Immune to My Own Edge

 I might be the only person in the universe who feels this way…but when I’m writing a controversial scene in either my prose or poetry…I sometimes forget the weight of my own words. I’ve become immune to my own edge, if you will. A cowboy obliterating his opponent with a gatling gun and splashing his guts like a tidal wave? A leonine samurai decapitating a ninja with his katana before sucking the poor bastard’s insides out with the spine as a drinking straw? A femme fatale seducing a man into bed with her before she bites his penis off and shoves it between his ears? These things may be shocking to my audience, but they’re normal to me. They’re so normal to me that I wasn’t even trying when I wrote those descriptions. Now it’s time to crack my knuckles…

The other day I wrote chapter 21 of my fantasy WIP Beautiful Monster. In this chapter, an imprisoned elf reaches through the bars of his cell and grabs a mercenary by his facial hair. He then proceeds to pull this mercenary’s face into the steel bars as hard as humanly possible, getting more aggressive with each tug. The mercenary’s eyeballs pop out, his teeth shatter and roll on the ground, his nose gets plastered to the back of his skull…to put it as delicately as possible, this mercenary is fucked. Too graphic for you all? Well, that’s funny, because this is just another day at the office for me. This is easily as brutal as it gets in my novel and I didn’t even flinch. I’m immune to my own edge.

How did it get to be this way for me? Too many mental illnesses and pills numbing my mind? Too much brainwashing via the television? Not enough flinching when I watched movies like Saw and Hostel? It’s one thing not to care too much if it happens in a fictional setting, but in a documentary or news story? My god, does that shit hurt. I’m not immune to other people’s edges, just my own. If there’s a news story on TV about police brutality (which has become commonplace in America, unfortunately), I’ll get so pissed off that my jaw will be sore from all the clamping down I’m doing. My mind will do more hundred mile an hour laps than a NASCAR track. But if I write about it in one of my stories? Nothing. Not a goddamn thing.

Why is this happening? Is it because I’m in control of my stories and poems and therefore already know the outcome? But what if the outcome is negative? What if a character is so haunted by their PTSD that they hang themselves from the ceiling fan with a chain whip? Will I be immune to that as well? If I’ve written it, yes, I will be. But only if I’ve written it. If I imagine it in my mind, then I’ll cycle through every harmful emotion I can think of, be it sadness, anger, or depression, which coincidentally spells the acronym SAD. Imagining scenes is much more fun than writing them, even with the harmful emotions.

That’s why I never understood it when people say that jokes can only be funny if you, the comedian, are the first to laugh about it. Sometimes I laugh at my own jokes, but not all the time. And yet, whenever I tell a joke I don’t laugh at myself, my audience laughs at it all the same. Want an example of a really disgusting joke? Okay, here it goes. Where do necromancers go to adopt children? An abortion clinic. You may laugh at that joke, you may not. Did I? Maybe a little bit at first, but I don’t hee-haw at it every single time. I must be immune to my own edge again. Here’s a joke I definitely didn’t laugh at, but other people found fucking hilarious. What do you call a Viking who saves people from drowning? Leif Guard. Not the most offensive joke I’ve ever told, but it’ll probably get more laughs than my necromancer joke, and that’s only if you pronounce Leif like you would “life” instead of “leaf” or “layf”.

Okay, so I’m immune to my own violence and comedy, but what about sadness? I can safely say that I’ve never cried at my own scenes before. I’ve had characters rape each other, attack animals, and die by the hundreds. Not one single tear. Then again, it takes a lot for me to cry these days. Well, it used to, anyways. I used to talk about having a 2007 benchmark for the last time I cried and that was because I blew my chances at signing up for Evergreen College. I can safely say that as of 2020, that record has been shattered. It’s not just the American news or the depression of being cooped up in my own home due to Corona Virus. Those things tax the fuck out of my mental energy, sure. But if you want to know what made me cry alone at night with nobody watching…I repeated the words “I love you” and “I’m sorry” over and over again. Who was I declaring my love for? I don’t know. Who was I apologizing to? I don’t know. It could have been anybody. Hell, it could have been my entire audience because I felt like I let them down in some way. I wasn’t immune to that. But writing about the experience? Not one tear drop.

While I feel nothing when I write my own controversial scenes, my audience feels everything. I’ve had people tell me they cried at my sadder stories. I’ve had people tell me they had chills up and down their spines at my lovey-dovey poems. I’ve had people cringe in pain as they read my more violent poems and stories. I say these things not to brag, but as a warning to anybody reading this piece of nonfiction. You have no idea how powerful your words can be to another person, for better or worse. A simple, “Hi” can be the difference between isolation and a pick-me-up. A tweet can be the difference between connecting with your audience and losing them forever. If a salutation and a tweet can have that much impact on someone’s life, imagine how a whole book can make them feel.

You know…maybe that’s why I was crying and apologizing that one night I broke my 2007 record. Maybe I felt like my books were having a negative impact on people’s lives. I know that’s not true since book sales have been piss-poor since I became a pro. But what if my sales spiked one day and my audience was angered by what I had written? What if Debra Winter’s characterization in Occupy Wrestling was deemed unintentionally misogynistic? What if my poems bored my audience to tears because of how the lyrics resemble corporately-produced rock songs? What if my depictions of rape and assault in Poison Tongue Tales were done in an insensitive way? Can I do anything about these problems now that the books are published? I could, but Amazon is making me jump through hoops just to make cosmetic changes to one of my poetry books. But even if Amazon was 100% cooperative, that would mean redoing six published books and always being behind because I’d be overwhelmed with work. It seems like a lazy copout, but it’s reality. I don’t have the energy to micromanage every single book I’ve published, especially when they’ve been on the market for so long.

But…what if someone didn’t see my writing in an offensive light? What if somebody loved it regardless of all of my negative thoughts? Art is subjective, after all. What’s disgusting to one person could be bliss to another. Yeah, I’m immune to my own edge, but I’m not immune to my own worrying after the fact. Maybe that needs to change. Maybe I should start holding my head high. But in the middle of the cluster-fuck known as 2020? That won’t be easy. But that’s one advantage to having immunity to the most controversial parts of my writing: I can get lost in the process and escape from the world, even if only for a little while. Maybe I can find that nugget of joy among the sea of diarrhea. Isn’t that why we write in the first place? Isn’t that why people say, “Write drunk, edit sober”? Don’t worry about the technicalities now, just barf onto the page and be happy for just a little while. I guess I’m not an uncaring sociopath after all. I’m just looking for joy where I can find it. If that joy includes evoking strong emotions from my readers, then goddamn it, I’ll embrace that shit until the day I die.