Sex, Coke and Metaphor

As Jane Austen was dying, she wondered if all her genius with language would be revealed as just howling lunacy.

When I was 16, I wrote a diary entry in a mid-sized green notebook called, “How Can I Be Good with All the Things I Do?” There were 167 entries. Number one was “sex” and number two was “coke.” That was where my mother, who snooped, but only out of concern, stopped cold, called the school, and made me come home to discuss the fact that the answer to the question I’d posed was, “You can’t.”

We made up and I straightened up eventually, more or less. But, while the top ten seem under control, number 72 on the list has always stuck with me: “This false way of talking.” How I had started to talk as a teenager—I guess it was the dizzy oh-my-gods, totallys, and awesomes—seemed to be creating a hard candy shell around my mind. Inside my mind was turning into whatever is inside Skittles. A more truthful way of talking seemed like the answer, but my natural idiom, a baroque style widely known as “pretentious,” which includes long latinate and actual Latin words, wasn’t going to win me friends. Surely there were more than two choices. It couldn’t just be Valley Girl or Oxford Don.

I’d say the concern expressed in #72 still informs, and sometimes pervades, my life. I have a dread fear of losing tonal control. The nightmare is not knowing what idiom set I’m drawing from, stealing someone’s coinages, trying too hard, sounding like everyone else, using deadbeat memes, talking like an AI. How can I be good if I do all of these things?