It’s All Peyton Place

Of late, I have been struggling because I have felt myself censoring my own writing. I have wrestled with it for several weeks now, and realized as I ripped out Leyburn I (it is an entire sordid story in and of itself), that the people I think might be offended are the same people who act with impunity towards the rest of us. So, fair is fair.

In the movie, Return to Peyton Place, Allison comes back to the hamlet of Peyton Place to face the fall out from her novel. In so doing, she confronts a truism about writers. The same people who are narcissistic enough to want you to put them in your novel, short story, essay or blog are the same people who screech the loudest when they don’t like what they read and then refuse to believe it isn’t about them, because of course they are the earth of Ptolemy’s universe.

A blog can be different from a novel because, in a novel it is easier to call b.s. on thee when the whole “I hate what you wrote about me” issue surfaces. The other reality is that if people you write about don’t read the blog, valor and humor pulls the pant off discretion, leaving discretion to run screaming down the street pantless and embarrassed. Yet, what I find most humorous is that the same people who think the blog kills when they think I am writing about someone else, also think I have the most sarcastic, biting humor when they think I am writing about them.

As I have gotten older, I have come to understand that too many people don’t mature. Sure, they get bigger, but for the most part, they are 6-foot tall five year olds. The same people who tried to hold their parents hostage with a tantrum to end all tantrums is generally the same ass who holds the family hostage until they get their way.

That is why, long after all trace of Anna Nicole Smith is deleted from the archives of tabloid hell, she will live immortal as a precedent setting SCOTUS decision. If my 80 year old father married a much younger woman who could smother him with her bosoms, I would be so disgusted and skeeved out, but I would manage. I would not, after he died and left her a mountain of cash, want it proven in a court of law that they actually consummated anything. It is enough to blind my mind’s eye. Well, Anna Nicole Smith’s son-in-law let the 12 year old inside himself who didn’t get the right color pony win out over being an adult. It only took SCOTUS to get it through his pig head.