Anchor ads are not supported on this page.

4S Ranch Allied Gardens Alpine Baja Balboa Park Bankers Hill Barrio Logan Bay Ho Bay Park Black Mountain Ranch Blossom Valley Bonita Bonsall Borrego Springs Boulevard Campo Cardiff-by-the-Sea Carlsbad Carmel Mountain Carmel Valley Chollas View Chula Vista City College City Heights Clairemont College Area Coronado CSU San Marcos Cuyamaca College Del Cerro Del Mar Descanso Downtown San Diego Eastlake East Village El Cajon Emerald Hills Encanto Encinitas Escondido Fallbrook Fletcher Hills Golden Hill Grant Hill Grantville Grossmont College Guatay Harbor Island Hillcrest Imperial Beach Imperial Valley Jacumba Jamacha-Lomita Jamul Julian Kearny Mesa Kensington La Jolla Lakeside La Mesa Lemon Grove Leucadia Liberty Station Lincoln Acres Lincoln Park Linda Vista Little Italy Logan Heights Mesa College Midway District MiraCosta College Miramar Miramar College Mira Mesa Mission Beach Mission Hills Mission Valley Mountain View Mount Hope Mount Laguna National City Nestor Normal Heights North Park Oak Park Ocean Beach Oceanside Old Town Otay Mesa Pacific Beach Pala Palomar College Palomar Mountain Paradise Hills Pauma Valley Pine Valley Point Loma Point Loma Nazarene Potrero Poway Rainbow Ramona Rancho Bernardo Rancho Penasquitos Rancho San Diego Rancho Santa Fe Rolando San Carlos San Marcos San Onofre Santa Ysabel Santee San Ysidro Scripps Ranch SDSU Serra Mesa Shelltown Shelter Island Sherman Heights Skyline Solana Beach Sorrento Valley Southcrest South Park Southwestern College Spring Valley Stockton Talmadge Temecula Tierrasanta Tijuana UCSD University City University Heights USD Valencia Park Valley Center Vista Warner Springs

Some of My Favorite Fantasies

One practical use I’ve found for the embarrassing character flaw of romanticism is applying that wrongheaded screwiness to being broke. I’m probably more strapped than I need to be (I’m paid very fairly), as I manage money so poorly that I have seen my friends quite literally drop their jaws at my idiocy in that department. Blaming Mom for anything anymore is pathetic at my age, but I am certain I can draw a straight hereditary line from my mother’s neurotic disdain for money to my own. I clearly inherited her dingbat tendency to view whatever inconveniences that life might offer with rose-tinted lenses and/or purple prose.

Case in point: during some of the latter months of what I’ve heard dubbed the Great Recession — after nearly two years of this temporary setback — I, like certain criminals and cranky geezers with their backs to the wall, snapped. Instead of robbing a bank or firing off angry emails to Congress, I steeped my days in various fantasies in which the poor are noble and the rich villainous.

One fantasy, for example, that helped me out a bit and lasted for months was what I’ve come to think of as my “Victorian Era.” A kind of relative to Goth sensibilities (there’s room, of course, for, say, vampires in Victoriana), 19th-century England is a kind of comfort food for the imagination. Never mind the realities of the period; this has as little to do with reality as possible. A few columns were informed with this prolonged kind of fugue state, and some were written in a style imitative of literature from that era (Dickens), so entangled with adjective-riddled syntax that I was hoping it would be seen as the parody I was ready to call it just in case it came under critical fire from readers.

During this season of escapism (around last Christmas through, say, St. Patrick’s Day), I bought, and at full retail price, Dan Simmons’s wonderfully weighty novel Drood, a spin-off of Charles Dickens’s final and unfinished work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Sinking into Simmons’s tome of madness, ghosts, opium, murder, and pudding-rich language launched me into an orgy of that late 1800s of the mind, minus, of course, the mud and stench and mindless cruelties of the time. In other words, I inhabited a Victorian jolly-old that never existed, that had little to do with history and everything to do with literary, penny-dreadful conceits. I went out to used-book stores and purchased a nice edition of the Dickens title, plus Wilkie Collins’s (the narrator of Drood) The Moonstone; The Last Dickens, by Matthew Pearl; and for good measure, The Poe Shadow, also by Pearl.

Sponsored
Sponsored

A sample of this fantasy might be something like going out of my way on payday to order bangers and mash at the Stout Pub (really more of an Irish joint) and actually drinking tea, all the while entertaining the fuzzy notion that I was a brilliant but obscure gothic-fantasy novelist in 1895 and a friend of H.G. Wells. Never mind that I have written my own novels in reality. There is no romance in reality, even though the real novels themselves are lousy with the stuff. As a kid I would do much this same kind of escape act, only to the Middle Ages — again, not as they were, but reflected through an Arthurian haze of shining armor unspattered with Medieval mud.

Another fantasy, one I haven’t revisited in recent years and one designed to dodge the truth of my deflated wallet, was the hard-boiled, down-at-the-heels private eye working a case pro-bono for a gorgeous damsel in distress (imaginary, usually, or at least the distress part and often the gorgeous part). This was more common in my 30s, again triggered by literature. Pulp literature: Hammett, Chandler — never Spillane (I managed to retain some rear-guard sentinel of taste).

During rainy days recently and living downtown, it was easy enough to lend myself to the pretense of being George Orwell down and out in Paris and London, working on 1984. Once more, forget the real down-and-out aspects of the life of Orwell (or Eric Blair, one of his pseudonyms, or one of his -nyms, anyway) during that period; I was the noble scribbler jotting down impressions of humanity confronting the Industrial Revolution. Oh, yeah, sometimes I was Jack London, too, but not recently.

My flights into imaginary poverty to avoid actual poverty have mostly pivoted on specific novels and novelists, never television (which I suspect may be more common), but sometimes movies. I was Sean Connery as The Man Who Would Be King for about ten years. Oh, yeah, that was a Rudyard Kipling story.

Here's something you might be interested in.
Submit a free classified
or view all
Previous article

20 Best Online Casinos USA For Real Money (2024 List)

USA Online Casinos: Top 20 Online Casino Sites of 2024
Next Article

San Diego's Uptown Planners challenged by renters from Vibrant Uptown

Two La Jolla planning groups fight for predominance

One practical use I’ve found for the embarrassing character flaw of romanticism is applying that wrongheaded screwiness to being broke. I’m probably more strapped than I need to be (I’m paid very fairly), as I manage money so poorly that I have seen my friends quite literally drop their jaws at my idiocy in that department. Blaming Mom for anything anymore is pathetic at my age, but I am certain I can draw a straight hereditary line from my mother’s neurotic disdain for money to my own. I clearly inherited her dingbat tendency to view whatever inconveniences that life might offer with rose-tinted lenses and/or purple prose.

Case in point: during some of the latter months of what I’ve heard dubbed the Great Recession — after nearly two years of this temporary setback — I, like certain criminals and cranky geezers with their backs to the wall, snapped. Instead of robbing a bank or firing off angry emails to Congress, I steeped my days in various fantasies in which the poor are noble and the rich villainous.

One fantasy, for example, that helped me out a bit and lasted for months was what I’ve come to think of as my “Victorian Era.” A kind of relative to Goth sensibilities (there’s room, of course, for, say, vampires in Victoriana), 19th-century England is a kind of comfort food for the imagination. Never mind the realities of the period; this has as little to do with reality as possible. A few columns were informed with this prolonged kind of fugue state, and some were written in a style imitative of literature from that era (Dickens), so entangled with adjective-riddled syntax that I was hoping it would be seen as the parody I was ready to call it just in case it came under critical fire from readers.

During this season of escapism (around last Christmas through, say, St. Patrick’s Day), I bought, and at full retail price, Dan Simmons’s wonderfully weighty novel Drood, a spin-off of Charles Dickens’s final and unfinished work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Sinking into Simmons’s tome of madness, ghosts, opium, murder, and pudding-rich language launched me into an orgy of that late 1800s of the mind, minus, of course, the mud and stench and mindless cruelties of the time. In other words, I inhabited a Victorian jolly-old that never existed, that had little to do with history and everything to do with literary, penny-dreadful conceits. I went out to used-book stores and purchased a nice edition of the Dickens title, plus Wilkie Collins’s (the narrator of Drood) The Moonstone; The Last Dickens, by Matthew Pearl; and for good measure, The Poe Shadow, also by Pearl.

Sponsored
Sponsored

A sample of this fantasy might be something like going out of my way on payday to order bangers and mash at the Stout Pub (really more of an Irish joint) and actually drinking tea, all the while entertaining the fuzzy notion that I was a brilliant but obscure gothic-fantasy novelist in 1895 and a friend of H.G. Wells. Never mind that I have written my own novels in reality. There is no romance in reality, even though the real novels themselves are lousy with the stuff. As a kid I would do much this same kind of escape act, only to the Middle Ages — again, not as they were, but reflected through an Arthurian haze of shining armor unspattered with Medieval mud.

Another fantasy, one I haven’t revisited in recent years and one designed to dodge the truth of my deflated wallet, was the hard-boiled, down-at-the-heels private eye working a case pro-bono for a gorgeous damsel in distress (imaginary, usually, or at least the distress part and often the gorgeous part). This was more common in my 30s, again triggered by literature. Pulp literature: Hammett, Chandler — never Spillane (I managed to retain some rear-guard sentinel of taste).

During rainy days recently and living downtown, it was easy enough to lend myself to the pretense of being George Orwell down and out in Paris and London, working on 1984. Once more, forget the real down-and-out aspects of the life of Orwell (or Eric Blair, one of his pseudonyms, or one of his -nyms, anyway) during that period; I was the noble scribbler jotting down impressions of humanity confronting the Industrial Revolution. Oh, yeah, sometimes I was Jack London, too, but not recently.

My flights into imaginary poverty to avoid actual poverty have mostly pivoted on specific novels and novelists, never television (which I suspect may be more common), but sometimes movies. I was Sean Connery as The Man Who Would Be King for about ten years. Oh, yeah, that was a Rudyard Kipling story.

Comments
Sponsored
Here's something you might be interested in.
Submit a free classified
or view all
Previous article

Angry Pete’s goes from pop-up to drive-thru

Detroit Pizza sidles into the husk of a shuttered Taco Bell
Next Article

Reader Music Issue short takes

Obervatory's mosh pit, frenetic Rafael Payare, Lemonhead chaos, bleedforthescene, Coronado Tasting Room
Comments
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed Big Screen — Movie commentary Blurt — Music's inside track Booze News — San Diego spirits Classical Music — Immortal beauty Classifieds — Free and easy Cover Stories — Front-page features Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts Feast! — Food & drink reviews Feature Stories — Local news & stories Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore From the Archives — Spotlight on the past Golden Dreams — Talk of the town The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it Letters — Our inbox Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news News Ticker — News & politics Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated Poetry — The old and the new Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers Reading — The hunt for intellectuals Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds SD on the QT — Almost factual news Sheep and Goats — Places of worship Special Issues — The best of Street Style — San Diego streets have style Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves Theater — On stage in San Diego this week Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads Your Week — Daily event picks
4S Ranch Allied Gardens Alpine Baja Balboa Park Bankers Hill Barrio Logan Bay Ho Bay Park Black Mountain Ranch Blossom Valley Bonita Bonsall Borrego Springs Boulevard Campo Cardiff-by-the-Sea Carlsbad Carmel Mountain Carmel Valley Chollas View Chula Vista City College City Heights Clairemont College Area Coronado CSU San Marcos Cuyamaca College Del Cerro Del Mar Descanso Downtown San Diego Eastlake East Village El Cajon Emerald Hills Encanto Encinitas Escondido Fallbrook Fletcher Hills Golden Hill Grant Hill Grantville Grossmont College Guatay Harbor Island Hillcrest Imperial Beach Imperial Valley Jacumba Jamacha-Lomita Jamul Julian Kearny Mesa Kensington La Jolla Lakeside La Mesa Lemon Grove Leucadia Liberty Station Lincoln Acres Lincoln Park Linda Vista Little Italy Logan Heights Mesa College Midway District MiraCosta College Miramar Miramar College Mira Mesa Mission Beach Mission Hills Mission Valley Mountain View Mount Hope Mount Laguna National City Nestor Normal Heights North Park Oak Park Ocean Beach Oceanside Old Town Otay Mesa Pacific Beach Pala Palomar College Palomar Mountain Paradise Hills Pauma Valley Pine Valley Point Loma Point Loma Nazarene Potrero Poway Rainbow Ramona Rancho Bernardo Rancho Penasquitos Rancho San Diego Rancho Santa Fe Rolando San Carlos San Marcos San Onofre Santa Ysabel Santee San Ysidro Scripps Ranch SDSU Serra Mesa Shelltown Shelter Island Sherman Heights Skyline Solana Beach Sorrento Valley Southcrest South Park Southwestern College Spring Valley Stockton Talmadge Temecula Tierrasanta Tijuana UCSD University City University Heights USD Valencia Park Valley Center Vista Warner Springs
Close

Anchor ads are not supported on this page.