Brilliance Avoided

He lay motionless on his bed listening quietly to the sound of passing traffic. It was unreal to him that each vehicle contained individuals with their own hopes and dreams. His own broken dreams lay around him like so many sharp shards of glass. The memories of what could have been or should have been keeping him awake late into the night. He reached and felt in the dark for a particularly jagged one that was preventing him from sleeping.

It was his dream of a happy life. A fulfilling and simple life spent with a loving woman and a good family. He had sacrificed that dream a long time ago in pursuit of his ambitions and his god damned belief that he had to make the world a better place. But he had failed. He couldn’t be normal. No, that would have been too easy. He had been granted both the ability and the opportunity to make a difference.But he fucked it all up. Now he lay alone in his bed listening quietly to the cars going by in the dark stillness of the night.

Things had gone so well for him for so long. He was raised in a good family. His father was tough but it only served to make him stronger. No one could cut him as deep or hurt him as badly ever again. Or so he thought. He’d done well in his formative education and got accepted to a top university. He’d done well enough there to get the job he wanted to get. It was not the job he wanted but it was a means to an end. He needed to learn about the world before he was ready to lead the world. But his genetic curse was his downfall. He started to drink heavily and it tore his life apart. He didn’t have a good woman like his father had to save him. He had sacrificed her for his career and she was gone. He had a 9-5 job now that he hated. They didn’t mind if he showed up pale, weak and reeking of booze as long as he could do his repetitive task on schedule. Truth be told he often showed up to work buzzed, and often drank on the job, but his manager could care less. All his boss cared about was if he got what he was supposed to get done done. As a functional alcoholic he scraped by. That was an ability and a curse that ran in his family.

He dropped that shard and felt around for another one. It was his aspiration to be a writer. That was before he came to believe that no one would ever care to read what he had written. In fact his writing showed signs of brilliance but that exclusive thing never materialized in any real form. His writing was piecemeal at best and hack at its worst. He never finished a story and he never published anything. Yet brilliance existed within his work and within him. But, like most things on this precious earth, his gifts were squandered and wasted.

There was a number of problems within him that prevented him from ever attaining immortality like his favorite writers: Hemingway, Steinbeck and London. He could not resist the temptations of the flesh long enough to accomplish anything. He was easily distracted and he chose to listen to doubts rather than possibilities. If he ever set aside the time to write he began to write about one thing but soon become distracted and disinterested with it and started on something new. In the rare event that he actually sat down for an extended period of time, and worked on something long enough to begin a story, it would soon be forgotten amid some distraction or other. The next time he took up the notion to start writing again he couldn’t remember what his last piece was, or more likely, he didn’t even care. As a result his computer and notebooks were full of fragments of writing, jokes and inventions. However, nothing was completed. Nothing was finished. This was how brilliance existed without any form. It appeared in a sentence here, or a paragraph there, but never in any amount or form that would allow it to be manifested to the world.

He was a victim of his own limitations. He could not find motivation to complete anything. He wanted to be a writer but he wasn’t willing to make the sacrifices. He knew when he was young that it was a long shot, perhaps the longest one he dared to attempt. Not that he ever did dare to. He was intelligent enough to know that anything good in the world would require time and effort to accomplish. Unfortunately he never took the time or effort to do anything with his writing. He was not willing to sacrifice his blossoming business career and potential political career for a bohemian lifestyle. It was just too much of a long bet. 

He new the impossibility of attaining the level of success with his writing that he could enjoy through the exercise of his other talents. Unlike accounting the future for novelists was bleak at best and non-existent at worse. Publishing was dead. Literary heroes were a thing of the past. No one cared about true novelists or literary artists. They demanded that writing be entertainment. Writing could be entertainment but he was never interested in writing just to entertain. To him writing was a divine and intimate form of communication. To him writing was the meeting of the minds. In no other situation is the communication between two people so pure, so clear and so precise. There is no background noise to lose meaning. No distraction of looking at hands or faces to distort and detract the meaning from the intended consumer. There are only the words on the paper ringing in the head of reader for moments that stretch into eternity. But this was not the writing that people wanted today. Successful writers wrote books that entertained and amused. Not books that searched for the soul of humanity in the depths of human depravity. 

He did on occasion throw a short story or poem to the internet. But he knew the internet was full of two things; porn and aspiring writers. No one would ever hear his voice. No one would ever know his hopes or his sorrow. His writings would be lost among the multitude like a needle in a haystack. If an unfortunate soul was ever to stumble upon his writings the mere form of his communication would be lost. The subtleties that existed within the multi layered paragraphs would never be analyzed or digested by the mind. The viewer would simply pass on to the next webpage with a video or song. Something that did the work for him.

He didn’t really want to be a writer either. From everything he heard writers lived terrible lives. They died young in tragedy or they died old and alone-often by their own hand. Most never were able to reap the rewards of their labors for no one appreciated their musings until they were dead and long gone. He could not rationalize doing something for the sake of itself. In the world that he lived in everything was about efficiency and effectiveness. The writers that were successful were garbage writers. They wrote to entertain not to enlighten.

With the credentials that he had earned growing up he could make more as an average accountant than he could as an exceptional writer. There was no room for the in-between. Either you are successful or you are not. However his career as an accountant was short lived. He gave into the same temptations that prevented him from writing and was fired for being a drunk. He lost everything and had to find the meaningless and dead-end job that he was currently working.

He put down that particularly painful shard and selected another one. When he was in college he started a website. It had great potential and at one point he even had a potential investor who was willing to put tens of thousands of dollars behind his idea. But that dream shattered as well. He had taught himself how to write the code and he put countless hours into the planning of the company and into the development of the database. His brilliance was almost proven with this. It glowed like the sun behind a thick bank of clouds but it never was able to break through. The website puttered and sputtered for awhile before he grew disinterested in it and allowed it to pass into oblivion.

He dropped that shard and tried to roll over and go to sleep but another shard stuck firmly into his chest and he selected it for observation. It was his dream of being the president. Of making the world a better place by leading the free world. When he was young he had the delusion that he could lead the great nation that he was born in. Instead of choosing to pursue his dreams he chose to listen to the people who said it was impossible. He chose to listen to the little voice in his head that said he wasn’t good enough to be president. He chose to believe that the minor mistakes he had made up to his early twenties would prevent him from ever being elected. He chose to believe that people would never elect someone who didn’t believe in a traditional god. So he passed on that dream and never attempted it.

Truth be told he showed promise as a leader. In his younger days he was a natural leader. Always willing to step up and take control of the situation. His ability to think creatively and be an effective problem solver were qualities every leader should have. He was always able to listen to suggestions and perhaps that was one of the things that prevented him from ever attempting. He listened too intently to the suggestions that he would fail. In college he had been a leader in his fraternity and he had learned the fundamentals of leadership in Boy Scouts. If the alcohol had not compounded his self doubts than perhaps he would have developed into the brilliant leader. But his potential was destined to lay deep inside buried like a lost treasure.

There were many more shards that always kept him from sleeping. It didn’t matter where he slept or on what. Nor did it matter if he changed the sheets or the mattress. The shards were always there. Always reminding him of what could have been. He was too old now to try and change. He had squandered his youth and his talents and that kept him awake. Luckily he had alcohol to help him sleep. If he drank enough it dulled the bite of the shards and he was able to slip in oblivion and finally realize his dreams. He reached for the half-full whiskey bottle on his night stand, put it to his lips, and began to drink.