8.5/10 – Grilled Seal of Approval

Moon is the story of Sam Rockwell on the moon. Replace the moon with the New Jersey countryside. Replace Sam Rockwell with Dom (yours truly for our new readers).

Nope, the story doesn’t change much. We’re still watching a character toil fruitlessly in the center of a great big vat of nothingness. I did spend a good portion of my time while watching Moon thinking about if I would choose to go to the Moon for a three year solo work commitment. Give me a steady supply of films, a desk, a chair, a laptop to type on, all the music I want, and I think I’ll be plenty happy. I may be bored from time to time, and, sure, I’ll miss human interaction, but I have existed inside my own head for most of my minutes and hours and days and weeks and years so I don’t think I’ll face much trouble.

Perhaps on the moon I will finally be able to focus and write the “Next Great American Novel” as my mother is oft to quote when describing what I should do. But I think it is more likely my “Great American Novel” is nothing like a novel at all. All of my writing tends to be meandering, stream-of-conscious narcissistic self-indulgent dreck that borrows too much from my own bizarre past and not enough from established rules of writing that are rules because they fucking work.

It’s not that I don’t want to write a particular way, no, wait, I guess that’s exactly it. Because if I really wanted to I would do the exact opposite of what I do. But I don’t. Nope, I just continue on pedaling even as the chain on my bike rattles right off, my brakes stop working, and a wall stands imposingly in front of me – its head blotting out the yellow of the sun and its leering facade practically challenging me to ram into it and test myself.

I smash into it. Hard. The wall reaches out and bats my head to the floor and twists a chandelier of twinkling birds above my skull. I’m dazed, but not broken because every hit just knocks a bit more sense out of my brain and onto the ground and then I have that much of a reason to hit myself into the wall again. What a bitch of a cycle, right?

Oh, it’s difficult for me to write in a standard manner. I can do it if I am getting paid or if it is for a particular purpose, but if it’s for me, if it’s for my own writing, if it’s for my own thoughts and feelings and stories and hopes and dreams, then no – fuck no I can’t, I won’t. It’s impossible. Is it not important to spew your brain on the canvas as unedited and dreamlike as possible? Is that not more real? I must censor myself on this site, but there is a limit to my censorship and the limit does not extend to writing correctly and with perfect grammar and completely without vulgarity or potentially unsavory details. Because this is me! This is my life! I cannot scrub myself so clean to conform to the expectation of the masses, when it is so much better to be authentic and appeal to the few.