Free Speech
I’ont remember my first story. I do remember that day though. Those few moments while I was looking at the blank screen in front of me, coming to terms with what the teacher was saying, are etched into who I am. We can write anything, I asked? ANYTHING?!
People forget this, but schools were pretty much prison back then too, I mean maybe not like today, but they had order and all that. So I had a real hard time understanding what was happening. The teacher kept walking around, smiling. Was it a trap? I decided to fall into it, even if it were. ANYTHING?!
I remember the title of the story my best friend wrote, who was sitting next to me in the dark computer lab, because years later we would dart glances at each other during our first sex ed lesson. He called his story “Wet Dream,” and it was some kind of underwater adventure tale. For years I have tried to remember mine, but it is so overwhelmed by that feeling from just before I started writing, so overpowered by that flash in my timeline, the one that changed my life, that there is just no way I can glimpse it from so far away. ANYTHING?!
I had some superhero that I build my worldview around during the years prior to my intake into the public prison/school system. He had a sword the was sort of magic, and he hung out with his tiger sidekick. The sword was very nearly all-powerful. On that day, so early in my youth, I was given my sword. ANYTHING?!
Sometimes it’s all fucked up and the magic isn’t working. Sometimes I slip and cut myself. For the most part, though, this sword has been great. I guess I don’t have a tiger, or it is gone now, maybe it died or whatever, hasn’t come yet, but the sword is enough. If it didn’t have the power to write about anything, if just the tiniest nick on its cutting edge prevented just one single word, I would throw in on the ground. The pristine blade of this sword, its flawless, is the sole source of its power. ANYTHING?!
I have used it for all kinds of things, but I am rarely saving the world with it, which is stupid, because something this world has not been a disappointment with is the magnitude and prevalence of malevolence to battle. Like I said though, most times I’m just opening pickle jars with it, or scratching marks in the dirt on nice days, or inching my back. Evil rarely gets slashed up at all, by this sword anyway. I know I can if I want though, so of course I drag the thing around with me, and never even think to put it down. ANYTHING?!
It’s sort of heavy, and it leaves marks, and it...
Let us just say this: if it couldn’t write about anything, and maybe here I mean everything, I’d drop it in a heartbeat.
Sometimes I use it like I should. Every so often I will light it on fire, it will be burning me and the pain will be so sweet, and I will march into the darkness. The voices are above me, maybe inside of me, and they guide me toward the dragon. “When you leave the village search around, find the darkest, most evil looking place in the forest, and enter the tree line there.” The sword is burning, my mind is ice, and I enter. I always come back with the dragon’s head, and the village will be lit from the flames I have put on the earth behind me, and...well, that’s of course why I keep the thing, why I never let it go. ANYTHING?!
When you can write about anything at all you can do those things in the forest, and you can come back home after saving the world, and there just aren’t many feelings like that. Maybe a really good streak in baseball, when you are hitting the ball all over the park, and you nestle into that cleanup spot, and your fielding perks up because of that. You are smiling on a baseball field in America! Maybe baseball has something like that, something like when you do those things in the forest with the sword. On a blue moon streak, when you laugh and look at the pitcher after striking out, because you know, fundamentally know for fact, that a near impossibility stopped you from ripping that ball into left. Even off the field, at the pizza places and around town, when you take that cloak with you, because it isn’t just on the diamond that you wear it, and you talk to the girls and look into their eyes, and the cloak is purple, and you think you will die in it. Maybe that feeling, that one borne from baseball, is close to the sword one. Maybe. But you know what, nobody ever dies in that purple cloak. There aways comes a day, bright under a summer sun, when you blast a curveball into the blue sky, and you for the first time in your life you let up a half step while rounding first, and you are anticipating that kingly trot around the infield—a returning Roman on his Triumph—and then seeps in that horror decay, that rot of life, and your cloak turns to dust, as you are forced to shift into an unseemly run, because you see the ball bounce off the top of the fence. Puff.
So there is that one thing, that baseball thing, that is a great thing, though fleeting, not lasting a lifetime, not close, and even if you find other small things of power, huge power, nothing will ever last like, or rival the power of, a blank sheet of paper.