keyword "blessed" title "grandma moses never had to be on TMZ" in "the next big thing" flash fiction

The later in life that we succeed, the later we will collapse into success-sheltered self-parody, this is our artistic covenant. We are all better off without turning into DeNiro, taking every role that we are offered, diluting what should be our legacies. We’re better off not being Elvis, there will never be a choice for us between the memorial postage stamps where we are young and thin or where we are fat and old. There will be fat and old postage stamps of us or there will be none and that is a transcendent joy. No one will ever want to see our sex tapes, not even the people we made them with and this will all be for the best.

By succeeding when we’re old, we will stay closer to the real human experience and in doing so have a lot more to paint about, to write about, to sing about, not just writing songs about being in a rock band, not just making movies about the process of making movies. We will have decades more of real life to draw upon, decades more than the wunderkind and ingenues, the flukes and prodigies. We will art about the states of every day suffering and toil that connect with average people for so much longer and we’ll be the better for it. By the time our experiences have been exhausted, by the time we’ve become Howard Stern just yelling about how the intern brought us cold soup for hours on end, we will be so ancient we’ll be forgiven it as simple senility, not that we were ruined by wealth or the creative isolation that comes by being surrounded with yes-men and fanboys who would never question us, collapsing into our worst and laziest instincts.

There will be more to say and there will be a longer time to say it in and so the crap jobs or the unemployment in our twenties and our thirties will have been worth it. As much fun as being twenty-three collecting awards and crashing Porsches into trees probably would have been, we will have perspective and perhaps a little more privacy on top of that. Grandma Moses never had to be ambushed by cameras on TMZ, never had to look over her shoulder in case a paparazzo on a horse was perched taking pictures just beyond her eyeline.

By the time we start repeating ourselves as everyone will eventually, by the time we are all pale echoes of our past glories so that we can continue to pay all our agents and assistants and other hangers-on, by the time we’re only crafting statements on the minuscule hassles associated with being somewhat famous, all that crap will be left to our estates and released posthumously when the critics would find it tacky to call us on our fading self-absorption. It’ll be wonderful, oh God, we will be so blessed.

Or at least that’s what we all tell ourselves, as we burn away in obscurity.

Last updated July 26, 2018