Throw a Hooker off the Egg Roof

It's not your fault when you have a great idea

OK, even though it’s going to seem that way from the jump, this is NOT fiction. This is an ESSAY. I am playing MYSELF and I did not make this shit up.

That being said, I just spent a month in bed tripping balls due to a recrudescence of typhus, which I caught because California is a fifth-world country and Paris is a vitamin-D-deficiency factory no matter how many gélules of vitamin D you want to avaler. I was born in neither of these places, I was born nowhere you’ve heard of at all, but once one domino falls you’re going to wind up wandering the world, so look out.

My conclusion was: OK, I’m done complaining about the state of the arts. It’s time to throw my egg box out the window.

NO! That is not a sexual reference. That is a segue to an old story about problem-solving.

As a novelist—and now that the novel is dead, a wandering storyteller—well, I’ve noticed (in tiresome detail) that novelists my age have been screwed by the unprecedented historical blah blah the Before Times.

Doing what we do seems to be impossible in an unprecedented manner, one we could have never predicted when we decided What I Will Work To Be When I Grow Up? as a child; it feels like a unique tragedy in human experience and we don’t know what to do.

Maybe—and this is dangerous, when people habitually confuse “childlike” with “childish,” but maybe—instead of getting lost in the weeds and details of learning to code, we need to go back to the basic human-brain architecture with which we used to be in tune, stop bitching, and listen for that spasm of intuition you felt the first time you figured something out that nobody else did.

Maybe quit feeling guilty about being different.

You’re probably not, really. You’re only noticing yourself. Rather than adhering to an “identity,” as the kids keep saying, or a “demographic,” as the old fucks do, you’re listening to the same person we’ve been having a conversation with since before we can remember: Good old, stupid old, familiar old Me.

When I grew up in the middle of nowhere, we didn’t really do “Gifted and Talented” stuff; we barely had the budget for Special Ed. When I got to college and found out that I didn’t even know what an Advanced Placement class was—I’d never even heard of it, but it seemed I needed it to get into half of the classes I wanted—I knew I was hosed.

There was one, brief attempt in sixth grade to devote a class period to the handful of us who could read at grade level, or maybe they chose us by stereotype: It was a bunch of weird boys and me. Most the class seemed to consist of taking tests; all I remember of them is that my teacher smugly told me I had very bad creativity.

The only memorable event was Egg Day: We were given a small parent-friendly budget, maybe three 1980s dollars, to spend on construction materials for a sort of egg-plane: We were given a raw chicken’s egg and told to build a contraption that could float it down from the third-story window to the pavement without breaking the egg.

I didn’t need the money; I immediately realized, as an enterprising child, what the sensible thing was to do. I found an old cardboard box, stuffed it with as many old newspapers as I could grab, put the egg in the middle, taped it shut, and had my weekend to myself.

When we got to school on Monday—well. I don’t know if this is a gender difference, or whether I’m from Planet Lazy and weird—in any case, what I considered sensible, everyone else considered cheating.

The looks on their faces! The receipts they had from Shopko, showing a total of two dollars and ninety-eight cents! The sheer engineering that went into the little legs they glued to those contraptions! The pencil sketches! The help from early desktop computers!

When I toddled in with my box full of newspapers—everyone knew in an instant that it took me five minutes, AND that it couldn’t fail—the looks they gave me were so full of rage, I sheepishly found some twine and a Kleenex so I could half-heartedly attach a “parachute” before drop-kicking it out the window.

Nobody was fooled. That thing hit the ground at terminal velocity, my egg didn’t even know he had fallen, and everyone else’s egg, in its glorious delicate chariot of the gods, was smashed to smithereens as they stared out the window and shook their fists.

Worse still, for them: The assignment was perfectly mis-phrased so that, if you were little shithead weirdo, you could justify interpreting the assignment my way. It failed to specify whether you were supposed to slow the egg’s fall, or pad its landing; it merely said “carry down” or a similar vague bit of poetry.

But if you paid attention to anything besides the instructions, they didn’t want you to pad the fall. Egg cartons were probably invented before airplanes, and this was an advanced class: The teacher wanted us to engineer some birdy shit. Everybody talked about it at length; I spent that discussion reading one of The Hitchhiker’s Guide books hidden under my desk, trying not to giggle. I already had my plan, like a miniature lawyer. (I’m pretty sure lawyering is what I should have done with my life, but unfortunately, I didn’t keep this same confidence during my late teens. There was too much screaming, and they didn’t want to come up with 60 dollars to apply to Harvard.)

OK, so it’s not much of a triumph tale; my dismayed classmates are all probably well-off engineers by now—still using my face as a dartboard, still doing things the way we meant you to do them, and I’m doing this still, so he who laughs last laughs best—but we’re only halfway through this vale of tears, motherfuckers.

I have always felt guilty about that incident, because everyone made it clear that I was cheating.

I wasn’t cheating, you assholes. I HAD THE BEST IDEA.

I’m sorry it didn’t take me eight hours to elaborate it, but maybe the eight hours I already spent staring at the wall today while you were playing with the two-thousand-dollar computer your divorcee dad guilt-purchased for you counted for something, eh?

Hm. Maybe it isn’t a gender difference. OR something wrong with me.

Well, the guilt trip worked, for far too long. Despite knowing better, I was inculcated with their flat-headed work ethic anyway. I spent decades learning to write. Learning to proofread. Learning Ancient Greek so I could study the classics….

Jesus Christ, I should have been showing my ass on the internet, I could have been a hooker pioneer.

But as long as you are pissed off, my friends, and yet self-contained, it is never too late.

I’m not quite sure what my box full of newspaper is yet. But god damn it, it’s time to be open to my own ideas again. Just because they’re good doesn’t mean they’re bad.