If…..
I really dislike conditional past hypothetical questions to begin with: If this had not happened, if this were to, if only you hadn’t, if you were born with or without, what would you be doing if you hadn’t not been not blah blah etc.
Hypothetical questions themselves are reflective and imaginative. But these other impossible questions seem pretty fucking pointless to me, unless the point is to make you doubt yourself and feel like shit about your decision-making process, and create nostalgia for an alternate present that DOESN’T EXIST.
I especially HATE it when people say, and it’s always with a chuckle, “If so and so famous angst-ridden author were alive, he’d be a blogger.”
Load the shells, darling, one for you and for me. Oh, there’s only one? Then come sit on my lap.
First, for this blogger sentence to have any real meaning or place in a conversation, the author mentioned would have to be very famous, for the juxtaposition of media to be shocking. Hmm…Shakespeare…if that poet and playwright, the one with all the quills, were to type his nonfiction views daily…or, oh, Hemingway? The journalist turned short-story writer and novelist? Well, I supp-
NO. If Hemingway were alive, I’d be out buying him bottles of whiskey, we’d drink one, he’d leave me curled in a heap under our table and then he’d go out and kill a lion and skin it and wear the skin on his body as he claimed five or six more women as wives, and then enjoy a Mojito for his every conquest, animal or otherwise.
Or he’d be at a bullfight, or enjoying some Mediterranean township. Or writing ink to paper, truly connecting himself with his material.
You might see how the romance of it gets lost in temporal translation.
I mean no disrespect to bloggers, as I am one: I just prefer that my literary heroes remain fixed in their constellations, and their spirits with their texts and filling their terrestrial paradises or book-lined, LCD-free offices, rather than in front of laptops too small for their bodies, straining their eyes and living their lives at the speed of their wi-fi connection rather than that of their imagination.
