Charlie Bluesmith’s Prologue
(Cut Prologue from Saturday Mornings Forever)
Creative Writing 102
Student Name: Charlie Bluesmith
Project Title: Saturday Mornings Forever
Approximate Length: 128,000 words
Narrative Form: Epistolary
Theme(s) Explored: Nostalgia, Coming-Of-Age (Again)
Introduction:
Saturday Mornings Forever is a journal I started during my second to last semester at UCSH, chronicling the multiverse of my neurotic thoughts and feelings about life, through personal narrative. I attempted to extrapolate various themes directly from my year, including nostalgia, mental health, identity and aging. The persona reflected here was in-attempt, an honest as-possible record of my personal evolution or, lack thereof. What resulted became a confessional of sorts, something akin to an existential mirror, reflecting my issues and neuroses.
The baseline so to speak, or rather, the lens of which I interpreted identity: Me, a 33-year-old moving back in with her mother after failing to achieve any material or personal success over a decade long stint prior in Los Angeles. The harbingers of failure in this story are all self-created and thus, comedic.
Saturday Mornings Forever refers to the concept of a mental fugue state resembling grief and lost childhood on through young adulthood; Saturday mornings represent to me the times where I interpreted the world at-large to be utterly infinite, beautiful and full of wonder. I redacted nothing for the sake of accuracy, and thus, thematically-speaking, any remnants of literary merit are purposefully (and genuinely) obfuscated by my neuroses, lack of emotional intelligence and insight for meaningful analysis of said idiosyncrasies. I think what makes this project worth the effort is that, well, the bare honest truth: I've never "played it straight" before, or rather, I've never been honest on paper.
I believe that what’s here is compelling enough, even if on face-value. Perhaps amusing if-not benign, irrelevant or in the very least, myopically anecdotal, Saturday Mornings Forever is a disjointed retelling of nostalgia, serving not only as a flawed study of indulgent emotionality, but hyper-sentimentality often fetishized through consumerism as means of linking our pasts to the present. Ultimately, this project can be summed up as a love letter to my past, and futile obsession with correcting it.
In closing, I dedicate this messy diary to my dad and to my best friend respectively, Tony Bluesmith and Heather Peletier, a pair of angels who were light in darkness. It wouldn’t have been possible without my mom, Sheila; to her who’s still with us, an angel of the most unimaginable sorts - you're awesome.
- Charlie
A. M. D’Angelo © 2021
