the old ceremony posted:

all through high school i was working on a hundred thousand word pastoral travelling scene that i called a novel, all the adults in my life encouraged me because they were all certain i'd be published on the basis of my age alone and at least make a few novelty bucks out of it, and i hated christopher paolini with fierce, theatrical violence. i loathed that man. sometimes i would open my copy of eragon, which was given to me by my sweetest cousin who later committed suicide so i simultaneously despised the book and was driven to hold onto it like a talisman, and stare at paolini's author portrait in silent hatred. of course i never got published and now i'm almost thirty and my youthful promise has gurgled down the twin infested drains of university education and the global financial crisis. i am haunted by paolini. the toilet paper comes away from my rear end with his face smeared onto it like a jesus toast. i see him in the rainless clouds. when i catch the bus to my welfare appointments, where a tired-looking woman tries to convince me to get a certificate in aged care and spend the rest of my life scrubbing the elderly, the bus driver with his competitive hourly rate and his union membership and his loving long-service leave is christopher paolini. the welfare lady is paolini. the elderly are paolini. i look at myself in the mirror and all i see is the teenage paolini, proudly smirking. worst of all i think eragon survives as something like a perfect cultural object, a fantasy novel that was written by an actual adolescent rather than the psychosexually adolescent adults that populate the genre and this thread