The first paragraph of my ill-fated novel

from this time last year. Read + weep.



"Lots of times these people go around complaining about their overbearing parents. The ones who push them excessively towards excellence. The demanding, fanatical brand of parenting. They seem to heap onto their children all of their own hopes and ambitions. Perhaps those unfulfilled, or other times in a wild, perhaps unconscious act of vanity, (which is probably the first reason these people ever have children) they wish their children to exactly mimic their own career paths. Mommy's a mathematician, Daddy’s a part time psychoanalyst, part time poet, and so Junior and Juniorette are shoved headlong into those same straightjackets of destiny. “I always knew little Junior had a sensitivity, a propensity, a prodigious proclivity for poetry…HE GETS IT FROM ME”. If Junior becomes a poet, then it proves validation for Daddy Dearest’s genetic prowess. Indeed, it would appear this father had endowed his own gifts upon his son, by some wave of the magic penis, and having never ever “pushed” Junior to “become like me” or ever schooled him in the art of poetry since before the boy could walk, no none of that determined the boy’s fate; it must have all been just a natural touch that was passed down generationally. Then, by a colossal accident of Mendelian wizardry, the boy comes to see poetry as his vocation. It’s quite a Catholic event: clouds parting, heart opening, lightning striking…Boom, Bip, Kazaam, boy is poet. He pens lines, knowing not whence they’ve come, and in his head, like a young seminary student, he feels a great conviction, an affinity with the lifestyle of his desired profession, that of the poet, and that he must never stray from the road to celestially inspired verse."