Fiction

The Journal of Paolo Honorificas
(part 11)

A brief note from The Editors:

Dear Reader: What follows is a personal tragedy concerning one of the great unknowns—one of the least deserving authors in the history of publishing, or so I've been told. As his journal has unfolded before our cyber-eyes we've laughed, we've cried, we've snored, but above all we have grasped that intangible truth of human existence, which has eluded philosophers and degenerates alike from the dawn of time: that we are, in the imor(t)al words of Paolo, "one smug family of like minded literary pettifoggery." And now, we have reached THE END.

Yours in questionable editing,

John Lawson

In Memoriam; The death of Paolo Honorificas,
An introduction By Scott Malby

"An introduction is the weirdest of forms. It tells us something about our minds. It's both a summation and a beginning. It's usually written after everything else is over but ends up preceding what it actually followed. "
—Paolo Honorificas

I'm writing this memorial introduction because Paolo is dead. At least we think he is. He's not been seen at his favorite bar, flea market or Laundromat for weeks. He was probably murdered. Anyone who came into contact with him could have done it. He was that irritating. He possessed all the noxious characteristics of a penniless poet.

He was a liar and a cheat. He was unable to tell the difference between his own imagination and reality. He was always writing things down and was both absentminded and forgetful whenever it suited him. He got on everyone's nerves. He borrowed money from people and never paid it back. He never ordered anything at a restaurant but ate off of everyone else's plate. While in the process of stealing a half used roll of toilet tissue, Paolo slipped off the broken toilet seat at the Salvation Army and successfully sued them for second degree bum burns.

Like his writing, Paolo lacked wit and charm. He was clueless. Everything went over his head. He had a yellow, industrial smile and was missing one of his front teeth. He was totally tasteless. He was smug and arrogant. The zipper on his pants was usually broken. He showered only when he felt like it and most would agree he would have been a far more successful writer if he had felt like it more often. His aftershave smelled like a strange mixture of garlic, urine and stale beer.

His one saving grace was his ability to make us all feel both more fortunate and superior in comparison to him. He was a hack. Paolo's lack of success is a lesson to us all. Writers are self destructive. Their lives tend to be one long anticlimactic series of messy , uneventful little procrastinations. What is even more significant is that Paolo was a terrible writer. His work is so bad it will never go out of fashion. Future readers who stumble over excerpts of his journal will find him just as inane and inappropriate as we do today. A hundred years from now conspiring writers will continue to draw inspiration from the fact that if he could get published anyone can. This leads me to the two reasons why I am writing this introductory memorial and not someone else.

While Paolo had many acquaintances, he had few friends. Those of us unlucky enough to know him drew straws to see who would write this. I lost. These very words are coming at the cost of my better judgment. The second reason is that I was stupid enough to buy a box from him at one of his frequent yard sales.

Inside the box was his postmodern journal. It represented a pastiche of reflections, diatribes, diary jottings, indecipherable musings and fragmented, personal notes characteristic of a frustrated unsuccessful writer in the last half of the 20th. century. It thus can be read as a historical document about failure in our time. Future writers will find it invaluable regarding what to avoid in terms of style, structure and thematic presentation.

The fact is that Paolo had no literary life so he made one up. He became the secretary of the Lost Bay Poet's Society. This society met once a month inside his head. Paolo was also a columnist and reviewer for a number of internet journals. This might well explain his many flaws as a writer. His interviews were infamous. He interviewed God one day and the devil the next. He sought out and interviewed awful poets. From the crypt of his own mediocrity he brought dead writers back to life and proceeded to thoroughly mangle his interpretation of them. His interview with a naked William Blake continues to cause me nightmares. Under the guise of a Mss Puss Wuss, Paolo wrote mean spirited unamusing advice columns of absolutely no redeeming social value.

Paolo would be the first person to tell you that he believed the internet was not a serious venue for writers. He felt it was a flawed medium filled with bad taste and questionable writing. A place he felt thoroughly at home in. A place where the not so good air their dirty underwear in pretentious little ezines run by junior wanna bees buzzing around the fertilizer in someone else's literary garden, unable to tell the difference between a rare flower and a common weed.

It was also Paolo's contention that most online literary journals were edited by frustrated writers who started up their own electronic rags primarily to establish a name for themselves and be interviewed by editors of similar electronic mags so that internet publishing could become one smug family of like minded literary pettifoggery.

Let me hasten to add here that this was Paolo's take on an amazingly vibrant scene and not my own. I couldn't disagree with Paolo more vehemently on this issue. I'm still alive and writing. I depend on these journals regarding publishing my own work. Palo be damned. Even in death he manages to cause me continued grief.

In reading Paolo's material it appears that he might well have been a Sufi in disguise who suffered too many brain hemorrhages. His mind was held hostage somewhere and never ransomed. Left field was his terrain of choice. You didn't have to know Paolo personally to realize how far off base he was. You need only read his questionable journal and you will certainly discover that for yourself.

In editing and translating his journal I took certain liberties. Paolo did not believe in capitol letters, paragraphs or periods. He once told me that writing for him was like climbing up the tree of hard knocks and diving into a waterless cement pool. Like most of his analogies I tried not to search too hard for hidden significance. In this particular case I did ask him what he meant. I was surprised to learn that as a child one of Paolo's hobbies was to climb up trees and dive into empty cement pools. I believed him. There is a certain disorienting, concrete aspect to his elucidations that can be explained in no other way.

Reality for him was ultimately found at the bottom of life's pool. His warped mind and broken nose bear testament to his forays into a realism he continually found himself splattering against. To his credit he would get up, dust himself off and suddenly soar into inspirational flights of fantasy before leaving his figural shape in the cement again. Like his life his words are accidents waiting for something awful to happen to them.

My translation of his journal is incomplete. Approximately a third of it has managed to find its way into print. Working on it has been a thankless, depressing task. I have found neither satisfaction, money nor recognition in the difficult job. Indeed, my reputation itself has suffered. There were times I thought I was turning into Paolo myself. My doctor has informed me the work is having a detrimental effect on my health. Most significantly, Paolo's death has led me to reconsider my own mortality. I've set aside my own creative aspirations for far too long. It's time I resumed work on my own novel. It's my guess that the person most upset by Paolo's death is Paolo himself. I know if I were the one who died I'd probably feel that way. What about you?

Sincerely, Scott Malby