Fancy Dancer

I feel like shit today and most days, life's a fuckin bitch? Dying isn't a burden, it's a relief— when you can say fuck off to the world. 

My work on Sherman Alexie has been ignored by most X accounts.  At one point his publishers convinced him to open an X account to his destain. He ended up with 4o followers, go fucking figure. 

Sherman is a lionized writer worldwide, he holds his own in the sphere of modern American literature. 

Alexie deserves to be elected into the American Academy and Institute of Letters, as was William F. Burroughs, who proudly wore the pin on the collar of his Sears suits.  

In his book, Superman and Me, Sherman talks about learning to read when he was 3, reading a comic book, and associating the panels with the written narrative.  

One day he picks up a book, examines it hard, the words are clear as mud, as if the sun, tree, and animal gods were blowing into his ear, he sees that the words on the pages are corralled into paragraphs. Sherman says it like this,

I didn't have the vocabulary to say, paragraph, but I realized that a paragraph was a fence that held words. The words inside a paragraph worked together for a common purpose. They had some specific reason for being inside the same fence.  

At the age of 3, the prodigy sees the world in paragraphs. In his own words saying, 

This knowledge delighted me. I began to think of everything in terms of paragraphs. Our reservation was a small paragraph within the United States. My family's house was a paragraph, distinct from the other paragraphs of the LeBrets to the north, the Fords to our south, and the Tribal School to the west. Inside our house, each family member existed as a separate paragraph but still had genetics and common experiences to link us. Now, using this logic, I can see my changed family as an essay of seven paragraphs: mother, father, older brother, deceased sister, my younger twin sisters, and adopted little brother. 

By the age of 5 Sherman’s in kindergarten reading The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, laughingly, as his neighbors in class were reading Dick, Spot, and Jane.

Sherman the wunderkind was seen as an oddball on the reservation, Indian kids weren't supposed to be geniuses. 

In 1985 Alexie applied and was accepted to Jesuit Gonzaga University in Spokane, receiving an academic scholarship, the only Indian kid to make it to college from his reservation.   

His work focused on the troubles of Indians, life on the reservation, alcoholism, poverty, and despair, but he didn't cry about it, he wrote comically.

Sherman played guard on the Jesuit school's basketball team till his Senior year. 

One day he calls his father, who kept a phone in the family's bathroom. Alexie’s father was astounded by bathroom telephones. 

Hey, Ma, I say, can I talk to Poppa? 

And then I remember my father has been dead for nearly a year and I say,

shit, Mom, I forgot he’s dead. I’m sorry, she answers, 

it’s okay, I made him a cup of instant coffee

this morning and left it on the table—like I have for, what? 27 years, and I didn’t realize my mistake until this afternoon. In Alexie's own words,

My mother laughs at the angels who wait for us to pause during the most ordinary of days and sing our praise to forgetfulness before they slap our souls with their cold wings, the angels burden and unbalance us and da fucking angels ride us piggyback. 

Alexie is a filmmaker as well. He has produced and written screenplays for low-budget films including— Fancy Dancing, Winter in the Blood, and Smoke Signals. Sadly I have never seen them, but want to. 

Sherman is well-known in the Indian world, and famous in the White world too.