Honors Research Thesis Presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with honors research distinction in the undergraduate colleges of The Ohio State University The Ohio State University Spring 2013 Project Advisor: Professor Michelle Herman, Department of English 2 Ellis August Qualm flew past the windows of Toronto’s Life Building for four seconds before smacking pavement. Thud. ++++++++++ 3 word. /// I Hate Diaries: A Journal by Solon Asa Brood /// Something Not About Vampires /// The REAL Secret (I Totally Farted in that Elevator) /// ‘Omeless Normal‘ate or: ‘Ow You Forgot to Start Freaking Out and Loaf the Friendly ‘Andshake1 by Solon Asa Brood or Solo NASA Brood or just Sol THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY PARENTS IF AND ONLY IF THEY DO NOT 1 This will make sense later? 4 DISOWN ME AFTER READING IT. IF MY PARENTS FAIL TO MEET THIS CRITERION,2 THE BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY SISTER NOORA, WHO, LET’S BE HONEST, WON’T TAKE THE TIME TO READ IT IN THE FIRST PLACE. WITH LOVE, YOUR BELOVED SON OR BROTHER, SOLON P.S. SORRY FOR YELLING ////// [edit: The first and last time I drank Miller’s, I threw up for an hour in Africa.] entreaux. I’d ask the muses for help and all that but the muses only contribute when a story’s about suprasapiens on suprajourneys, and this story isn’t that. It’s about me: Solon Asa Brood, the tall 17-year-old adeaux whose neighbors consistently see him steering his family’s muddied Gator down the concrete to that creepy cemetery, and the closest he’s come to filling any suprarequirement is the time he had to take the RTA all the way across Dayton alone to give blood at a rusty redneck health clinic with two broken automatic doors and a stained marquee that used upside down 7s for Ls. Honest—you, I, they, us—nobody can compete with the classic classic heroes.3 2 World’s lamest transformer. 3 To be fair, Nobdy had a hard time with them as well. 5 Expectations were set waywayWAY too high, WAY too early on. Odysseus’s résumé:4 sidesteps whirlpools like nbdmate, blinds, pranks towering Cyclopussies, spends evenings being ‘seduced’ by sexy sex nymphs. Solon’s résumé: owns Whirlpool, stealthily spends every other night with one-eyed monster while he thinks about sex nymphs. —and by “sex nymphs,” he means porn stars. —and by “porn stars,” he means so-so devotchkas who cater Arby’s labes they get to moan on P-hub. I’m talking dishwashers and masturbation all day long. Three words that describe me best? PLEASE and HIRE and ME.5 All things considered, calling the muses wouldn’t work for me nearly as well as it did for 4 If this were Wheel of Fortune and someone guessed ‘S,’ they would be rolling in the monies. 5 Also, “squirgleblerft, ooble, prairienugget.” 6 Homer or Vergil. Times have changed. First off, I wouldn’t call. I’d text. Second (off?), if I ask the muses to help me, they won’t drop their goddessy festivities and submit like they did for the super storytellers. They’ll throw me a copy of The Feminine Mystique and say something smart like, “Here’s a story for ya, ya sexist pig,” or “Go a-muse yourself, ya sexist pig,” or “No,” and I’ll stand there, awkwardly ruminating, trying to think of a good comeback, and when too many seconds have passed comebackless, they’ll collectively snort and walk away, proud and musey and victorious and what not and, of course, while standing there, awkwardly ruminating, I’ll know, deep deep down, that I really have nothing to do with sexism in the workplace or anywhere else, and that my current silence is less a sign of my inability to refute their points than it is a sign of my inability to cope with the continuous absurdity in my life otherwise known as being held responsible for something I have no control over, but, like most things, had thrust upon me at birth. I’ll yell something about sandwiches or the kitchen to maintain my sense of masculine superiority, as per usual, and they’ll wheel around, infuriated. … We will then have an orgy. Erato in the corner on the lyre. Terpsichore crumping the hardwood wet, correcting me every time I scream her name wrong. Euterpe on the flute. Clio, yelling. Just yelling. And in the morning, I will make them breakfast. They will demi-limp into the room (Melpomene comes in right as I start cutting onions, of course. Everyone chimes in with a condescending-but-friendly “Oh, Melpomene!” as she wipes the tears from her face and smiles), and help me make my story super: 7 Solon Asa Brood is my full name, and I’ve been telling college admissions I’m a boy obsessed with wordplay who skips the words in Playboy. I’m growing up across the road from a lake and a rundown cemetery in the center of one of an infinite number of country towns peppered throughout the great Midwest. Antique shops and corn fields, antique shops and corn fields, antique fields and corn shops, an occasional trip to the drive-in, bonfires, flannel, Bud Light, soggy Bud litter wrapped in tall wet grass, wooden picnic tables, curvy roads, shredded billboards, deer, unacknowledged racism, the Middle Class Headquarters. America’s Americans. Ohioans: the people you remember exist once every four years. I was untimely pluck’d from my mother in 1991, the Year of the Palindrome, and looking back with what I know now, which includes the names of all 150 original Pokémon, the choruses of most Journey songs, and...the rest of those Journey songs, I’d say it was primetime for Macduffery in the US. If not for the 90s Nickelodeon, then for the panoramic view of the Internet’s rise to fame. Shit got exponential. Kids my age watched 9/11 from their 4th, 5th and 6th grade classrooms and the asbestos- we-can-get teacher’s lounge, and wondered—really wondered—what it meant. We didn’t gasp and say, “What now?”—we dropped the “now” and experienced it for what it was, not for what it was like. We’re still riding/ our/ gasps. (And writing them, as it were.) Stay with me. … The tragedy was fresh. That’s what. Fresh. We palindrome-and-roundabouts were mischievously intrigued by the disaster, but all maintained dust bowl milkmaid countenances—if 8 you can imagine such a thing.6 You’re hearing it from the source: the Bush, Sr. babes understood more than we let on. I despise generalization just like everyone else, but hear me out: on September 11th, 2001, we—the Palindromishes—became part of something much grander than ourselves. And it felt magical. It felt new. Disney, but brutal. Dismalney. Something. How something so horrible could make us feel so, eh, included, is the paradox of our times, and I can’t define it. But it did. 9/11 was neat. Gruesome, devastating, and unequivocally serious—but somewhere, deep in the psyches of kids who never had anything real to fight for— empowering. … Growing up, I aspired to be a thespian. Ididn’tk what a thespian was until I got to high school, so up until high school, I wanted to be the next big shot movie star. Not Ben Affleck, because I’d heard he was a “doosh” from several sources, but someone like Tom Cruise, a closet doosh, or Brad Pitt, who Shania Twain mentioned in that one song my mom always played on our half-dayroom stereo when I was younger. “OK. SO YUHV GOTTA CAR. THAT DUN’T OPPRESSA ME MUTCH,” said Shania Twain to me every day in 1998. My early childhood friend Norm and I promised each other that whennotif one of us became Brad Pitt, we would let the other one ride our OshKoshbGosh cargos to stardom. As I grew up, acting more and more frequently, I would constantly tangle myself up in my roles, like a pre-pubescent Heath Ledger. I took my acting seriously. I wasn’t like those other insecure Ocean Pacific kids in local theater productions who decided to “try” acting, who “kind of” liked singing and dancing, who got defaulted into it because they weren’t really big fans of or 6 If you can, can you explain it to me? Still having trouble. 9 particularly good at sports. I was an actor’s actor by the time I was twelve (years old, not pounds). A method actór. A Newman acolyte. A cunt. Before perfecting Leo Bloom in a watered down version of The Producers, I interviewed a local accountant and acquired his twitch; for my role as Lieutenant Cable in South Pacific, I interviewed a lieutenant stationed in Chillicothe and borrowed his heavy brow; Tevye, Fiddler on the Roof, I had the chutzpah to interview my only Jewish friend, Eugene,7 after his bar mitzvah at the rotary club; Sweeney Todd, Sweeney Todd, I got a job at the local hair salon and murdered anyone who asked for a little bit too much off the top. Snip snip drip drip. You knaw. I was swiftly fired by the head barber,8 but those who attended my customers’ funerals could not stop raving about the deceased’s bangs. “It’s so unfortunate what happened to Mrs. Grath.” “It is. But look at those highlights! They’re to die for!” said every woman in my town, and, upon realizing the pun, chortled, then felt immensely guilty for having used it.