Eccentric Flower:200906/Bruno and Damage

Once upon a time I used to regularly read an online comic - well, "comic" isn't exactly the word, because it wasn't funny - but let's say, an ongoing story told in four-panel installments. It was the story of a very neurotic woman named Bruno, her life, and the people who loved her and put up with her. It was drawn by a man named Christopher Baldwin. The story has come to an end, as stories always do, but you can read as much of it as you have the time and patience to read - it should all still be online.

In cleaning entries from October 1999 I found one that consisted mostly of snippets of good conversations from "Bruno," and it's nice to have the reminder of why I liked the strip - because most of my memories which remain of it are not exactly positive.

If you've looked at any of the archives of the 1999 journal from around this time, you'll see that a couple of months before then, I had finished a novel which had a young protagonist who was a neurotic, badly damaged human. This book got a fair number of negative initial reads, mostly because of this protagonist. To be blunt about it, Aedie hates or is unenthusiastic about everything. He's survived a very bad childhood, and is both adolescent-jaded and deeply suspicious of the world - a bad combination. He's going off for six years' immersion on an alien world which has never had human visitors, he's extremely intelligent and alert, this should be a brave new adventure for him - but all you really hear from him is how badly everything sucks.

The thing is, this IS Aedie's character and I refuse to change it, because I have to show him evolving out of that - that's the point. But since the entire thing is from his point of view, it means I have a book where about the first two-thirds practically dare the reader to try to get through it.

On the other hand, Aedie does change, and if I incorporated some outside viewpoint like Bruno has - other characters who can tell Bruno what a fool she is, so the audience sees it too - the book would be salvaged, I think.

I mention all this because I didn't really see the parallels for a while. I like Aedie more than you do. Sullenness and all, I am rooting for Aedie to win. This is because Aedie and I have a lot in common, as I realized even at the time, and one of them is a particular grit-teeth-and-screw-the-world attitude which Aimee Mann once summarized neatly for me:

Now I'm in that place again
And I know he can't come in to get me
And one day he will live to regret me
Susan I can see it now

Whereas Bruno, a lot of the time, just pissed me off. I wanted to shake her. I wanted to make her count her blessings. I wanted to ask her, "What the hell do YOU have to be so mopey about?" And so forth. Yes, I know, a little schizophrenic. Bruno got itchy any time a relationship was going well, worried about when the other shoe was going to drop. She got nervous about being in one place too long. She feared change but also feared stagnation. She rejected people who loved her.

That's the key difference there. Bruno rejected people who loved her. Aedie knew he didn't HAVE anyone who loved him. Aedie would be hugely jealous of what Bruno was throwing away.

Somewhere along the line I had a brief, minor email spat with Christopher Baldwin. I don't remember what it was about now and that's unimportant anyway. The important thing is that this spat, along with supplementary evidence, showed me that Baldwin shares many of Bruno's neuroses.

In other words, I think, Baldwin doesn't realize or doesn't care how annoying and upsetting Bruno's behavior could be, because he was too close to Bruno's point of view ... and I didn't realize or didn't care how annoying and upsetting Aedie's behavior could be, because I was too close to his.

I have said for years that all stand-up comedians are fundamentally damaged in some way. I think it's like the point latter-day writers, notably Alan Moore, have tried to make about costumed superheroes: You've got to be more than a little nuts to get into the business in the first place. It takes a particular mindset to go on stage and try to make your living making light of the world, and there is always something nasty lurking behind the mindset. I have known a couple of people who were or wanted to be professional stand-ups, and they were all deeply damaged people. Most of the famous comedians whose private lives I know the least bit about have turned out to be gravely neurotic when off camera, at the very least, if not outright malajusted. It just seems to come with the territory.

Sometimes I wonder if that's not true about certain kinds of writing as well. I won't go so far as to say "you have to be deeply neurotic to be the sort of writer who keeps writing over the long term" ... but I wonder if that's not a first approximation of the real answer.