Brave Fools and This One

By Cameron Glenn

Rebecca and her aspiring artist friends experience one last summer together before they head off for collage. Rebecca writes a beatnik inspired stream-of-conscience ramble from the perspective of a sad middle aged man.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cameron Glenn
• Release date: Jan 22, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370928705

Cameron Glenn

Cameron Glenn grew up the third of seven children in Oregon. As a child he dedicated hours to the pursuits of basketball and cartooning, as well as waking up way too early for his paper route in order to earn money to buy toys, candy and comic books. He also loved to read and write, which he continues to do voraciously. He currently lives in Salt Lake City after having earned a BA in literature from Boise State.

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Brave Fools and This One

By Cameron Glenn

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2017 Cameron Glenn

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Brave Fools

One

2014.

Read this all fast. Glance, breeze. Don’t think too much.

Ugh, graduation. The slick robes and weird square hats with the tassels. I’m sure there’s a reason for the tradition of the ugly graduation fashion, history and symbolism, and although it’d probably be pretty easy to Google the answers, I don’t really care. So much for continual intellectual curiosity, I guess. At least about the graduation getup. No one I know really cares either; it’s just one of those things that’s totally weird yet has become so interwoven into the cultural fabric over generations that you don’t really question it: you wear the ugly silk straight lined robe with the dorky square hat because everyone before you did when they graduated. Wearing the ugly getup is the last rule the school system forces on you before the squeeze is released and the people’s taxes are no longer used to support your education. You’re a little balloon let go of free to float up into the sky, and for the moment don’t think of the inevitable crash when the balloon deflates and sinks; just watch it float up and imagine it floating up forever into that perfect solid blue block of sky with the happy grazing puffy clouds.

You put on your face for graduation. Makeup. Want to look pretty for the pictures. The pictures to preserve forever this momentous hallmark life accomplishment, this marker of life advancement and aging. Like most of these types of things the parents make a bigger deal of it all then what is probably warranted and it’s all a bit embarrassing, how they mush over your baby pictures during this time, like you’re a participant to your own funeral. A weird mix of reminiscing and anxiousness of anticipations and dreams for the future going on, along with all the greeting card corny sentiments and crap, everything weighed down by generous drenching of syrup. But you put on your face, your makeup, if you’re a girl, because you want to look pretty, you always want to look pretty, that’s why god made you a female, to look pretty and have your prettiness be delightsome to the world, like a flower, so depressed creepy loser old men can ogle and smell you and get a smack of happiness by imagining touching you in their otherwise drab sad desperate lonely lives. Be a ray of sunshine. Be boner bait. So you put on your face, work the magic of makeup, the red over lips that makes your lips look like a blood drenched vagina, the blush on the cheeks to make you look flustered with excitement, the eye shadow and mascara to soften your eyes to make them look like they’ve been bruised. Curl your hair.

Moons don’t cry. That phrase struck me and bounced in my head a few days before graduation day. I try to be poetic sometimes. People hate poetry, think it’s all pretentious nonsense and poetry on display makes people understandably queasy. But for me, poetry offers an outlet for the zest of abandonment and nonsense I crave but am too sheltered and trapped to actually step out and experience. All our minds are filters which nature sifts through anyways, so we’re all naturally little art vessels so why not try and be poetic about it sometimes, in order to try and manufacture some beauty from the crap life throws at you. Maybe with all the overly corny sentiments that permeates over all pre-graduation preparations and ambiance, I was especially attuned to poetic musings. There was a pre-graduation fog that surrounded us as we inched closer to the cliff’s edge, to fall through the coming veil to enter the world of knowing that all the soul crushing, earth shaking momentous g-forces pressing in on us during the four year high school ride, really meant nothing. Outside our orbits we had thought was the universe are infinite galaxies that don’t know or care about us. We’re released from the gravitational pull and float lost in space. So, ‘Moons don’t cry.’ What does that mean? Nature’s indifference to mankind’s plight. So much romanticism, emotions, myths, menstrual cycles are associated with the Moon, but Moon’s don’t cry. I wrote ‘Moons don’t Cry’ in some Junior girl’s yearbook, drew a picture of a crying moon next to it, ironically I guess, handed it back to her and she glanced at it then gave me a look like I had wiped the page between my butt crack leaving a brown smudge on her page rather than my autograph. Oh yeah, poetry freaks people out I thought. I should keep that in mind as I go and try to be a writer.

One perk of youth is that you can hold big dumb sloppy dreams and not yet be considered sad, silly, or desperate for doing so. Too young to yet be a failure. Potential decays with time but while it’s big in you let it burn bright, let it excuse foolishness, among other justifications. Use it before you lose it, same as your looks, before you slather that makeup on a face with saggy jowls that portend the saggy boobs and saggy butt and molasses minuets grown cold and bland you stew in watching the same game shows your mom watched, Vanna the smiling cyborg spinning letters while cyborg host Pat Sajack interviews a contestant: Oh, what part of Miami are you from, underwater Miami or above ground Miami?

I can’t be a model or a fashion designer, can’t be a professional tennis player (out of all the professional athlete opportunities for women, tennis pays by far the best, nearly as much as men, and if you happen to also look cute in a skirt like I do, you’ll get hundreds of millions extra in endorsements; I used to daydream of being a gymnast but there’s really very little upside for them for the amount of work required to be decent at that discipline; same with dancers) I can’t cure Alzheimer’s disease or rescue Japanese dolphins or find the way to harness the suns energy to a degree that we won’t need fossil fuels anymore, thus saving the earth, can’t be a environmental or immigration lawyer, can’t impact the world for good in that way, not smart enough, not talented enough to be a singer, either pop star or indie, or rapper, or actor, so can’t become important (all people known by the masses contain more importance than the silent ones no one knows of; that’s the biggest lesson school taught); I don’t think I want to be a teacher, I respect their value to society as any good person should, but there’s a hint of something depressing it feels in how they witness kids pass through their classes, conveyer belt like through the years, while teachers are stuck repeating the same lessons, going over the same books, explaining about the same types of rocks, ad nauseam.

I wonder what teachers think about graduations, their significance pertaining to them only being a yearly event signifying three months of vacation until the next school year starts. But maybe, why not, be a writer; an easy thing to give a try anyways, even if every other person is also giving it a try and the chances for success are basically the same as your chance of venturing out to sea in a driftwood boat and discovering a secret island that has a cave full of talking gummy bears.

A side note: I watched a live-stream of cool teen pretentious New Zealand pop star Lorde at Coachella and she was like a god up there on stage, a disarming amount of confidence that I think only the young, not yet beat down or disappointed by life, can have, yet still be a bit awkward, like, there’s a sense that when she swears she does so thinking she’s using ‘cool big girl’ words. Yet she was great, I really like her and her songs, not manufactured canned factory pop but authentic gems from her own mind, and it’s great that true authenticity can still become world stage huge in art and music. That she’s around my age should make me more of a fan of hers, like, proud of a peer or whatever, but truthfully it sort of agitates a tad because I have to fight against an irrational jealousy that creeps up.

I like poetry; she writes great lyrics I could never write. Yet, digging deeper into the ‘what’s your current take on Lorde’ analysis, it’s also a tinge sad, I thought, seeing her command that stage in that swagger way, not sounding as good as her album voice yet still being a good performer, thinking that, perhaps she’s at the zenith already of her life and career and she’s too happily dumb to know it yet, and how kind of scary and sad that possibility is, to be the best you’ll ever be at age seventeen. With eighty more years of life left to go, eighty years reminiscing on the one year you were your best self, when, ironically at the time, part of what made it so good was the bliss of imagining how much better it could all yet still be.

A common high school joke goes ‘if these are supposed to be my best years of my life then kill me now’ or something like that. When I think of Lorde (that’s her stage name; she added the ‘e’ at the end to make the name appear more feminine) I also can’t help but think of Sky Ferreira, (another young pop star I’m currently into, who’s prettier, has better songs, in my opinion, was also signed by a record label at thirteen, because I guess that’s what happens now, record labels snatch up young girls and wait for them to ripen before picking and sending them to market, so if you’re not on a music label by age eighteen and want to be a pop star, too bad, you’re out of the game before you even got to play, granny) and why Sky Ferreira never exploded, as of now, the way Lorde has, and how that just means it’s all a random crapshoot, who makes it and affects culture and people’s lives and infiltrates so many millions strangers minds and is loved by millions, and who, just as talented, tries and struggles yet is loved by only dozens or no one.

But I digress too much. A bad habit I swear I’ll curb. So I thought I’d try and be a writer. And rather than just talking about it, I thought I’d actually start it. Because magic elves won’t do it for you while you sleep: that’s a line from one of the billion YouTube advice videos for the billion, at any given moment, give or take five, who aspire to be professional writers.

I decided I’d write a kids novel. But, one of those kids’ novels that adults aren’t embarrassed to read or obsess over. An American Harry Potter. An embarrassing admission, but if you’re going to be ambitious prop your ladder against a full moon not a crescent moon (moon’s don’t cry). I had character names and a rough outline and general direction I wanted it to go; I knew the ending twist.

A royal family, young parents with young children, from a magical fantasy kingdom are under siege by a population swept up in revolutionary revolt, and the royal adviser magician guy creates a dimension portal for them to escape through as the mob rushes at them, then they end up on Earth, in America, San Francisco, but going through the portal wiped out most of the children’s memories of their fantastical place of origin. So then, eleven years later, while the family is vacationing at Yellowstone, big beetle machines come and kidnap the children’s parents and then the royal adviser guy comes and explains shit to them and they go through a geyser portal to their magical kingdom in a quest to rescue their parents and rescue the kingdom, which is run by this evil dictator guy.

And maybe they have magical super powers because of similar reasons to why Superman has powers; soaking up so much of the earth’s sun during those years gave them powers when they go to this other dimension, and maybe their dog talks because that’d play really well for the movie adaptations. Then the twist would be that the kids parents were actually horrible monarchs and the main moral would be monarchies are ridiculous so stop worshiping and fawning over the British royal family you stupid American’s.

And yes, I’m vaguely familiar that this story resembles the tale of the Russian Czars who were killed during Russia’s Red revolution, pretty doll Anastasia and creepy long clawed Rasputin or whatever, and fictional variations of this story have probably already been told, but oh well. I filled about a notebook’s worth of effort on this project, trying to keep in mind certain ‘rules’ for writing children’s literature: tight plot, clear direct sentences, constant forward momentum, heavy on dialogue, to explain and move the story forward rather than just yammering, dialogue is easier and more fun to read than just prose and works well to establish character and character relationships, show an abundance of both imagination and humor, kid humor, silliness is good while still respecting their intellect, plot and character matter above all, minimize poetic metaphors, plot matters more than prose and… there was lots of other things I tried to keep in mind while trying to write this thing, like, magically become more clever and wise than I ever have before, and really, any good general rule of writing is pretend to be a con person; the word ‘author’ comes from ‘authority’ after all, and all the famous opening lines of famous novels are strong declarative statements, such as ‘men with money want a wife’ to paraphrase Jane Austin, or ‘all happy families are alike, all unhappy families are, whatever,’ to paraphrase Tolstoy.

But it got too hard. Creating a fantasy world is hard. People who are able to do it with any success probably find it fun, and there’s the rub. I didn’t become eager to write it. And if writing feels more like pushing a boulder up a muddy hillside rather than sliding down a mudslide, then the writing probably just isn’t any good; readers shouldn’t be able to feel the slog of creation.

So I’ll write this instead. It’s about the summer after graduation. My crazy dumb friends and I. The last pulse of the wave as it crests to crash to the shore. One last tight sip of air of anticipation, one last gasp and release, one last thrust and wasted time and regrets made while the inner mantra ‘regret nothing’ hums; romance, sex and gore, staring at walls, ceilings, stars and horizons, blank and open, confused yet confident, and loving and hating everyone by the end, eager to leave, scared to let go, one last whiff of nostalgia over the cheerful simplicity of childhood, only simple in retrospect.

Finger painting one last beautiful mess before the awareness hits the mess