A Cellarful of Nose - Future Shoes

pleasant and surprising successes) of disappointment,
discombobulation, and dejection.
You see, all my life I pictured myself as a giant-killer, a
quick-draw artist always there with the deadly bon-mot, the
death-by-faint-smile observation.
But nowadays I see myself instead more as some bent-over
dwarf coughing up blood by the roadside in the passing
headlights. How did things come to this?
I accept that my writing is flawed. I know my thinking
acumen is second-rate. I concede that my judgment is sometimes
poor.
But when I hear these things confirmed by my father, who
seems not to appreciate that this is not a game for me, it is my
life, and a hard, often unfulfilling one, it's so brutal, it tears the lid
off a fresh can of self-doubt and recrimination in oil.
I went for a walk after our conversation last night, and there I
was, myself an old man of 52, angry at his old man! I was
seething with anger, spitting at the indecency of a man slapping
his son who is working long hours to hold things together, raising
his grandchildren, mocking him that his teenage sketchbook was
the only good thing he ever did.
I looked up at the cloudy night sky and asked it, in all
seriousness, what the fuck was I missing?
But then, as these things have a way of doing, the facts
reassembled themselves. Here's how it went.
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