recently, I decided that I wanted to pick up painting again. I’ve been looking for a creative outlet (it’s really hard holding all of this genius inside, I know you don’t know but I’m telling you) and thought, ‘Sure, I remember being great at this as a child prodigy; maybe I can pick it up again and produce something really wonderful as an adult.’ It was an unmitigated disaster. Not my piece, mind you; my piece was, well I hate to keep using the word “genius” but let’s face facts here. It was the people around me that were the disaster. I thought, because I may be rusty, that I would go to a local wine & paint night to practice my skills.
Everyone there was utterly and completely mediocre. Some of them even got tipsy and were just giggling their way through their painting with their friends like this was some sort of pleasure cruise. Disgusting is what that is. When I create, I want to be surrounded by like-minded creators that want to put their all into everything (as few and far between as those people may be). So, I put my everything into my painting, produced a work to be envied by the gods, and then put my paint brushes away for good. It’s just so boring being so amazing sometimes.
Let’s talk about music now. I am very much a musician at heart, a multi-instrumentalist (I play two different kinds of clarinet, some piano, and I’ve been told I play a mean triangle), a songwriter, a heartbreaker, a love-maker… I’m getting off-topic. Music stirs something in me, and it’s only right that I share that stirring with the world, yes? When I was a child, around the same time as I was producing works of staggering genius like “Green Turkey #5,” I was learning how to play the piano. I took to it like a fish to water. I remember going through the lesson books that my grandmother had stashed in her piano bench, lesson books from the mid-1950s that had that real atomic family kind of feel, my fingers gliding effortlessly over the keys. C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C… C, B, A, G, F, E, D, C. C-E-G-C-G-E-C. Scales, arpeggios, I could do them all. I wrote songs, wonderful songs that were much before their time, songs that my grandmother liked to call, “Stop that banging on random keys and play a real song.”
She just didn’t understand. I still have fond memories of those songs I wrote as a young child, but they were not meant for the world. The world wasn’t ready yet. It wasn’t until high school that I believed the world may be ready for the full force of my musical talents. I rented a bass clarinet from the school and began my tour de force. I was, naturally, first chair (of course, I must mention that I was the only bass clarinetist in the tri-county area, but I would have been the best even if there were others). My fingers would soar gracefully over the keys, my breath pouring forth from my lungs and producing a sound that made angels weep. Scales, arpeggios, chromatic scales… I could do anything and everything with that bass clarinet.
I wrote several etudes for the bass clarinet. My band teacher would tell me that my technique was fine but that my songs were nonsensical, without any sense of rhythm, time, or melody. He was jealous. But I persevered, and continued honing my craft throughout high school. At a certain point, though, music became just like painting for me. It was so easy, so boring; and I was surrounded by mediocrity everywhere I looked.
So I moved on. Drama, acting, this is where I would make my mark. Sure, there wasn’t any real creating involved if you think about it in the strictest sense. Reading the words of other people usually left a bad taste in my mouth, but I realized that I could actually have a lot of fun with this. After all, a true actor is more than just a reader of words on a page. A true actor is an artist, one who interprets the words on the page for an adoring audience. These roles I took on, I wasn’t content to just play them straight, or do anything as ludicrous as follow stage directions. These roles, they needed my genius to really shine. These plays, they were nothing without me.
Oh, and how I lamented having to sit through the soliloquies of the other actors (if I could really call them that), waiting my turn to do a world-shattering rendition of that one monologue from Ionesco’s “The Bald Soprano.” You know the one; where the maid comes out and tells everyone that even though the husband and wife that arrived at the party together seem to have realized that they actually are husband and wife, it turns out that due to a technicality, they aren’t really husband and wife at all, but two complete strangers. It was, well, world-shattering.
My acting teacher liked to say that she didn’t ever choose me for lead roles in plays because I was such an amazing character actor. Some folks might take that as an insult, having someone imply that they don’t have the looks or charisma to be a convincing leading man. But I chose to look at it for what it was, and attempted to steal the spotlight as much as I could in any role that I had.
Honestly, I don’t really remember getting bored with acting, per se; it was just the same thing as always. Every other person in class with me was such a ham-fisted overactor that whenever I would try to be the least bit creative with my roles, I felt like the only one willing to do so. They would tell me to just stick to the script, as though I was the one causing them to be bad actors by not saying the lines exactly as they were written. Ingrates. It’s just as well that they stopped inviting me to come back; I was over trying to work with such a lack of talent surrounding me.
So, failing to find anyone who really understood me and my genius in all of these different mediums, and getting bored with being so great at everything while being surrounded by just… garbage, I turned to writing. Now, I will say that I have a special fondness for writing; I’ve been dabbling in it since I was very young. As a result, I find that my genius as a writer is much more staggering than my genius in other mediums (but really, when you’re at my level, there isn’t really any way to quantify how much more staggering one bit of genius is over another), and as a result of that, I find that writing has a tendency to keep my attention longer than other mediums.
Sure, it’s easy for me to fill page after page with combinations of words that have never occurred to any other writer before. Of course I have no trouble writing very evocative pieces that can leave a reader gasping for air from laughing too hard, or that can leave a reader a sobbing mess on the floor. Of course I can let my thoughts spill out over the page without a cliched phrase or hackneyed rhetorical device anywhere in sight. It’s just what I do.
Sometimes I feel a little bad about it. For instance, I really don’t think it’s very fair to invite comparisons between myself and other writers; my light really just outshines everyone else’s. That doesn’t mean the other lights aren’t bright; they just aren’t brilliant like mine. I would never, for example, deign to enter some sort of competition for writing, in which my skills were to be judged by a jury of my peers and in which we would lose writers week after week until (of course) I end up at the top, winning the whole thing. That’s certainly not a way to endear people to me (even if I intellectually understand that it’s just because people are intimidated).
At any rate, I’ll certainly never let myself get bored with writing. There is too much at stake, too much that needs to be said, to let the world suffer without the presence of my words. Maybe this is my way of proving something to myself, that I can still be great when surrounded by… not-greatness. That I can still be revered and understood as the genius I am, even if no one else can really tell what I am saying. That I can push through the jealousy of other writers telling me that I am too palaverous, too haughty, too sesquipedalian to be any good.
No, I must not let myself tire of the psalms of the self-righteous, who seek to extinguish my light at every turn. I will write, in spite of everyone. I will create, and show the world that I am a force to be feared and celebrated all at once. And I most certainly will never