ROAR!!!

I have seen your true face, the one you hide from the world for fear they might find your real heart.

But I have seen it! And I know your story. I know!

Before your world was destroyed, I know you wanted to become an author. I know you were originally a person of no great means. Gravitas, panache, erudition and élan, I will gently say, were not skills you possessed in abundance.

You were not the consummate spell-binding raconteur, nor the preeminent linguistic taxonomist who could regale us about the history of the Azilian and Tartarian seignories of Europe that evolved into all of the Indo-European languages as well as into language-isolates like Sumerian.

You were not the shamanistic polyglottic lexicographer applying a ruthless applicationem amalgamating ontology, philology, etymology, epistemology, hermeneutics and grammatology in an iteration of post-structuralism that made Derrida salute from the grave.

Your writing lacked raw talent, but it also lacked the puffery of the classic overreaching neophytic ingénue with their sophomoric and abecedarian postulates. There was no artfully-placed schlock, witty bon mots, or wistful je ne sais quoi to sort through; just beneficence and grace.

I know these things because I found your black notebook, on the bottom floor of a coffee shop, tucked in back of some books on a “take one, leave one” bookshelf. Judging from the layer of hoary dust and a single date I found scribbled in the margins, the notebook had been there for at least five years. It contained a series of stories that weren’t actually that good, but your preface splayed my soul open to a core I had forgotten was there.

I was smitten. You smote my heart.

You explained that you were dying of cancer, with no family to carry on your name or memory, so you had carefully hidden a collection of your works in a place where you hoped someone would one day find them, and having read them, perhaps wonder about your life.

I want you to know that I carried around your notebook for weeks, holding it to my heart with reverence. You see, I too am an aspiring author, and your words inspired me. Truly! Not the ones in your stories – those were actually not very good. It was your personal story which inspired me.

Concerning rhetorical acumen, it needn’t be said sub-rosa that new authors tend to be readily armed with the usual grabbage of operative suppositions, presumptions, assumptions, conjecture, theories, hypotheses, axioms, appropriations, usurpations, arrogations, presuppositions, premises, effrontery, meretricious gall and pure waffle. Your work exuded none of this.

You understood Aristotle’s Three-Act structure and Freya’s Pyramid, the Peak Experience and the Final Denouement all well enough. From your annotations, you clearly felt that your manuscripts were just bits and nubs of an impossible and wasted dream.

Your crib notes explained that your loved ones often asked why you wrote, what is it that compelled you, and there was no immediate answer. Following their Guidon of Assholery, this Panzergroup said you would never monetize your work. You wrote “Were numbers so important to them? Then let them have numbers!”

In your margins you calculated that the average human being lives around 75 years * 365 days * 24 hours * 60 minutes, living an accumulative 525,600 minutes in one year, and 39,420,000 minutes in their lives.

By extension, you estimated that you had spent three decades of researching, sketching out, writing and editing twenty manuscripts of around 100,000 words each, with similar numbers of rejected words that didn’t make the cut. There were well over 4 million typed words and 4 million more written in your labor of love.

In those three decades of 15,768,000 minutes, easily 5 million moments were completely dedicated to what your mother perceived as a Sisyphean nightmare. It was thirty years of 12 days off in 12 months of 12-hour days and you even estimated how many trees you had killed to get from there to here.

You calculated that if a standard pine tree is around 1 foot in diameter and 60 feet tall, then it must have a volume of around 81,430 cubic inches. Discarding the unusual parts of the tree such as knots, lignin, and branches, you estimated that about 50% of that mass could be turned into pulp, with the yield being about 805 pounds of paper.

Since every ream of 17” x 22” paper weighs 5 pounds and contains 500 sheets, then each tree produces around 80,500 sheets of paper. In 30 years of writing, you had slain 30 trees. At the bottom of page 12 you asked your critics “Were those enough numbers for you?”.

As I read them, your stories were a machina of mythology with a dry tautology that would be difficult for any writer to sex up. To your critics, so smug in the proprietary of their correctitude, your stories were just tales, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, and worse yet, read by no one. I’m sure you wanted to get right to the rasa of the subject in a way which made the reader sit up and say “My God!” but you couldn’t.

You weren’t that kind author.

But there is the thing. As soon as I read your story and gave you even a modicum of appreciation, you were no longer a writer, you were an author. And so you are! We authors can make a grocery-list read like a rhapsody of Rumi or a soliloquy of Shakespeare, and we have no need for the approbation of Luddites.

Our writing may not always be chic and exquisite, succinct and graceful, or even simple and elegiac, but it is our gift to the world, and let them at least respect that much. Your biographical comments were the real story – the one inscribed on my heart.

I read about your dying father who had always been somewhat mean, how you carried him around the house when he could no longer walk, how you watched in amazement as this once unconquerably strong man regressed into a little boy who only wanted to watch shows about puppies and kittens and how you sat by his side, holding his hand and kissing his wrinkled head, watching documentaries about snow monkeys and crying with him when the little ones were bullied.

How fragile and beautiful is life! How fleeting!

I read about when you were sick and homeless and working three jobs a week to lift yourself from the gutter and how you still wrote your manuscripts. Rejected query letters and dismissed proposals, agent-argot and publisher-patois - these never defeated you.

Thoreau said that “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it” and looking back, you seem to have given everything you had to your writing, leaving nothing else behind except this black notebook.

In answer to your critics who seem to have never visited you as you lay dying in a hospice, who never kissed your wrinkled head and sat by your side watching shows about puppies and kittens, you wrote because it brought you joy, and you wanted to pass that soul-spark along as a gift to anyone at all.

When it comes right down to it, existentially we cannot even prove that we exist. We are chemical creatures driven by a biological imperative to leave behind some proof that we even lived after we depart. We can’t all paint the Sistine Chapel or create some other great work of art that makes future generations remember us with fondness and wonder how we lived. All we authors can do is cast our works upon the water and let the current take it where it will.

My Captain! You struggled as a writer but not as a human being. You were kind, and in the end, that is all that really matters. I too may never publish a grand Opus, or pièce de resistance. My work may never lead readers to understand the Mise en abyme of some subject in a way never before imagined or to cause a debate on whether mon méthode du Dessous des Cartes was pedestrian or brilliant.

It may not even matter since most people don’t actually read stories anymore. We can’t wake the unwilling up from the sopoforic somnolence which marks their day-to-day drudgery of life.

In the esprit de corps of all authors and really of all dreamers ever, I vowed to the Muses to pay you homage by creating a story about you for submission in a writing contest.

You never signed your little black notebook, so I’m just called you Sam. My comrade, I want you to know that I unexpectedly won the top prize. $20,000 I think! Rest in peace Sam of the Black Notebook. You have become my hero and inspiration, and this is how I see you:

What can I tell you readers about Sam? After losing his first job as Analyst-Therapist, or Analrapist, he struggled to find work until landing an unexpected position as a weekend fill-in for Captain Underpants. This was where Sam realized he wanted to work in the Hero Industry, despite the typically low-pay and poor benefit packages. He soon began landing gigs filling-in for Hero’s who were going on vacation such as Sentinel of Seal Bay, Champion of Chesterfield, Protector of Pretoria, Hero of Halifax and Avenger of Aberdeen.

With his resume filling out nicely, Sam applied for the position of "Marquess of Reading" before realizing the job had absolutely nothing to do with literacy, or even Heroism for that matter. Putting this setback behind him, Sam soldiered on and soon became the epitome of upward mobility, obtaining ever-more prestigious positions such as the Event-planner for the Chief Evil-Fighter of Earth, Assistant-Secretary to the Supreme Savior of the Solar System, Groundskeeper for the Guardian of the Galaxy, Urban-Planner for the Ultimate Defender of the Universe, Tea-Taster for the Council of Time-lord’s and Career-planner for the Commander of the Cosmos.

After numerous interviews, Sam almost landed the coveted job as Ancillary Jr. Chief Executive Officer in Charge of Everything, but the position was downsized and instead he became the Benefits-manager for the Best There Is, the Best There Was and the Best There Ever Will Be. Sam thereafter retired to write his memoirs and before he passed on, he could often be found sipping a stiff drink at the Optimist Club reminiscing about his Hero-Career so that the little people may live vicariously through his mighty exploits. His favorite saying was this:

“I have seen your true face, the one you hide from the world for fear that they might find your real heart. But fear not friends, all good things must begin.”

I inserted my addition to Sam's stories, replaced the notebook on the shelf, and poured an oblation of my toffee caramel-nut half-caf latte into a nearby plastic plant. And then I prayed. But I never do that, so I can't be sure I did it right. In case I did, then this is what Sam heard:

Sam, you magnificent bastard, when the deathless gods ask who you are, throw your head back and roar! You say "I am Sam! Slayer of Time and Trees! Splayer of Hearts! Smiter of Souls! And Author Extraordinaire!"

Be proud of who you are! Be proud, Sam, and ROAR!!!