I am muddling along with Misdemeanors & Felonies, it is, as I knew it would be, difficult. I have been struggling through each chapter and I still haven't gotten close to what I know will be the real tough ones. Still, the early years are hard to write about also; I remember my formative years with a lot of pain, and I don't want to come off as whining. I hate whiners. Chapter 6 didn't get done yesderday. As I was writing it, I came to a startling conclusion that I was spinning my wheels.What we have here is a failure to communicate.
What a great line the chain gang warden said to Paul Newman in the movie "Cool Hand Luke." Those eleven words can be used in so many different situations. It can describe a hodgepodge of problems within our lives, from out-and-out marital unbliss to something so simple as how to go about writing your memoirs, or autobiography, or confession, hell I don't even know what to call what I am writing. I do know that the first five chapters of Misdemeanors & Felonies are written wrong. It isn't so much that the chapters are written wrong; the real problem is a lack of communication between myself and the pages of material I am writing. I have started out doing exactly what I said I was not going to do; I am trying to describe my life in a series of events.
That is a no-no.
The five chapters of Misdemeanors & Felonies can be rewritten when I am finished; I'm not going to start playing that rewriting-as-I-go game. The problem is my mental image of what I want the book to say. I don't plan on leaving anything out, but of course, that will happen whether or not I want it to or not. But the very important things will be dealt with and that is a promise. As I was starting on Chapter 6 I began to sense that all was not right with what I was doing. I was writing the chapter as if I would write a novel. No-no, Jerry, that ain't the deal. I thought I had that figured out, but I seem to want to slide back to my original intent and I can't let that happen.
What I want to accomplish here in Misdemeanors & Felonies, is not only to relate certain events that have happened, but to reach out to the reader and try to explain what I was thinking as I was doing whatever it was I was up to. If I was being a nice guy at some point, that needs to be brought out as well as the bad things. Although I am not a psychiatrist I haven't lived to age I am without picking up a certain understanding about human nature and what makes us tick. I haven't a college education, but I have street smarts and I have read many different philosophers, from Hippocrates to Rand (Ayn) to Sarte and Camus. Besides, understanding why we do things I don't think takes a brilliant mind, basically it takes common sense. Yes, there are dark places we go that the common person cannot penetrate, and therefore psychiatrists are needed to delve into their psyche, but I maintain that for the most part, people do things for two reasons: it makes them feel good to do it or it makes them feel bad to do it. The feeling bad can, and usually is incorporated into the "feel good" scenario, therefore there is only one reason we do things . . . For the most part it makes us feel good. You may think my idea that people who do things to "feel bad" and that it relates right back to the "feel good" status, you don't know much about masochism and its counterpart, sadism, because the two go hand in hand with the other, one is hardly able to exist without the other.
I went long today, but I needed to air out some things. Mainly what this was all about is that Misdemeanors & Felonies will be a telling of events, but more than that, it will be the telling of how I was thinking and feeling at the time. That is the key to understanding why humans perform the way we do while on this earth. . . .
See you tomorrow . . .
MY NOVELS:
Write To Murder . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/956621
Margaret and David: A Love Story . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/1072842
My Mother's Revenge . . . http://www.lulu.com/content/1132742
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