I’ve been thinking about why I’ve never been entirely happy with all the versions I’ve attempted with my long-simmering Walk in Silence (the book) project, and I think I’ve finally clinched it:
It’s too positive.
Or more to the point, there have been two different stories I’ve been trying to write all these years, semi-memoirs if you will, that never sat right with me. There’s the original semi-fictional story with various titles that I started writing my junior and senior year in high school, originally wrote in second person (inspired by Jay McInerney, natch) and tried reviving several times over the years…and then there’s the music overview bearing the WiS name that has two versions itself. Version one attempts to chronologically review what I felt were important ‘college rock’ albums that shaped me during those years, and version two (which ended up as the ‘Rockin’ the Suburbs’ series on my LJ back in 2005 and reprised here on this blog some years back) was a personal memoir with music added.
These two different projects have always led separate lives. The fictional one has lit-fic levels of personal trauma and emotional spiraling, while the musical one is a list of my favorite albums with a few personal memories attached. But they’ve also both been inextricably tied to each other as well: both are stories about growing up and being obsessed with music, specifically 80s alternative rock. But more importantly, both are about not fitting in with the mainstream. Both are about finding a special place in life where you feel a part of something special, where you feel like you can be yourself without outside influence or conflict.
And out of all of this, I realized, there’s got to be a perfect opening line for this story I’ve been trying to tell all these years.
Conformity is a hell of a drug.
I use that line a lot these days when I talk about politics and social media and other things that frustrate me, because I can see a lot of its negative issues stemming from (or relating to) the willingness to conform to something that may or may not be a good thing for society. But this was also something I’d thought about back in those days, in similar ways.
As always, this new take on the Walk in Silence project could end up the same as all the others, crashing and burning and never getting finished despite Best Laid Plans. But who knows…? I’d rather give it a try anyway, on the off-chance that it may just be the perfect approach I’d needed all these years.
We shall see, then.
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