This is how I wrote when I graduated from high school. A wonderfully longwinded cacophony of overreaching prose. Commas scattered, like grammatical buckshot, amongst my blinding abundance of pretentious adjectives. To arrogantly split infinitives was my mission. I made the mistake of dreaming my audience idolized every precious, poetic syllable that dripped from my pen. I didn't have an audience then and now that I do you don't give two shits either way.
In my first year of university I began to hate that garbage. That's how the theatre fags talked, how the egotists -stuck in their eighth-grade glory days- wrote. The profs laughed at their snivelling suck-uppery and I despised all of them. So I wrote like this, got straight A-'s, and I decided I should write a book.
This was still all in my first year and as much as I have implied my hatred for the egotists, I was clearly one of them. Though back then my code for egotist was "intellectual" and I was the only one. I read Kerouac and Burroughs and Rand and Vonnegut. I stood out amongst my miserable, in-the-way classmates walking the halls of my school. My green, knitted chapeau and thick-framed glasses spelled out my superiority and significance in flashing, yellow-orangey, Broadway-ish bulbs. I smirked.
At this point he paused and wondered whether the first-person narration was as intellectually powerful as Dave Eggers had led him to believe. The bums around the bus stop glanced curiously at the wall of pencil-text on his douchey yellow legal pad. He was a fake. This was evident by the green chapeau. Not to mention the unnecessarily loud indie music pumping from his headphones (carelessly hung around his neck as if he had forgotten they were there, noisily blasting the sounds of that new band: "Meticulously Researched Playlist Of Post-Rock That Only The Most Amazing Potential Girlfriend Would Recognize And Conveniently Approach Him To Discuss."). Even the bums knew this.
He took a moment from his clever soliloquy of self-deprecation to peer down the street for the bus. It was not coming. He continued to stare at a distant sign post though. Maybe the bums would notice and recognize the intelligent look of quiet contemplation on his face. Of course they would. They're staring at him in open admiration of his youth and virility right this very moment. He can tell. He chuckles proudly, with condescension and reluctant acceptance of his sheer magnitude. He misspelled "sheer" on a test fifty-four minutes ago.
At that point I really began to doubt the third-person thing too. It seems so high-school-short-story. So "see-Dick-run". Is there another option? How does second-person actually work? Nobody ever explains that to you. There! Was that second-person? Do you just refer to everyone as you? You continue to read your words and wonder to yourself whether you should have yoused a different point of vyou. You do. I do.
-Sad Blogger
