The Write Stuff???? (Part Deux)

Still working on this recommendation in my head. I got halfway through it in my brain last night, but then the whole thing spiraled out of control into a Breakfast-Club-this-is-where-we-are-twenty-years-later schtick. Collectively, my classmates and I are a lot of things. I'm not going to name them all out, because that would just be too cliche, but we are good stuff, and here and there are bits of badness. Kind of like someone in the class behind me who got picked up for a messy felony offense and then deported to a country that they hadn't lived in since they were an infant because their dumbass adoptive Farmville parents never finalized the naturalization process. Boom! Hello, impoverished South American country where someone doesn't speak the language and has no relatives! But then on the other hand, there is my senior year prom date who very likely could end up as governor one day and I'll be his dirty little secret from high school. The total dichotomy of his father (who was the school superintendent) kind of leading the charge on almost expelling me from school and then, reversing course by allowing his son to take me to prom always made me wonder if dear old dad was just trying to make sure his son had a sure thing on prom night. Cause he didn't! That joke was on him! Anyway, this is exactly why I posted our prom picture on facebook. I.am.ahead.of.the.curve.here.

But back to homeslice and I. We ended up going to the same college, but he was lucky enough to live on campus and I was not-so-lucky enough to live with my father because he and my mother had basically determined they weren't going to pay for me to live on campus. My choices were Longwood or VCU. I was jealous of homeslice, because he got experience college as it's meant to be experienced, and that's with the view from a dorm window. I got to experience college with a view out of my commuter windshield. We ran into each once or twice that first semester, and I drove him to the bank once, but then headed right back to Farmville when living with my mother became an better option than living with my father. The lesser of two evils, I suppose.

The last time I saw homeslice was 1996-ish, when somehow a bunch of us from high school ended up in the trailer he and some other guys from high school had rented drinking beer and laughing about high school. I got the distinct impression that they were all looking at my T&A and found a reason to leave. Yes, the post-high school years were good for me, developmentally.

I suppose what amazes me about homeslice's writing (and I've tried to go back and read his whole blog, but it's damn near impossible because there's got to be at least a thousand entries on that thing, plus I still haven't read his stuff that's been published. My name is bad friend.) is that he manages to catch the sheer hopelessness, poverty, small-mindedness small-townish-ness and aimlessness that is where we grew up but he does with the acuity of being able to look from the outside in, and back out again. Mix that with varying degrees of socio-economic awareness (by the time I was in eighth grade I could break down all the different types of white people there were in our county, I'm ashamed to admit), a convoluted racial hyper-vigilance cultivated by our county's history, and hanging out in a junkyard every now and then. Some of the shit he writes about I don't get, that usually being music and MMA, but the rest of it, yeah, I'm there. Of course, I'm kind of biased, being that we've known each other for years upon years upon years, and I know of the people and places he writes about.

I'm definitely going to do the recommendation, but here's the rub. He didn't give me enough time to frantically read up on and research about ten other authors in my mind I'd like to compare him to in my head prior to writing this damn thing, and I can't count on Wikipedia to be reliable for this. Yes, it's reliable for me diagnosing all of my medical problems, but for something this serious - hell to the naw! This program only accepts ten students per year. I did at least get on the school website and do some reading on that. The other, and greater, concern that I have is that I'm going to be the person to dumb this whole process down. Obviously, homeslice is smarter than me. His slice of genius is slightly bigger than my slice of brilliance, which means he's way ahead of me. Seriously, though, I have some serious reservations about me being the retard who accidentally stumbled into the Mensa meeting or something. Something this big, I can't fuck this up. I mean, this is someone's life here, and what if these people look at my letter and they're like, 'That's the dumbest and most ignorant shit we've ever read. Admission denied.' What if I have too many commas? We,all,know,I, have a, thing,for,commas,,,,,. And I don't want to just pull something out of my ass. I'm honored to have even been asked, considering I consider homeslice to be not only smarter than me, but a better writer, too. You don't respect and honor something by just pulling some shit out of your ass. Even though I've had something floating around my head for the past couple of days, I can't let this shit percolate but too long, because the deadline is looming and shit that's over-percolated always taste like, well, shit.