Fathers, sons, baseball: bad movies

This rote deflection of even the faintest praise isn’t humility, but a putrid species of narcissism.

He couldn’t take great prose. The thought of someone having written it was too exhausting.

They had gone so long without, a compliment would have destroyed them.

We spent the next two decades holed up on the Cape in a drafty pink ranch house where I slammed out hundreds of short stories for low-paying sci-fi pulps. As it turns out, financial ruin and amphetamines make for a powerful muse. For a time we had a side line raising mushrooms in our basement, but it never paid off. That period finally ended when a collection of my writing marketed under the title The Unsound Mind of L. Rand Steiner met with modest success.

Listen—I never really made it out of there. The kids gave up on me long ago. Ann and I no longer speak. There’s a bad feeling lodged deep in my chest. The last time we spoke my son looked me in the eye and said well, Dad, it’s been weird. I didn’t know if he was saying goodbye, and was afraid to ask.

Sitting in this chair, trying to not piss anyone off.

Years later he finally learned to appreciate the flavor of the shit sandwich.

Long after your actions and their results, the residue of your intentions.

Sick with worry, half-mad with hope. Talking to an empty room. Help is on its way.

Looking back, it’s clear that you were far more ridiculous than you realized at the time, and that the same is true today.

This incarnation wasn’t in the cards.

I was young. I thought I was an artist, but I didn’t even know what that meant. Looking back, I’m embarrassed—even now, for what is obvious to others but not to me.