Average Guy

His poetry pamphlet having not been the success he had thought it would be, Gary binned the lot of them, in the same way as many folks in his neighbourhood might fly tip white goods, old garden chairs, worn out suitcases, and other such items.

 Someone would read the poems, and post a complimentary review somewhere, he lived in hope.

Meantime, at just past sixty, he was still scribbling away, the ideas still came to him as they had years before. He was in his head, a Scottish screiver, a Beat poet, horror novelist, even a short story writer chronicling the working class, all hats he had tried on with varying degrees of success throughout his young and not so young life. As Bukowski had said 'what matters most is how well you walk through the fire', and he was still doing that, the fire of words, the war of words in which he saw himself as a foot soldier, even at his age

He had returned to writing prose, memoirish flash fiction, biographical writings, call it what you will, he was writing about his life, a semi-fictionalized biography type thing.

Music had always inspired him, from his schooldays onwards, he had more or less documented the decades with an imagined soundtrack in mind, and his judicious quotation from song lyrics had not yet brought litigation to his door.

Lou Reed came to mind today as he walked his daily circuit round the area he had lived in for nigh on fifty years. He could become a ‘local historian,’ he knew enough about the area, he could have a Podcast and run guided historical tours in the environs. He mentally filed that notion to the back of his mind for future reference.

Aye, Lou Reed, he was great, the leader of the Velvet Underground, his favourite band of 1982, and whose music he often listened to. He liked Reed’s voice, the almost spoken intonation of the words, the lyrics he had written. Lyrics were a big thing for Gary when he was young, that was where his endless thirst for poetry originated.

Gary had discovered The Velvet Underground and Lou Reed’s music in the early ‘eighties when he worked in an office as an Admin Assistant. The duties he was allocated were mundane and boring, so music and books provided great distraction, thanks to his friend Denise, and her collection of tapes and various others he worked with who lent out their LPs and books to him.

‘The Velvet Underground and Nico’ became a favourite album, and he progressed onto Reed’s solo albums from ‘The Blue Mask’ onwards, he liked ‘Mask’ as it was quite loud and heavy-ish, and he had read somewhere that Reed’s lyrics were a bit like Dylan, whose music he liked quite a lot, so that couldn’t be a bad thing.

Gary liked Reed’s album, ‘The Blue Mask,” “Average Guy,’ which described him to a tee. An average guy trying to do the right thing, which was Gary, ever since he was a kid at school studying for exams, doing the right thing like his folks and theirs before them.

 ‘Average’ , that wasn’t a word that was widely used these days, back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, it was used frequently in school reports ‘Gary’s work in the Maths class is well below average’, and in office appraisals ‘ Gary only does enough work to get by, if anything his ability is average’.

Gary reflected on this; his older self was past caring about ‘people’s’ opinions about him.

 How many years had he worried about that sort of thing?

Here he was, writing down his life , his fictionalized memoirs, the people he knew disguised as characters in his stories, just like , in his mind, his great hero Jack Kerouac had mythologized his friends and given them pseudonyms when documenting their famous trip ‘On The Road’.

Gary’s road was Union Street, in Aberdeen, the fabled ‘Granite Mile,’ which was very much changed since his teenage years, due to the Low Emission Zones, the residual effects of the Covid Pandemic, and the continuous repairs that were visited upon this once proud main thoroughfare. Whatever the Facebook group moaners said, the street was always and had always been the ‘Granite Mile’ to Gary, a street of memories, and once a street of dreams and poetry. The street he staggered on homeward from the pub when he was young, and nowadays where he often walked on weekday mornings, often taking photographs for his ‘Out and About in the ‘Deen’ Facebook page he had commenced during the Pandemic, five years ago.

He would add this story, once he had honed it, spell-checked it, edited, and fine-tuned it , to his collection of autobiographical stories, ‘Rebel in the Head’, which wasn’t a bad title, but recently he had been thinking of something more like, ‘Scenes from a Life’- the autobiographical ramblings of Gary Shand’.

He was an average guy, whatever that meant in 2025, being ‘average’ was not a bad thing. Like his mum had said all those years ago when the O’Grade results came out, Gary was ‘like his dad, not someone who would set the world on fire, but one of the good guys, who would look to do the right thing.’ Somehow this quote from his first ‘fictional memoir’ still spurred him to write, his urge to write was still smoking, and feeling inspired he decided that he would remove the pamphlets from the bin, and find some way of marketing them, maybe some of the online vendors would be a way forward?