VerbaTim by Tim Mitchell
Why I Write
Most authors and essayists write for their own
personal gain -- wealth, fame, power. I am writing this with a higher
reason in mind. My wife told me to.
"Tim," she bellowed lovingly, "we need something
you've written to put up on our website."
Actually, this is not an uncommon motive for great
writers. Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, and Norman Mailer all wrote because
my wife bitched at them.
She once told Jorge Luis Borges "Get cracking,
you blind wetback fuck, before I slap those ugly glasses off your face."
He responded by writing the stunningly intricate and lyrical collection
that would become known as "Labyrinths." But she still wouldn't blow him.
It was my wife Chaucer had in mind when he penned
the words "Lyke unto a hamme in lyttle slyces cutte / Her heavye -- HEYE!
Will sommebody tell that bitche to give it a reste?"
She has dabbled in other fields, less successfully.
Her foray into shrieking maniacally at Gaudi was the primary reason his
cathedral was never finished.
"I have become the primary architect of the wiggley
and bendy," Gaudi's journal for 1932 reads, "but I fear I shall never
work again, because that woman's incessant nagging has driven me to distraction.
Also, I live in apartment building of my own design, and it's real trippy."
She once apprehended Salvador Dali at a cocktail-and-Vienna-sausage
party, and slammed him against the mantlepiece, screaming "HEY! Skinny-moustache
boy! What the fuck are the drippy clocks all about? Why don't you and
Gaudi move into a drippy apartment, put your stupid drippy paintings on
the wall, and assfuck each other until you both drip?"
This inspired Dali's famous quote, "The only difference
between myself and a madman is that a madman would hack that cunt to pieces
with a dull machete."
Sometimes, she has been capable of inspiring artists
in other fields. The rape scene in "A Clockwork Orange" being a prime
example. However, she has learned that writers are more accepting of her
style of musing, since they are all drunkards.
Probably the pinnacle of her influence on the great
writers was her unrelenting torment of J.D. Salinger until "Catcher in
the Rye" was completed. He's been hiding from her ever since, although
she did track down Thomas Pynchon once and tell him that "Gravity's Rainbow"
was "a boring piece of shit."
And so, friends, this is why I write. Because I
know that, like the
oh fuck. She just got home. It's finished, dear.
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