Shakespeare at the Buzzer
Calvin and Hobbes always knew what was up.
At 2 pm on Black Friday, I was laying on the couch, stuffed with six pounds of turkey in my stomach, when I realized I had yet to write the new edition of the Gonzo Papers that was to be published in two days. Knowing my loyal audience would be craving it, I immediately dragged my fat ass to my top-secret Writing Bunker to brainstorm. Gripped by last-minute panic, I frenziedly wrote a draft that didn’t make much sense, a long moaning session about how my biweekly “deadline” was too much to handle.
Luckily for you, that’s all changed. I had been scrambling to finish each blog before the two weeks were up and was producing subpar material because of it, and then my editor K. Evelyn Dean offered some great advice: “it’s your blog, so write it whenever the hell you feel like it about whatever the fuck you want.” Exactly. Therefore, from now on, I’m gonna write and post these whenever I damn well feel like it. Sue me. You think Shakespeare had some greedy publisher breathing down his neck for him to finish Romeo and Juliet? Hell no. Shakespeare wasn’t even real.
This post comes slightly more than two weeks after the last one, but I’m happier with the result. That’s a good thing, because when I started this blog I was young and full of energy, but now that I’m old and bloated I’m more willing to sacrifice deadlines in favor of quality. After all, my first draft was a jumbled mess, and this one ties together last-minute panic, Thanksgiving, Kevin Bacon, and Where the Sidewalk Ends in an almost-coherent fashion. That, I believe, is the wonderful power of revision in action. And believe me, folks: I do this all for you. You guys deserve the very best I can give you, because I know how much it means to you. Just look at the wall of my Writing Bunker, where there’s a large motivational sign that says “Write confidently, especially when you’re totally clueless. Everyone will believe you if it seems like you know what you’re talking about.” See? I’m a blogger of the people.
Okay, so first, Thanksgiving. Some things were the same this year: 1) more calories consumed in three days than the rest of November combined, and 2) turkey sandwiches for like six meals straight. Other things, however, were different: 1) we didn’t get together with my relatives, and 2) to keep us busy my mom organized the Rhodes COVID Olympics. I know it sounds like a bad game show hosted by Steve Harvey that airs at 2 pm on the CW, but the COVID Olympics were a series of ten events that my family competed against each other in over the Thanksgiving weekend. Events included best watercolor painting, farthest kick of the shoe off your foot, most free throws made out of 15, best parallel parking, closest Husker score prediction, and more. And the event that’s most relevant this week was our “poetry slam.”
Action shot of me taking gold in the popcorn event at the 2020 COVID Olympics.
Ah, poetry. Right. It’s like jazz: no one gets it, everyone is confused by it, and yet somehow those who practice it professionally are accorded some sort of reverence. As far as I’m concerned, the only poet worth praising is Shel Silverstein, because his poems 1) rhyme and 2) are funny. That’s good poetry, the real, solid, accessible, meaningful stuff. Shakespeare’s stuff—all 154 of those damn sonnets—was too dense and didn’t even rhyme, plus Shakespeare wasn’t a real person. Look it up. Shakespeare was actually Sir Francis Bacon, or Kevin Bacon, or nobody at all. In my Writing Bunker I keep a picture of Shel Silverstein on the wall for inspiration.
“There was a young man from Decatur
Who slept with a LOX generator
His balls and his prick
Froze solid real quick
And his asshole a little bit later.”
For the record, this is my favorite poem. It’s from Gravity’s Rainbow.
For those who don’t know, “poetry slams” are these things where people perform original poems in front of a crowd. My mom, who used to coach the Gretna High School poetry slam club, told us that for the COVID Olympics we each would have to write and then perform a poem of our own. Sitting at my desk in my Writing Bunker, looking at my portrait of Shel “Stanza King” Silverstein, trying to find something to write about, I was totally stuck. I hadn’t written a poem since elementary school, and that was when we learned what haikus are. If you’re ever in a pinch and need a haiku, here’s one: “I don’t like haikus/Poetry doesn’t make sense/Refrigerator.” Feel free to use that, as long as you pay me twenty bucks in copyright royalties each time.
Anyway, this all relates to last-minute panic. My mom had given us a deadline of noon on Saturday to write our poems, and at 11 a.m. I hadn’t even started and didn’t have any viable ideas. Then I went to the local supermarket to pick up some groceries. When I got home, the deadline bearing down on me, my creativity turned on just like Calvin’s. I went straight to my Writing Bunker and wrote a poem called “Supermarket” in fifteen minutes. It took Shakespeare months to write Romeo and Juliet, and that was just his ghostwriters trying to come up with a title as boring as Romeo and Juliet.
A sample from “Supermarket”:
There’s too many veggies, too many fruits
for a mere mortal man like me
If I were brave and fought lizards and newts
I’d raid all the produce with glee
Okay, so it’s not great—in fact I got dead last in the poetry slam—but in another stanza I did manage to rhyme “concerning” with “undiscerning.” Let’s see Shakespeare’s ghostwriters top that. Getting last didn’t bother me, of course, as all the great poets are misunderstood. If you don’t grasp the depth of my work, then it’s not my fault. Clearly my poetry is just years ahead of its time, like modern art or the 2012 Blackberry smartphone I keep in my Writing Bunker. You think Shel Silverstein was properly appreciated during his career? The fact he never won the Nobel Prize in Literature is one of the greatest injustices in literary history. Interestingly enough, he did win two Grammys, but that’s not enough.
Calvin gets it.
I also knew there was no way I was going to edit the poem once it was written. First draft, best draft, is what I always say. When you’re working on a deadline, your best ideas will come to the fore. Regardless of how many times you write a new draft, the unfiltered original will always contain some of the best elements. Once that last-second buzzer gets close—whoosh, baby, we’re heading to the moon. William Faulkner knew this, and he wrote the first draft of As I Lay Dying in six weeks and didn’t change a word of it for publication. That won him a Nobel Prize, but somehow Where the Sidewalk Ends wasn’t good enough for the Nobel committee.
Oh well. Now that I’ve unburdened myself from the constraints of a biweekly deadline (it’ll still probably be about that long between posts) I’ve got some ideas for some real experimental shit in the future. In fact, if I wasn’t getting stomach cramps from yet another turkey sandwich, I might have even written this whole blog as a poem. I thought about it, but the only word I could think of to rhyme with “bunker” was “spelunker.” Somehow I don’t think Sir Kevin Bacon ever thought of that one.
Seriously, Shakespeare wasn’t real. I don’t care what the “experts” say. Bill Shakespeare was as fictional as Romeo.
