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April 17, 1998
Volume 8: Ken Layne, How I Almost Love Thee
An Open Letter to Ken Layne:
Ken Layne, I would be in love with you, the dulcet way you tell us most everything sucks, the cunning click of those polysyllables you string together in lieu of a few short four letter words, and the way your picture glares out at me a few times a week.
But I'm not. Why? Because Ken suffers from the same problem that I have been known to suffer. I am sympathetic, Ken, but adamant. You have to get over this attitude that you can bring people around the way you're going at it. As Dorothy Parker said, "You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think."
It's a long, lonely road, fraught with both self-indulgent and real pitfalls. Go back to school, darling Ken, get some more degrees and spend your time in front of a chalkboard, explaining the pyramid of article writing to a new generation of smug young middle-class idiots hoping for nothing better than a handout from Microsoft and a zippy red Miata with whitewall tires.
I understand the difficulties you're going through. I've been there myself. I don't know how many times I've been sitting there saying, "If he didn't care enough to tell you he was cancelling his trip to visit you on your birthday, dump the bastard." Or, "If you hate your job enough to call in sick once a week, how much effort does it take to send resumes elsewhere?" Or, "I don't care if I've never seen it before, it's still a goddamn re-run."
It doesn't matter. I have ranged from sweet reason to compassionate nods of the head interspersed with gentle nudging to jumping up and down to the point where my bra straps cleaved in twain. Modern society is so hell-bent on factionalizing and fracturing us that the gap between thought and deed has become almost impassible. If I can't sway one woman on why she should leave her idiot boyfriend, what hope do any of us have on anything that really matters?
So what am I saying? That those of us who are writing, or are wanna-be writers, are just blowing smoke out our nether orifii? That this is a useless field because more people are interested in what Dear Abby had to say about the right way to put a fork in a dishwasher than they are in how many people got massacred in Rwanda this week?
I'm saying that there has got to be a better way.
What is that better way, Ken? Obviously you don't know, or you'd be deploying it, instead of writing those sweetly irascible columns that make me want to kiss your pouty lips. Hell, obviously I don't know, or I wouldn't be here with my manly text editor pounding out a reply to your hip-but-ancient ideas.
Contrary to what it might seem, I have nothing but respect for what Tabloid is trying to do. I would go work for them in a heartbeat, because I'd rather be doing something that might have a chance than nothing because I don't yet see an Apple of Success to be snatched from the angry god in this garden. So if you need a receptionist/stenographer/coffee-girl whose skills barely outweigh her attitude problems and has a throat ill-designed for swallowing what passes down most gullets without a belch, Ken, you know where to find me.
Until then, I have to go over to visit my lawyer, who I've paid staggering sums of money to execute something that if I'd done myself, I'd probably have been deported and told not to return for five years, if ever. Don't worry, I didn't tell her I was a writer. She'd probably frogmarch me to the Pacific and dump me off a cliff if she thought she was abetting someone in as disreputable a profession as that.
Posted by gtaylor at April 17, 1998 01:09 AM
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