Oblivio: Stories and such by Michael Barrish

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Biggz | Sep 26 2002

whats the web site where yer ex is at, i wanna see those naked pics

Sincerely, Dustin Morris A.K.A. Biggz

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Doesn’t exist. I made that story up. I’m a writer.

-mb

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why would you make up fake journal entries? thats kinda strange

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Biggz, why would you make up a fake name? I bet it’s because Biggz allows you to be different from Dustin, right? Anyway that’s my guess.

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because my real name was already taken as an email

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I mean Biggz, Biggz. Why Biggz when you’re already Dustin?

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well it was a nick name given to me in high school and it has stuck since then, so i use it a lot. not as an escape but as another part of me, to keep ahold of old memories i suppose. i take it u never had a nick name?

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I’ve had a ton of nicknames, including Crump, Bloomers, Spike, and Misu (which means Little Bear).

But my point about yours is that it’s a little like me writing stories that aren’t true. Actually, it’s not really like that, so my point is not so good.

My real point is that stories are always made up, even when they’re about something that really happened. On my website I mix completely made-up stories (like Bookmark) with stories that are only partly made-up, and I don’t bother to say which are which, in part because deep down I’m not totally sure.

There are different senses of “true,” if you know what I mean. There’s the sense of “this really happened,” and then there’s the sense of “this gets at the essence of something.” I’m interested in both, but probably the last one more.

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so do you write these things becaue you wish they happened or because you wish they will happen because you write about them? i see your point though

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Biggz, that’s a fabulous question.

Sometimes I write about things because I wish they happened, or rather to create a world in which they did happen. Bookmark, the story you read, is not a good example of this. I don’t want my ex-girlfriend to start doing online porn; I think it would make me sad. Although, whatever, if she got into that, I’m sure it would be interesting.

I wrote a different story called Poolhall which was about seeing my dead grandfather in a poolhall. That one, maybe, I’d want to be true. Although I’d want to change it so that the dead grandfather was the grandfather I actually liked. This means that the story wasn’t really what I would wish.

The second part of your question is interesting too: Do I write to make things happen? I think in a larger sense that’s true. I write in part to have people notice me and my thoughts, which I think are worth noticing. But that’s not what you meant. You meant do I write something so that the thing I write will come true? No, I’ve never done that.

Although, wait. I once wrote a story called Badger which was based my relationship with this awful woman I worked with. In the story the character based on me does secret things to torture the woman based on her and ends up driving her crazy. I didn’t really torture her in real life, nor even want to torture her, but I have to admit that writing the story made it a lot easier to deal with her. It was like I had got it all out in this other world, a world like the world of dreams, and so I didn’t have to feel so bad in this one. This is different from what you meant, but related.

Also, another time I wrote a story that besides being a story was also a message to the woman the story was inspired by (although the story wasn’t inspired by her so much as by my relationship with her), because at that time she wouldn’t talk to me or let me communicate with her in any way. This was true in the story as well: the woman wouldn’t let the man contact her. I got around this by posting the story on my website, where I knew she would eventually read it. Writers do this sort of thing all the time; it’s a perk. Filmmakers too. Like there’s this famous film by an Italian director, Fellini, that’s about a famous Italian film director who can’t figure out what to make his next film about. In one scene the director (who is played by this super-sauve Italian actor, someone way better-looking than Fellini) shows parts of his film-in-progress to some people including his wife. The parts he shows include this part about a beautiful actress who he, the director, is obviously obsessed with. We see the wife’s reactions to all this, and she’s got this fuck-you-asshole expression on her face, which you have to figure Fellini’s real wife does as well, somewhere, which is why Fellini included it: to tell his wife that he knows how she feels about his real-life obsession with such women—perhaps even with the actress who plays the filmmaker’s obsession in the film!

That’s all a bit complicated and doesn’t totally relate to your question. Anyway sorry about not having any pictures of my ex. Sometimes I wish.