Metaphors Be With You on Deadline

I went to bed last night wondering just what I’d be writing about in this column today. That might seem a bit last-minute, but I find a deadline is like a thick window I can’t see through unless my head is slammed right up against it.

Shortly before I woke up this morning, I had a nightmare. I was in a college class and about 15 years older than anyone else in it. The dream came with the background that I’d probably been able to coast along in the class with a minimum of information and a nasty wit. What made it a nightmare was that this was the put-up-or-shut-up time of a final exam. I wasn’t wearing pajamas, but I was otherwise wholly unprepared.

It was a test on the writings of the German philosopher/author dude Goethe. I had trouble with the first two questions, the second of which was some sort of Goethe in-joke that the professor--a woman in an old-fashioned print dress--and all the students except me had a big laugh over.

On the third one, an essay question, I encountered a real problem. I’d written my first sentence, “I believe Goethe used the devil as a metaphor for mankind” and then noticed someone had inked smutty drawings on the lower part of the page.

I crumpled it up and started over, first on wax paper that my ballpoint pen skidded over, then using a red Crayola, which crumbled instead of wrote. Then I rifled through stacks of my reporter’s notebooks, but every page was already filled. The other students were chugging along. A clock showed 25 minutes had passed, and I was still trying to get this one dumb sentence down on paper.

I should point out that I have no particular opinion regarding Goethe using the devil as a metaphor for mankind. For all I know he used him as a credit reference. My knowledge of German literature was chiefly limited to what the Krauts were saying in Sgt. Fury comic books. What they usually said was “Gott in Himmel!” right before Sgt. Fury or one of his Howling Commandos bayoneted them.

In the dream, finally, I found myself in an anteroom to the classroom, rolling modeling clay into worm shapes that I then made into letters. On tables running the circumference of the room, I placed the words, letter by letter, on top of clay figures. I made a devil that looked like Don Knotts and recall placing the word “metaphor” on a clay steer with big gonads and a duck on its back.

I thought, “Maybe I can fob this off as folk art.” Then the class bell rang, and I woke up.

I’d be interested in any good interpretations you might have on this dream. Me, I think dreams are like cable theft: It’s free entertainment, but you’re never sure when they’re going to come break the door down.

I find most of my nightmares are deadline- or preparation-oriented. There’s some small irony to me being a journalist--a profession in which deadlines are constant, absolute and unforgiving--because I used to dread deadlines like nothing else when I was in school.

I got skipped a grade for a while in elementary school--skipped right past the part when kids learned the multiplication tables, and am still fuzzy on them. I became further addled because a kid had told me about fractions, and I didn’t quite get it. I thought they were perhaps something like germs, sinisterly sticking unseen to a number. Hence, if I had to add 4 + 7 + 11 + 9, I’d come up with 32 because I’d figure that with four numbers all those invisible fractions had probably added up to another 1.

When it came time every day to do math, I literally would hide under my desk. I tried to give the impression--should the teacher spot me--that there just happened to be something really interesting going on down there that had diverted my attention, and head, below the desk. Given that I’d still get called on, I suppose it was a hard impression to maintain for 45 minutes every day.

Thus began a pattern of avoidance that became so strong by the time I was in college that I even successfully avoided graduating. With term papers, I’d never start writing them until the night before they were due, or sometimes on the morning they were due. I got so bad at deadlines that at the end of one term a sympathetic writing teacher just asked me what grade I needed to stay afloat and let me to get my overdue papers to him that summer.

In most cases, though, I’d be up all night, bugged to distraction by the insistent hum of an electric typewriter. I’d write dreadful careening stuff, like one English Lit paper about “Wuthering Heights” where I took the premise “What if Heathcliff had had antlers?” I thought at the time that all this procrastination was my way of not taking “the system” seriously.

On reflection, I think it was my way of being terrified of my limitations. By turning in stuff written in a caffeinated stupor, I could divorce myself from it. If I got an A, the professor was an idiot. If I got a D, I wasn’t perturbed, since it was done under insane conditions. In either case, I never had to say, “This is me. This is the best I can do.”

The weird thing that’s transpired over the years is I think I like deadlines now. The wonderful musician Captain Beefheart once said, “A little paranoia makes a good propeller.” I think that if you have to grab at straws at the last minute, you can sometimes pull a thick malted along with them. Writing gets to be more immediate, more like improvised music.

I find the same can be true doing some other things, like cooking while your guests wait. The last minute is as good as any, as long as you’re willing to pass a botched souffle off as flan, or as a metaphor for mankind.

T. Jefferson Parker’s column resumes in this spot next week.