Success, that indomitable wall of my imagination. It’s a wall I so want to climb, however hard it may be, however long it may take, however much blood it spills from me to scale it. I so want to publish plentifully, to perform my thinking and craft for a living; I so want to be something like my own master—I want this more than anything. But I’d have to know where this wall even is, first. Because as things stand, I can’t be quite sure that I’m even running in its direction; I’m shrouded by the fog of not knowing, handed down to me by my working-class family, and extenuated by the lack of ambition that’s defined most of my young life.
I’m flailing at nothing in the capitalist abyss, in my yearnings to escape its 9-to-5 clutches; in my effort make vocational momentum from my six years and two degrees of university education, and attack the debt that it brought me with checks borne from less anguished strivings. This existence, I pray to myself, can’t be one long, crippling payoff for one decade of real, memorable life. But I should be happy just to have a day-job—so says the old lady I share a cubicle with, in chorus with my Midwestern conscious, neuroplasticized by this land of passive Christians to believe there’s something holy about living in total subservience to the myth of youth’s flame, dying its permanent death early.
And seeing as the Bulls have been shit-kicked out of the NBA Playoffs by LeBron James—his terrifying frame the ultimate obscurer of that wall—I guess I’ll just have to wait until next season (when Derrick Rose is finally back) to feel personal power flowing through me again.
The so-called literary institution, in so many of its various forms, is ignoring all of my emails, all of my letters, all of the screamings from my warped mind—this mind’s warping which used to feel like a beautiful victimization, worthy of art, but now feels much more like an impetuous personal problem, one my girlfriend (the miracle I can’t maintain) will only be able to tolerate so much longer.
Perhaps this literary institution heard I was upgraded in my office, from contractor to salaried employer. Ah, it said, Well, he’s gone now. Gone, gone, gone to the mashy masses he was born among, in those sad sagging middle-American suburbs. It doesn’t matter that he’s not yet accepted his inevitable destiny, the death of that silver inside of him, that silver which makes him want to look outside of that colony of rote, sterile meaninglessness—have you seen that Chicago Loop, with all its self-important task-doers? It’s hilarious, I tell you, hilarious in the most deadly of ways—because we ourselves have seen where John Wilmes is going, and it is nowhere. We ourselves have added his name to the blackest of lists, that one that says: Born Under Zero Stars.
Perhaps my belief that I’m effective with written language—that I’m compelling, or even consistently cogent as a writer—is the result of an extreme, disturbingly misleading megalomania that I’ve effectively transferred to enough people surrounding me to keep it alive; those words of encouragement, they’re all merely spouted out by equally defeated souls, plagued by the same fallacy as myself in their delusional gazes to the top. They, like me, refuse to accept that their endpoint is working for an attorney from their same home-town—but from the richer half of it—who condescends to them daily, with startling unintelligence. And then they return to their rented apartment with a patio, that patio their only solace, one more signifier in the incremental chain toward a death without freedom, without imprint, without cause more profound than exhaustion, than just having had enough already.
John Wilmes is a writer and professor in Chicago, and the author of Jad's Dad Milo, available at Mouse House Books.
