. . . he said, taking the guitar off his shoulders and casting a wary eye over the assembled crowd. He was looking for reaffirmation through negation, but after a momentary pause had yielded naught, he continued speaking with a false air of disregard. ‘I might never be famous, but I’ve come to the conclusion that this doesn’t matter.’

Heart-felt speeches can be hard, especially when the intended audience fails to give you any sort of response. He considered the crowd, slim pickings at best; framed photographs of mom and dad, three stuffed monkeys and a cardboard cut-out of a blonde in a bikini who held aloft a bottle of domestic beer with a come-hither look on her face. No help coming from this group, and the fact that none of them qualified as ‘real’ did nothing to make the words come any easier.

It was late and he’d been drinking, bouncing around the small, cluttered and dirty confines of his apartment as he tried to lose himself in the fantasies of rock-stardom. He’d set up the crowd in a moment that approached self-mockery, but as he pranced in front of them, working his way through a terrifically sloppy rendition of yet another original composition that would almost certainly never see the light of day; his untrained voice had come bouncing off the apartment walls into his ears and forced one of those moments of revelation that unpredictably strike the drinking side of the philosophically bent.

He lit a cigarette and took a long drag, steeling himself for further speech. ‘At my age’ he was thirty-two ‘you have to be honest with yourself; fame isn’t waiting around the corner. I mean I’ve tried a bunch of stuff, half-heartedly I will admit, but I tried nonetheless. Nothing ever ignited more than a momentary passion, but as I said, at my age you have to be honest with yourself . . . and what is suddenly clear to me is that fame doesn’t matter nearly as much as I once thought it did. I’m going to keep on creating . . . be it poems, songs, drawings or novels, for as long as there is breath in this fragile human form. That’s enough. That’s more than enough, it’s more than most people get, and I need to be thankful that I’m driven to creation at all.’

The stuffed monkeys said nothing, the bikini blonde hadn’t altered her expression in the slightest, and while the photographs of mom and dad were smiling, they’d been smiling the whole time. He thought fleetingly that this whole thing might work better if he tried it out in front of a live audience; but that was too near a parable about his real life to be comfortably acceptable. He stubbed out his cigarette and staggered to bed.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 10th, 2008 at 11:55 pm and is filed under indiscriminate, fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.