As I travel the familiar but foreign path of Jack Sawyer, Morgan Sloat, Speedy Parker, and the sick Queen, I cant help but ask myself, haven't we been here before? Is it Empis? Is it BooY'a Moon? Is everything really eventual? I am enamored by SK, and he essentially taught me to write, but I feel he goes back to the same well a little too much, and yet its still worth it to read between the old worn paths. Something I've been thinking about lately—studying his sickness to compare to my own as I have—I don't get the impression that he ever really REALLY suffered much from the crippling emotional/mental torture of not knowing what you did out in public on a blackout bender, and being forced to pick up the pieces as best you can, face the music. His, at least as I perceive it, was more private and self contained, which I frankly cant relate to and am envious of. I mean there's no stories of him getting arrested or kicked out of bars or found face down in the gutter. There are plenty of those about me, and that does show up in my writing I suppose. These were things that F. Scott was more familiar with, and it did surface in his writing later on, how could it not? I'm NOT saying SK didn't suffer enough in his hell, I think I'm just saying we're different species of monsters, but one can still learn from the other.
by inappropriateshallot