internal dishabille

It's easy for me, a perfectionist who has fallen fall short of such a standard, to lament my shortcomings. Perhaps it is easy for any motivated individual craving more ample opportunity, aptitude with this or that device, or more time. Would that I possessed a vaster intellect, like a Da Vinci, an Einstein, an Edison, or Tesla.
I glance at those phenomenal individuals surrounding me, those with a magnificent capacity for memory, comprehension, learning, teaching, writing, analysis, abstraction, discernment, sight, patience, pathos, faith, love, intelligence and all those attributes of creativity and social propensity that sometimes appear in my life like the moon, but disappear too readily when the sun brightly shines.
I was merely middling in high school, where discipline lacked and apathy reigned. I liked school, but I wasn't sharing my experience with anyone. I recognized my peers as intellectuals in my preppy high school, but didn't believe them truly worth competing against, and so I wasted a great deal of potential learning because my pride was too great.
Stories have always appealed to me, but something is lacking in mine. I think, perhaps, I cannot bear writing less magical stories than Carroll, or tales without the wit of Twain or Swift. Everything was always a comparison, and that's yet another of my greatest foibles. I've never been capable of writing my own stories, because those wouldn't be as magnificent as the stories of those titans of literature whose pieces have changed my life.
Settling is so difficult when magnificence is within grasp.
One of my favorite quotes is one by Neil Gaiman (obviously):
Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you and there’ll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that - but you are the only you.
...
There are better writers than me out there, there are smarter writers, there are people who can plot better - there are all those kinds of things, but there’s nobody who can write a Neil Gaiman story like I can.
(Neil Gaiman)

It's an easy slippery slope to fall down. I get an eerie image of a funnel spider, and I'm at the lip of it's web, teetering. I can almost imagine the hungry monster waiting within this trap, 8-eyes of cunning waiting for the twitching strands of web. But Gaiman is wise. I'm none so intelligent as my father, many of my friends; I cannot read so fast as Matthew, nor comprehend as much as perhaps J, or gather in the details of creation as imaginatively as A, or bear up so strongly under pressure with such a pleasant smile as many of my friends.
I'm not, and (at the rate I'm going) may never be, an artist, poet, or musician, and I will never be able to produce a poem like Mary Oliver, Charles Simic or ee cummings, and my stories will not cradle the beating hearts of myth that Gaiman crafts, or the unbelievable intellect of a Dostoevsky, or the tragic, soul-wrenching cleverness of a Steinbeck story, but I still have stories - I do, I do. Some weeks it just doesn't seem like I can tell them.

I'm reading a bunch of Agatha Christie (I think I finished three this week and I'm started on my fourth). I love the way she develops character, and creates suspicion on every single person. It's true purity of person in the books is exceedingly rare, and those people you sometimes suspect even more, simply because the rest of the cast is hiding something, what haven't you discovered about them? She manipulates the reader so deftly that I'm consistently dazzled, just trying to arrange all of the characters and their relationships in my head. It's fantastic.