zelda It’s somewhat damaging to go through a proper English Literature education. You can’t help but be bombarded  with tales of men, and the women those men define themselves through. Adam and Eve, Odysseus and Penelop, Helen of Troy, Daisy Buchanen, Brett Ashley, and  so on. You take it back to Adam and Eve, and men have blamed women for their rise and fall since the dawn of time.

Aside from this, I grew up on family stories of quitting a good education and becoming a painter, all for the love of a woman. It’s all so damn romantic, and it seeped into me. I can blame my angst-filled teenage  years, and love affair with pop-punk on these stories. It’s also probably why F. Scott Fitzgerald is my favorite writer of all time. Well, that, and the fact that The Great Gatsby is a freakin’ masterpiece. But my appreciation for F. Scott doesn’t end at his writing. His personal life has a lot to do with it too. If you are unfamiliar with how messed up and beautiful his relationship with Zelda was, I suggest you check it out. I can seriously relate to somebody who has long-lasting love affair with the crazies. I’ve dated so many mentally unstable girls that I almost don’t know how to talk to or  handle a normal girl.

The final dangerous piece is that I want to be a writer. And the thing of it is that I grow up and have this romantic, idealized notion that there’s going to come along a woman who will be my muse. Like I could just look at her and be inspired to write this great masterpiece. And I know that’s crap, especially for me. Maybe I’m doing it wrong, but I just don’t ever really get that from women. I don’t lock eyes and come up with amazing lines that will be quoted for generations.

The idea of a muse is strange. If you go back to Greek mythology, the muses are pretty women, naturally. All these women that start wars, that ruins great friendships, that inspire us to beat Apollo Creed, they are all fictional. You can’t go around expecting a girl to do the work for you, and I think it’s semi-damaging to the contemporary male to sit around and expect it to happen. The best we can really hope for is a girl who will tolerate our neuroses, make us smile, and forget ourselves. I guess that makes me jaded in the romantic sense, or a realist, I don’t know. I truly believe that awe-inspiring, soul-crushing love is out there, and it will knock my metaphorical socks off, but I’m never gonna expect it to make me write the greatest cinematic masterpiece of the last fifty years.