THE FORK

If the sky is the limit for humanity in general, then diving into the black hole is the limit for a confessional writer. To be self-flagellating and masochistic, you must be brave and bold. Or maybe you are fooling yourself? You are on a kamikaze mission and you want to take down as many as possible before you self-destruct.

As a journalist and an author, I am bound by court orders to refrain from discussing certain political and personal issues. I could be stripped of my pension, fined thousands and sent to prison. So much for free speech. So much for telling the real story. So much for writing my autobiography.

For a writer of such little fame, my pen has been the sword that I have used on myself as I have dealt with the repercussions of my swash-buckling prose both at work and at home. As an unedited journalist and author, I can say that I have broken most of the rules. There are few sacred cows that I haven't milked. But it has cost me. It has cost me three families for starters.

I could tell scores of stories, but one will suffice. I am in Mexico City because I retired from the Brownsville Independent School District after the superintendent threatened to fire me if I continued to write in my usual vein. I relished the students and the classroom to such a degree that I could still be teaching at 75.

At the beginning of my 39th year in the BISD, I was summoned from my classroom to meet with the superintendent in the principal's office. The superintendent informed me that my job was on the line as a result of the articles I was publishing on my blog and Facebook. I listened. I had held the superintendent in high esteem until this moment, but political pressure had reached the breaking point and she was trying to break me to please those who held power over her.

I wasn't in shock that after four decades in Brownsville someone had finally realized that I had far exceeded the limits of the skies and was spinning wildly into space. Part of my success as a blogger had been graphic with my tasteful photographs of women with large breasts and men with huge erections. As a artist with an incoherent vision, it never occurred to me that I might be defying community standards and it had never occurred to anyone to challenge the school district that the BISD was employing a pervert who was no artist at all.

I decided that I had reached a fork in the road. Though I hadn't posted any nudity in several years, there was no way I was going to change my writing. I was incapable of change. If I was going to change, it was either to devolve into a primitive stage and perceive reality from a more stark angle or evolve and transcend reality and create my own universe. Neither choice would find a sympathetic reception from the superintendent and those who were pulling her strings.

I had had a good career. During inebriated moments, I have bragged that I had a great career. I didn't want to diminish this accomplishment with a protracted and controversial confrontation. Calculating my retirement, I was practically working for free. I decided that I would complete my 39th year and call it quits. 

If it hadn't been for that conversation with my boss, I would be on summer vacation with god knows how many years under my belt and proceeding into the future with a one-year-at-a-time mentality. Instead, I am in Mexico City. 

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