You're Gonna Lose: On Silencing Your Stilwell

September 21, 2011

You’re Gonna Lose: On Silencing Your Stilwell

Novels take work, too much if you ask me. So I dabble a little in instant gratification every now and then, and by that I mean poetry. I’ve been writing it. The wait time is shorter.

Ever since my dad passed away 6 months ago, I’ve been dabbling in it a lot more than I ever have. Ballpark? About a poem a week. I’ll be sitting at work, looking at Scotch tape and zoning out on my Gmail account and suddenly it’s a poem. And every day I’m seeing Twitter updates and receiving email subscriptions from that lovely lady Krissy Brady, reminding me that there are fiction/non-fiction/poetry calls all over the web waiting to be answered.

So tonight I clicked on one of her tweets. It was a call for poetry. Grand prize? 3k. 3 big ones. The money gets smaller from there, second place, third…etc, but honestly? If publication were the prize, it would be the best prize ever. Please just, accept my poem. Just accept me. I don’t want anything for it. Just take it and show it to people. Let them feel a thing for two from it.

So here I am, pouring over sent emails to Jax (my loyal poetry reader aka poet in crime) to see which ones I think work best for this submission. It’s $7 per 25 lines, so I figure I could get away with a couple, and I wouldn’t mind actually paying $7 extra to throw in a couple more. I figure, I’m fairly confident in the open wounds I’ve dribbled into these lines. I just might win.

And that’s around the time I start to hear Tom Hanks’s voice come at me from A League of Their Own, just before the last ball game in the World Series. It’s the scene where he’s sort of zoning out near the dug out, repeating to himself “we’re gonna win”, and all the while this little fat kid, Stilwell, is chastising him in the background over and over saying,”you’re gonna lose.” It’s kind of an epic moment when Hanks grabs the baseball mitt off of someone standing near by and throws it at the kid, instantly shutting him up. It’s that “yeah!” moment when Tom Hanks realizes he’s stunned the kid, and says “got em!”

In reality, when it comes to submitting my work as a writer, as a student, as a small-time marketing associate at work, I am both Tom Hanks and the kid. When that really positive part of me comes out at the outset of any venture and says “I’m gonna win”, there’s always that little fat kid in the background, upturning his nose, wiggling his fingers at the side of his head saying you’re gonna lose. Fucker. And I know I’m not alone.

Here’s where they separate the Jimmy Doogans from the Stilwell’s, ladies and gentlemen. When you start to hear his tinny voice rise from the sordid depths of wherever negativity comes from, throw your baseball glove at him. And don’t just do it quietly, you gotta do the whole “yeah! Got ’em!” move. And that little laugh afterward too. God it feels good to laugh. After all, as my dad would reiterate over and over throughout my softball seasons way back when, there’s no crying in baseball. And yeah, we’re gonna win.