A Story: Johnny Letdown

There once was a boy named Johnny. He was an artist of every caliber. He painted, he danced, he sang, played the trumpet, he acted in plays, and he made sculpture. And Johnny was mediocre at all of these because he never could focus his passion. But he spread it to all of the people he knew. He tried to make them happy. He lived for happiness.

Johnny at the church.

Johnny was making a play. He wrote his play and found a nice old man who owned a coffee shop.


"May I do my play here?" Johnny asked.


"What will you give me?" The old man replied. He smelled of coffee and whiskey.


"I will give you happiness." Johnny said.


So the old man let him do his play at the coffeeshop for he said: "Money makes me happy. You can do a play here. But you must make everyone who comes to watch the play buy a coffee."


"Okay." Johnny started making the invitations. He sent them out. He even included a note about seeing the play for the price of only a coffee. He invited all of his friends to the mediocre play that he was doing. They all told him how they were so excited and happy for him. They just couldn't wait to see it, they exclaimed.


"We're soooo happy for you. You're finally doing something with your life!"





The night of the play came and went. No one was in the audience. Johnny was torn up. He wrote this play and it was about to change the world and nobody cared, he thought. Johnny couldn't even say the first line to an empty house. All he could do was cry. The old man came out and started yelling: "You didn't give me happiness. You gave me bills to pay. I didn't sell any coffee and now I am using electricity for these stage lights. Get out of my establishment, sonny!"





Johnny started walking the streets. He was so sad. He was let down. His whole work, this his artist's life was never appreciated. His passion deflated like a blown up balloon that popped in his face. He wanted nothing more to do with art. He was Johnny Letdown.





He went to church. Inside he prayed to God.


"God," he asked. "What did I do to deserve this? Why do none of my friends care about me?"


Suddenly a voice rang back.


"Your friends care about you. But they are too selfish to read anything that anybody else has written, they are too busy to smell the flowers, they are too irresponsible and in between their marriages and babies, they will never ever enjoy life. Maybe they will enjoy it, but not with you. You must move on. Get over it. Go into business." The voice echoed in the hollow chamber walls illuminated only by candlelight.


"Who are you?" Johnny shot to the empty room.


"God, Johnny. And I didn't see your play either. Theater stinks."





Johnny went back to the streets. He found a man near an overturned garbage can. He was playing a harmonica. Johnny stopped to listen. He found a quarter and put it in the man's hat.


"Got any talents?" The man asked him suddenly.


"I guess not."


"It's not really if anybody thinks you're good," the man replied. "It's just if you think you are good. Are you happy?"


"I don't know."


"What are your talents? What do you like?"


"I like art, but I don't think I'm any good."


"Why?"


"I made a play and no one came to see it even though they said they would."


"Nobody ever comes to see me," the man replied. "I don't mind. I'd rather have no friends, than friends who lie."


"Me too," Johnny said.


"Why don't we be friends?"


"Okay." Johnny shot back. "You must show me how to play that thing."


"Only if you show me how to make a play."





So Johnny and the man did artistic things. And the work they created was life shattering, earth moving stories and music and art and life. And nobody ever saw it. Because nobody cared. But they were happy, homeless, and cold. And Johnny Letdown grew happily and artistically old. But no one knew because no one listens to stories anymore.

Fiction Writing: A Dangerous business

Anger. Angst. Bitterness. They built up and they create rage. Some people like a champagne cork must go off. They must release the built up pressure and pop. This April at Virginia Tech, one Seung-Hui Cho did just that. He killed 32 people in one of the largest classroom shootings to date. Afterwards there was the panic of the public. How could this have happened? Why didn't we see this coming? Why would one person do such a thing?

Seung-Hui Cho: Portrait of a Confused, Angry Young Man

Of course there is no easy answer. So many factors -both genetically and environmentally- could have set this young troubled youth off. A lot of people are looking to his writing now in an effort to make sense of Cho's rampage. His two plays "Richard McBeef" and "Mr. Brownstone" which I have just read about, but not actually read seem to be interesting creations. A friend of mine whom I work with stated: 'I read his plays on the internet the other day and they were just horrible.' I also read Stephen King's commentary about the plays on the wikipedia link above. Cho may not have had the best grammar or spelling skills, or have been very educated, but his plays are about situations where the characters are not himself. Whether his plays are realistic or not does not matter to me, but what does seem impressive is that Cho is writing attempting to write about other people. His imagination also stems into violence, but who has not had violent thoughts? My point on the matter is Cho is a true playwright in the sense that he had the sensitivity to try and understand people when nobody would understand him. What Cho did to those 32 people was horrible, but what happened in the mind of Cho to make him agonize and kill that morning, is just as horrible. Every story has two sides, every victim has a villian, and every villain can be made a victim. It is all a matter of perspective and the spin on the story. Cho maybe was a talentless hack, but you cannot judge the moral character of a person by what they write, or can you?

If I write the sentence, "Tomorrow I will kill 40 people." Who would believe me? Who would think I would do it? Who would take my sentence as fact and throw me in jail. Who knew it was the opening line to my first person narrated novel? You can guess and guess and theorize what a person is feeling by their writing and you can be correct, but you also cannot slander a person's character because they have the free will to create freely from their imaginations. I just read an article in the Star Tribune about a person who was rejected from the Marine Corps for writing about nymphomania in the first person in an assignment for a creative fiction class. I believe the person was being fined and may have had to serve jail time. Only his trial will tell the outcome. Tragedies will happen to human beings, it is best to be wary and sensitive at all times to people and their feelings. The following section from Shakespeare sums up my feelings about a "crazy brain":

The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear! (ACT 5, Scene 1: A Midsummer Night's Dream)

So before we go ahead and draw and quarter all of Cho's writing, maybe we should analog it somewhere in the history of humankind as part of a tragic canon. The truth is intelligence is in the eye of the beholder, and talent is immeasurable, but human suffering is easily readable on the page in light of characters, but before you lock up the writer for being crazy, maybe you should explore censuring your own fantasies and imaginations. Characters are creations. They are not us, they are not necessarily real, they portend tragedy and or trouble. Evil exists all around in stories and real life. People are not nice. People who are friends can pose as enemies. Hell, people pose all the time, THAT is what life is truly about. So while the media makes victims and villains, I will be reading and trying to understand people like Cho and the dead from Virginia Tech. And in the wake of tragedies, beware of fanatic militants out to protect everyone and sensationalize. There are those always waiting to capitalize off of tragedy and to stand in the limelight -in many many capacities, from copy-catting to red scare tactics {remember that period of history?} After all, I just wrote my opinion on this subject -maybe I'm just capitalizing too? I wonder if anyone else thinks it's any good. . . or perhaps I'll be arrested later today. Sensational.