Wednesday, February 20, 2013
If you come from a small town & you want to be a writer
If you come from a small town & you want to be a writer, one of the first things you have to grasp is that every small town has a corner store owned by a guy named Larry across the street from the grammar school. & you will be marked forever as hopelessly provincial if you insist your Larry was the only Larry or the greatest Larry.
What saved me was that, as a teen, I spent nearly a month every year in Atlantic City, winter & summer, & stepping on the boardwalk at California Ave., looking north toward the great piers & The Traymore was always so awesome. I felt like other people feel when they go to a dark place & see the Milky Way. Next thing I'm back home sitting at the counter in Murray's drinking a cherry Coke & nobody understands that three or four times a year I'm having these religious experiences where I'm seeing disembodied psychic energy patterns left by Al Capone, Frank Sinatra, Dean & Jerry, & Freddie "Boom Boom" Cannon shouting "Wooo" as he flies by in front of Irene's Gift Shop.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson
What saved me was that, as a teen, I spent nearly a month every year in Atlantic City, winter & summer, & stepping on the boardwalk at California Ave., looking north toward the great piers & The Traymore was always so awesome. I felt like other people feel when they go to a dark place & see the Milky Way. Next thing I'm back home sitting at the counter in Murray's drinking a cherry Coke & nobody understands that three or four times a year I'm having these religious experiences where I'm seeing disembodied psychic energy patterns left by Al Capone, Frank Sinatra, Dean & Jerry, & Freddie "Boom Boom" Cannon shouting "Wooo" as he flies by in front of Irene's Gift Shop.
Labels: about writing, Atlantic City, growing up
