While writing up the last blog entry
of the Top 10 Albums that Changed my Life, getting all emotional and just
pouring my heart out into it, I came to an important epiphany. I’ve finally
decided what this blog really is. It’s my memoirs. My autobiography, if you
will. I always said I’d write one someday, when I’m old and gray, but why wait
until then? And why go through the fuss
and stress and rejection of trying to get it published as a book? I’m doing it
right here, right now, everyone can read it for free. It’ll reach more people
this way. You don’t have to send me a dime for it. I’m sure Google, who owns
Blogger, profits off it in some way. But whatever. Can’t do anything these days
without the rich taking most of the pie from you. They’ll give you a crumb if
you’re lucky, but that would involve putting on a creative leash that I don’t
want. Like what they have to put up with over on YouTube. Vloggers getting
demonetized and taken down for petty reasons involving strict and yet vague
rules about their terms of service. If I ever get taken off Blogger, screw it.
I’m saving each of these entries as word documents. I’ll just set up somewhere
else! I have absolutely nothing to lose, doing my memoir this way.
Back in Graduate School I took a non-fiction writing class. They had us reading “lyric essays”, which are a weird type
of essay where often times you borrow lines from songs or movies and toss them
in there with your own thoughts and short personal stories, normally all having
to do with a central topic. Check out Bluets by Maggie Nelson and Reality
Hunger: A Manifesto by David Shields. Bluets for example is all tied
together by the color blue, and everything this color means to the author. This
is where my non-fiction writing style comes from. I started my own lyric essay
in that class. It was going to be called Audiobiography and be about my
whole life as told through my mix tapes. Maybe I’ll post up what I have of it
on this blog sometime, I got through all the tapes of 1999 and early 2000
before shelving the project in favor of my fiction. Anyway, Audiobiography
was going to be my memoir. But now I have a new idea. This blog is it.
Maybe
it’ll be made into a book someday, but it’s going to have to be a “Best of”
collection or else it’ll be the longest book ever printed. It’s not all going
to be gold anyway, what I write here. It sadly won’t benefit from links and
embedded videos, and maybe not pictures either. I’m not worried about it being
a physical book for the time being. I guess it’ll be sad if a massive solar
flare ever happens and knocks out the internet and destroys all electronics,
sending us back into the stone age, or if there’s a zombie uprising, or if some
other apocalyptic scenario causes society to crumble, because then my memoirs
will be gone. But at least I’ll have hard copies of Odinochka. I’m going
to have to get something of it printed out if I want my grandkids to enjoy it,
sure. I’m not confident in our civilization lasting that long. Maybe at most I
could self-publish it one day, and just not care if it makes a profit or not,
if only to have physical copies in existence for my friends and family. Alright,
when I have enough money and enough material to put into it, that’s what I’m
going to do. Let’s give it about five years. Sooner if I have the money and
feel like it. That’ll just be part one of the memoir.
See, having a copy of my grandfather
Suren’s memoir really changed my life (I’m named after him). He wrote
all about how he joined the anti-Soviet Armenian Revolutionary Federation in
the 1920’s, got arrested by the KGB in 1930 when an insider ratted them out,
and spent the next five years in the Soviet gulag system being transferred
around the Soviet Union until he got to Siberia; but one rainy day, he escaped,
and made it all the way back to Soviet Armenia by staying with kind villagers
who were endangering themselves by harboring a fugitive, and sneaking on
trains. I’ve never been through something remotely like that, but it gives me
the motivation to never give up. I’m Suren the Second. Our lives and
circumstances were way different, I’m not even saying I’ve been through
anything that compares to what he went through in those gulag camps. Worst I
had to go through was middle school, and terrible call centers. But we both had to find a way to survive,
in our own situations. We both had to say “never give up” even when things
seemed hopeless. And I want my descendants to read my story and get that same
motivation from it. It’s not going to last forever up on the internet. But hey,
we’ll worry about that later. For the time being here it is. Day by day, week
by week. These are my memoirs. The Tales from the Masked Bard.
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