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| pic via Hanna Barbera |
Dear readers,
There's a few things I need to tell you:
First, I apologize for only writing 30 days worth of plays.
I'm studying to be an English teacher, and all my final semester
projects kilt whatever modicum of creativity I had left. See, I was trying to outdo George Bernard Shaw's one-act plays by writing daily one scene, one-act plays. To go one better than Shaw, and as it was only one scene, to make it a easier for today's online reader. Lesson learned: Before you attempt to take on Shaw's legend, make sure you have something worth writing about, especially when you're arrogant enough to believe you can scribble out a masterpiece in five minutes. Maybe I just needed a rotating shed for inspiration.
Second, my name is Fred Hagemeister and I am A Stumbling Mass of High Energy Frustration. I use a lot of pseudonyms on this blog, but this is all me. I feel like a villain removing multiple masks to reveal his true face. I am Editor Freditor, I am Bud "kind" Darwell, I am Zanzibar von Bitter, I am Stupor Mundi, I am Cold Pizza and countless others. Why all the chicanery? Half of it is because I set deadlines for myself and was never exactly proud about how some of the pieces turned out. The other half is because I think it's sad to see one guy write an entire blog.
It probably goes back to my old fanzine Killing Trees. Friends promised to write, but most of what I got were drunken, two sentence scribbles on a napkin, and was told to add more to it. So for the majority of the zine, in order to fill space, I created a bunch of fake writers, wrote a bunch of fake articles, and published it that way. After creating all those aliases, I found I enjoyed writing from multiple points of view.
Plus, I learned that with a fake staff I could create all kinds of weird rivalries for my one-man show. I mean, all the best publications from my adolescence were a surly mix of writers and editors: Creem magazine, early Rolling Stone reprints ( I mean really early), hell, even Stan Lee's Bullpen dispatches made the Marvel Comics workplace look like a cross between a bar and a treehouse. In reality, I'm sure all three offices were just crowded rooms full of sad, middle-aged drunks trying to create some excitement under deadline. Pretty much what I do here!
So is everything now going to go under the name Fred Hagemeister? Am I getting rid of my little imaginary world? Who knows. I have the urge to make this blog super crazy. I don't even know what that means yet, but it could be something which, as a future teacher, I don't want my name attached to. How would you explain to the school board a Victorian tale in which butler ghosts exact revenge on their former employers by forcing them into lives of opium trafficking and white slavery? Okay, I just made that example up, but who knows where I'll go next. Certainly not me, that's for sure. A pen name could come in handy!
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| pic via Abominable Dr. Phibes, AIP |
