This original essay from Jeremy Benjamin, is part of a series of essays from the writers of The Portland Fiction Project.  You can read more of Jeremy’s work here, and check out our interview with him here.

I’m So Full Of Shit My Shoes Make A Squishing Noise On Pavement
an essay by Jeremy Benjamin

I dreamt last night I ran out of the pub to where my bicycle was locked and squeezed my front and back tire in my left hand for assurance that it was securely inflated. In the dream’s course I repeatedly ran outside with accelerating compulsivity until the moment of shock when that rugged mountain tire went limp in my hand, like holding a bag of snot I had trusted to deliver me home. And all I could think was, I knew it. I fucking knew it. Next moment the leak is in front of my face, a brightly shining hole in concentric rings of carnage that hisses as it stares back at me, a cyclopean eye spitting out more air then ever was in that tire. I’ve dreamt this numerous times before. Other nights it’s my brakes I keep checking until they fail me. Except with those, it’s not a hiss but a flat snapping sound of a cable worn too thin.

I told myself I would walk inside, order a cup of tea and a muffin and not leave the comfy chair until I’d written a polished essay. An essay pertaining to literature, or pertaining to writing fiction in Portland Oregon, or writing fiction in general, or pertaining to nothing. An essay that’s brutally honest, witty and concise, one that digs so deep into my hopes and fears that I’ll hear an all pervasive OHM resonating in my chest as I float out the door.

I locked my bicycle outside, and the last object I noticed before entering was a brown shard of broken glass on the grass, proximal to my front tire. Then I remembered my dream. I’ll keep typing and checking my words, checking my words, checking to make sure they’re accurate and witty and polysyllabic enough, I’ll halt and double back to the first paragraph to check that I’ve used just enough alliteration to give the reader a hard-on, and that I’ve used it sparingly enough so as not to be pretentious. I’ll make sure my paragraph breaks are in the right places, that my paragraphs aren’t long and bulky. I’ll stake out repeated words and replace them with synonyms. I’ll make sure my tenses are consistent. Or deliberately inconsistent. I hate to end a paragraph with one word that takes up an entire line of white space, but I’ll curb my fetish because no reader will give a damn if the word ‘inconsistent’ stands alone (and it won’t, because the next person to open this text file will have different default margins), nobody will shake their fist and say way to use language economically, asshole, why don’t you just cut down a tree and piss on it.

I changed ‘ran outside repeatedly’ to ‘repeatedly ran outside’ and then I added ‘rapidly’ because ‘rapidly’ starts with an R – as does ‘ran’ and ‘repeatedly’ – so that the sentence read ‘…with rapidly accelerating compulsivity…’ then the next time I ran back to it, ran back to check that the words were still holding air, still pressurized with enough truth per cubic inch to carry me home, I deleted “rapidly” and I will probably add and deleted it at least three more times.

Now I’m safe on first base because I made an analogy about obsessive behavior, who else could make an effortless connection between checking a bicycle tire and composing an essay, I’m a clever little bastard who can ramble through non sequiturs trusting they’ll reveal their own connective theme or deductive argument if I leave them alone. My acting coach tells me to get the hell out of my own way and just leave it alone, because the truth is always more interesting, the audience isn’t paying to see your idea of how that emotion should be expressed, they just want to see you live so that they can know they’re not alone.

A literary colleague – and east-coast-bred brethren – once proclaimed over beer that putting it down in writing is a greater accomplishment than dramatizing it on a stage. I think you’re full of shit, anonymous buddy of mine (he’s totally gonna kick my ass when he reads this). I mean, seriously, that’s all any of us are ever trying to do: get out of our goddamned way so that we can have our catharsis, pound our fists on the floor in sobbing histrionics and then toast pints of microbrew and walk away hearing a pervasive OHM resonate in our skin as we float off to our cave. To dream about mountain bike tires reduced to bags of snot, and then use that for material. And then edit the dogshit out of it until we like it enough.

When I first sat down and finished my tea, I thought I might procrastinate and read a comrade’s story. When I copied and pasted it, I accidentally selected all the text except for the first word, which was the protagonist’s name, so that the story I read opened with “said the most important part…” I was about to write a longwinded critique of how creative and postmodern it was to start a story mid sentence, then, realizing my blunder, I laughed to myself. When I laugh to myself, I’m obligated to pause, look at the situation and investigate whether it might be utilized in a story somewhere somehow, if I might extrapolate from it a scenario wherein a professor is grading papers and gives a student a failing grade due to a fragmented opening sentence, only to realize later that it was the professor’s clumsy mistake, and to make it up to the student he engages in a high-stakes web of blackmail…with a torrid sexual affair thrown in.

Everything is pertinent. Everything is appropriate. An actor has no concept of vulnerability or embarrassment, because every private emotion of theirs is public property. A writer does not have the privilege to shut the door and swat that mental digression like a mosquito. When I hear coworkers whispering and my instinct is one of curiosity, I have two conflicting job duties. The one that pays me by the hour requires that I remain at my desk and mind my own business. The one that pays me by more abstract means requires that I be relentlessly nosy.

One of my earliest [language-arts] mentors once urged me to lead a creative writing workshop for my peers (I was fifteen at the time). In the workshop I challenged everyone to write a dialog scene in which they run into the person they least expect to see. My mentor participated in the exercise too; his piece was a speculative scene – set twenty years in the future – in which an older version of him encountered an adult version of me in a mental health institution, the premise being that he was committed and I was a successful novelist passing through. In the scene, he asks me what I’m doing there, and when I explain to him that I’m visiting to do research for my next book, he gets upset and goes into a ranting speech about how I’m selfishly exploiting people’s misery to use as fodder for my next bestseller, and the scene ends with future-him being hauled off by orderlies and sedated while I take notes. When he read the scene out loud, an awkward silence hung in the room, and he winked at me. To this day I have no idea what that wink meant. I could think of a few things that wink might have meant, and I’ll think of a few things more.

If I meet you on the street, I will dig my claws into your flesh, pluck out your story and watch the blood splurt and trickle down my forearm as it writhes and pulses in my palm, held up like a trophy as I salivate with voyeuristic interest. I want you to vent. I don’t want the pleasantries; I want your dirty laundry, and I want all of it. I offer mine freely, take as you will.

My radius of attention has just jumped to a wall’s distance and I register the young lady on the other side of the coffee table, typing intently at her laptop. I wonder what she’s writing. Maybe it’s an article for a newspaper. Maybe it’s a thesis project on plant biology that will be the impetus for technological advances that will enable future generations to grow their own food in a micro-garden on the skin of one’s shoulder. No, scratch that; she’s writing a love letter. I’m already imagining it.

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