Crom Unhinged

Thursday, May 8th, 2008

Under the influence

A little while back, or probably more like 3 years ago, somebody asked me who my writing influences were.

At the time I didn’t really have an answer that made any sense. I sort of muttered a number of non-committal things, made a strange and possibly incorrect reference to the works of William Burroughs, and then chugged the rest of my Rye & Coke. I’m not sure if I have a better answer now, but people have asked me again, so the issue is moving to the forefront once again.

When I was 15 I would have told you that I wanted to be Robert Heinlein. BE HIM. Not be LIKE him, I mean scoop his brain out, remove my own, and place it into my meat-shield. I would have been pretty happy with that…well…for like 20 seconds or something. I loved Heinlein. He represented a stream of thought that was so free, and in line with my own hearts desires. He was a writer who had actually thought about the Taboo’s, Laws, Emotions, and Failures of humanity, and had drawn conclusions of his own. He had thought of things that transcended the canalizing effect of apron string knowledge, and try to think in a way reconcilable with logic and compassion.

Sometimes he won, sometimes he lost, but he played the game his own way.

But life is a slow release from ignorance, and the fact is, I’m not Robert Heinlein. And more importantly, if I valued the idea of thinking for myself, and breaking free from the indoctrination I received in my formative years, than my final lesson had to be overcoming those same things from my mentor. The student surpasses.

As I got older, I found myself drawn to a lot of separate sources.  In the end, my own twisted mechanism fell in with a writer that many of us aspire to be as crazy as: Hunter S Thompson. So much so, that I found I emulated his writing. For a time I was content to think of the world as a Mechanism that had no respect for the Process. A harsh playground, populated with cold-hearted pimp/bullies, who shook their fists in the air, and bellowed at me for control. A piss filled crevice, lorded over by cheap, fuck-off politico’s with gilded whores on their arms, pumping our wallets to feed their appetites, and leaving the Common Man, raped and worthless on the street corner.

But that was always a little too hardcore. I still feel amazed when I read Thompson. He was a high-powered scientist, with a jeweler’s eye for politics and the theater of life, capable of distilling complexities with precision, while consuming that which was distilled. Those who envy him, often envy the hard line he walked, and assume that to achieve the same Gonzo Power, you need to be as twisted as Hunter was. Sadly, they are wrong, and I’ve mentioned it before. Hunter was a journalist of immense talent, and his daily grind and snort was the past-time that helped him endure his tour of duty in the emotional hurricane of Journalism in the time of Agnew, Nixon, and the Powers That Be.

Now I feel like I’ve actually started to touch my own voice, and it contains within it some of the elements of those mentioned above, and others that have crossed my path. I love reading, and I love to feel the skein’s of thought that authors and ‘wrights take us all on. Writing Panda Girls, and working on the novels I’ve been chewing up for the last few years (Two of them, and they are whores who do not love me), I’m searching now for the joy of writing, and trying not to worry too much about changing anybody’s life.