My Ugly Baby

Yeah, you read right. It’s me again. Just like a bad nickel or an exhausted SNL skit, I come back again and again. What? It’s not me you’re curious about? You want to know about my ugly baby? Uhm, excuse me. This is my blog, you’ll be curious about me here. That’s right. Look at me.

I’m waiting.

C’mon. I can do this forever. Look at me.

I’m not kidding.

…

Thank you. That’s better.

So It’s been a while. Let’s get reacquainted Hi, my name is Rob and I’m an attention-a-holic. I’ve been divorced for two years. I’m still attention starved but I’m getting better. The last time I kicked the cane from underneath an old lady I didn’t go, “Ta-da!”

Everyday and every way I’m getting better and better….

That’s my mantra. Mi mantra es su mantra. OK that’s not true. It’s mine, and everything is all about me—not you. You’re here because of me. If you wanted to read about you, you’d be at your own blog. That would make you quite the narcissist wouldn’t it? But you’re not. You’re here to see who I am.

Somebody told me once, “I see why your wife left you.” What a coincidence, so did MyEx. It was all about me. That’s OK, all of us with ex’s have reasons or are reason’s victims. If you want, jot them down. Make it about you. Here I’ll leave some space.

Oh, that’s sweet, you drew a Thanksgiving turkey hand. That’s nice, but unless your reason is: “I have the attention span of a toddler” I think you missed the reason for my reason exercise.

Yeah, I drew a turkey too. The thing is, whether you drew a turkey, stuffed a turkey, or are a turkey, from this side of the paragraph double-space it means nothing. Throw it away. It’s a chalk-line in the past.

“That was all about us. The present starts here.”

See? It’s a hashmark—a compass point where you say, “this is where things changed.“ It’s a learning experience. You’ve learned from it and moved on, even if the lesson was, “I’ll never marry a crazy person again.” The end.

It is not an ugly baby that whines and cries. Let it go.

“I was married once, look!”

“WAAAH!”

“That’s a, uhm, lovely marriage baby, how old is it?”

“Five years.”

“Oh my, look at the time.”

“Wait! Stay while I feed my ugly baby...!”

There are too many ugly babies in the world. Let this one go. Me? I have mine, but my divorce is not it. MyEx and I get along, but we’ve long since moved on from what was. I’d say we’d forgiven each other, but I don’t know how much there was to forgive.

“I’m sorry that you’re you.”

“Yeah, me too.”

I’ve spent the past year working on new projects, new relationships, and new experiences. Everything is new but the old Rob. He’s still the same.

I worked on a new book. Interestingly enough, I named it Hindsight. It has nothing to do with divorce. And yet Hindsight is my ugly baby. If you haven’t guessed by now, I’m a bit of an attention whore. Yep, check it out. Post a comment here and I’ll rub up on you like you’re slathered in chocolate and whip cream. I know. I have a problem.

And yet, I’m a writer. It’s like the worst field for an attention whore. Not only is it the most anonymous creative profession, next to dog grooming, but it’s also impossible to get your ugly baby noticed favorably. They say that everybody has a book in them. As you read these words, at least one million e-writers are vomiting up stories like a bulimic horde with a finger caught in their throat. Try pushing your baby to the front of that mess.

In this field, agents and publishers mow through wheat and chaff behind blinding clouds of bran and germ, relying on reflex or risk live burial under a silo load of milled paper. Somewhere in this maelstrom of query mail is a kernel of Rob.

I’m sending my ugly baby out to get rejected, in hopes of finding the needle agent in a slush stack.

It’s just like falling in love—except the vomitous horde part.

We go out to find someone who sees us for who we are. Someone who sees our dirty and our true and loves us anyway. If we’re really lucky: someone who loves us because of our dirty truth. We all want someone who’ll accept our ugly babies from cover to cover.

Like love, the odds are against my book, and as an attention whore, both practices are daunting. I’m setting myself up for serial rejection, just to find one instance of acceptance.

I started showing my Hindsight baby last week, sending cigars and touting ugly baby beauty. Friday I received my first two rejections before my morning coffee.

“Dear Author...forgive us for replying with a form letter…”

The form rejection. Writers see plenty of these. It’s like that girl in the coffee shop whose smile lights your heart, but it always shines it for someone else. My other rejection was worse: it was personal.

“Thanks for trying…I’m not attracted to the story.” Or, “Your ugly baby offends me.”

I’m not only an attention whore: I’m a masochist. That blows worse than my limp spaghetti tales of yore. Still, I may be an attention whore, but I know I’m not alone. We all have ugly babies. Like our noses and our battles, we pick our ugly babies. Hindsight is my ugly baby because like my heart, I know that somebody will see the beauty in it. My divorce, held no beauty. I threw it out; cuz there’s no baby in that bathwater.

You do the same thing going forward. You carry your ugly babies with pride. You show them because you believe in them. But enough of you; let’s talk about me…