This is the last famous name I’ll drop. (I probably won’t keep that promise.)
I saw Bruce Springsteen on Broadway. I was watching the Boss from the audience. Not even good seats. I’ve never been somebody who likes to use whatever celebrity status I might have to go backstage after a show or down onto a football field at halftime or into some basketball team’s smelly locker room before the game.
Up onstage that night, Springsteen talked about being something of a fraud because he pretended that he was somebody he really wasn’t. He felt that he hadn’t really lived the life described in his songs. They were fiction. Just poetry. (Really good poetry, though.)
My entire life, I honestly have had no idea who the hell I am. It’s still that way.
I look at myself as just another idiot wandering planet Earth with no real idea what makes the world go ’round, no particular identity, just another lost soul.
Like the Boss that night on Broadway.
I still have dreams, of course. For example, I dream about being nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In the dream I arrive in Stockholm for the award ceremony on December 10. I get all the way to the front door of the Stockholm Concert Hall.
At the door, the judges are assembled to greet me.
They’re all there waiting.
Smiling big Swedish smiles.
And they say, in unison, “Gotcha! You’re not going to win the Nobel Prize, James. Not going to happen. Not on our watch.”