Saturday, July 13, 2002 8:28 AM
I know that I yam and yam that I know.

I went out last Sunday in search of a Bocce set. Thought, if I'm going to be mentally involved in this game for a time then I should probably try some physically finessed action. Figured, well, it'll probably cost around $40.00 which is too much for the frivolous side of my budget and hoping it would only be around $20.00. I also vowed to get down to the lawn bowling courts over at Frick Park this coming weekend. Research says my brain. Research! I am nothing (quit the cub scouts twice before my twelfth year), if not prepared. At least, know something of what the hell you are writing, expostulates my creative writing teacher.

Creative writing class ninth grade. "You can only write what you know," said Mrs. Whatever-her-name-was-that-vanished-from-me-after-all-these-years glibly. I thought it was stupid then, confirming that if I could only write what I know I would spew out about a page and a half and before the necessity of moving on to something else. I know that wasn't her meaning, but it is always my initial negative reaction to a rule or a guideline. I am a very contrary person. Whatever it is I'm against it, remains the ruling script in my life. Sometimes it is even helpful.

But there is a problem with this knowing thing. An old Stan Freberg cartoon where a person comes across a struggling artist, who looks terrible, takes one look and says, oh, you've suffered too much. My life has not been full of suffering. I am a suburban guy in a middle age struggling from pay check to pay check in middle America just middlin’ along. I have not been to war. I have not been part of a holocaust. I have not seen abject poverty. I have not ...well, it's all been ok really. So in the suffering department, other than a load of guilt I carry around for acts that seem not even all that related to me, I lack the "artistic temperament". I conclude from Stan and others that I just suffer too little.

I am not particularly driven. I wish I came home every evening and just wrote long tormented passages of passionate prose or poetry. Instead I eat some dinner, take a glass or two of wine and write for an hour and produce some broken dreams that seem never to get done. I will not bother here with the growing list of projects which I am far better at conceiving than completing. Hey, maybe this is a “life of quiet desperation.” No?

The other problem with this epistemological dilemma is that what I know is relatively uninteresting. For example, I toyed with the idea of a novel called simply, Mechanical Refrigeration. I liked the idea of it being confused with a text book and I may (just one of the projects) even write it some day. The problem is that when I start to write it, it seems very uninteresting. Either I know this subject too well or I don't understand its charm or my depth of knowledge is every bit as shallow here as elsewhere. Perhaps I should suffer on the spit of thermodynamics for a century or two.

It really is ridiculous, I now suffer and despair because I don't suffer and despair or know enough. Doesn't seem legit to me. Could I exist in an unheated garret with these superficial miseries? Perhaps I should cut off an appendage and proclaim undying unrequited love to some woman. Carry her scarf in my back pocket so that…wait this is getting far too erotic and complicated for my simple brain.

I went over to one of the sports sales stores that reside behind the mall and seem way more interested in clothes than sports. They had exactly two Bocce sets. One for $20.00. But it was called a beginners set, had pictures of children playing on a lawn and plastic hollow balls. Next to it was, of course, the set that I wanted. I picked it up, proud that I had the muscles to do so, for I am sure that Olympic Weight lifting champ Paul Anderson (shows when I paid attention to sports last, eh) would have had a hard time raising that set in a spiffing wooden box to eye view for examination. 80 bucks!

Always the smart shopper I went to a discount store and found a set for even more money. America can provide a cruel shopping experience. How can I possibly write about Bocce when I have not played Bocce? How can I play Bocce without having a set of Bocce Balls? Thus, thrust high on the horns, I hang watching the world spin around.