The Life and Mind of Charles Bivona. That still makes me cringe. Sang Lee chose that title, “because it’s so fucking arrogant, and you are anything but.”
He’d known me since I was twenty-four-years-old, a quivering ball of anxiety and low self-esteem—feverishly scribbling into my journals.
After five years, and much coaxing, I finally read something to Sang. He also wanted to be a writer, and I was his unfortunate community.
I chose something very short to read, a stylized sarcasm about the unusual language my dentist used while drilling my teeth. I finished reading the passage and just sat there, sweating, bracing to be laughed at, to be called an idiot, or a moron, or a fat fucking loser with weirdo thoughts and ideas.
My childhood of poetry and scribbling hadn’t been easy.
But Sang just sat there, smoking, nodding his head. Then he said, after a deafening minute of silence—
“Dude … that was fucking amazing…”
Then he said it again.
“Dude! That was fucking amazing!! That’s what you’re always writing in your journals?? Stuff like that? What the fuck!”
But what was really amazing: I almost believed him.
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