When I was in kindergarten I remember that my teacher, Miss Belaine, gave us an assignment to write a little book. Mostly it was an arts and crafts project; we drew pictures with crayons and narrated them with a few sentences and bound the whole mess with colorful string. We put a cover on the front and back of the book and voila! – the assignment was done. I have no recollection of what I wrote about, but when the teacher picked mine up she noticed something different. On the inside front cover of the book there was an extra piece of construction paper attached that was stapled on three sides, leaving the top open. What is this? she asked me. I showed her that it was a slot that I added just like the library books had, and with that I produced a card that had the sign-in and sign-out dates and the name of the borrower that fit in there. “Now you can go show it to the principal and he can put it in the library,” I announced to her.
Even back in kindergarten I was making books, and more importantly conscious of sharing my imagination with the world. As a little guy drawing was my real passion, and I was pretty damn good at it. I would go through paper so fast that my mom started buying me huge rolls of newsprint to draw on. I would have bet everything I owned that my art skills were the ones that I’d develop, and end up a visual artist or graphic designer. Reading was just a hobby, but I was always amazed at the power of the written word to create new worlds, and escape this one.
As an eight year old I went through a massive kleptomaniac phase, but being a geek at heart I mostly shoplifted books from Walden Books. I’d go in there with shopping bags from other stores and pretend to be browsing around and then help myself to their stock, throwing them in the bag and then just walking out (this was before sensors in the books as security). My career as a book thief ended one time during the Christmas season. I was walking out with a shopping bag bursting with books, looking causal and whistling to myself, when it broke, spilling my spoils on the sidewwalk. A security guard dressed as Santa Claus busted me, but they let me go after recovering the books.
At some point in high school my love of drawing and art took a back seat to literature. More and more I preferred words instead of lines and colors to express myself. I fell in love with the literature I read, like old friends who came back into my life: 1984, Fahrenheit 421, Animal Farm, the Great Gatsby, On the Road, Camu’s the Stranger, the existential Siddartha, Inherit the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird, one of my favorites - Lord of the Flies, and the Catcher in the Rye. Especially the Catcher in the Rye. Words had a resonance that imagery didn’t, an echo in the mind that lingered. I even loved how books smelled, and to this day I still open up a book and smell it before I read it. Growing up in New Haven, Connecticut allowed me access to the academic and literary tradition of Yale University. To me those ivy-covered walls glowed with brilliance. As snow dusted the sidewalks brilliant kids in dirty jeans fogged the windows of coffee shops as they concentrated on gigantic tomes of knowledge. My mom even worked there – Yale, not the coffee shop. As a young kid I would accompany her to her office to hang out, and in high school we would get into Yale bars with fake ID’s and joke about soaking up Yalie’s brain power by beating them up.
In college I read all the time, but unfortunately it wasn’t enough of the prescribed books in the syllabus, and my grades looked like a rollercoaster. I got wasted every night and skipped all my classes so I could read and write on my own. Soon I failed out and went to work for a marketing research company for a while, but came back and got straight A’s the rest of the way. I grew an affinity for writing essays, mostly because it was fun and easy to bullshit. I could transcribe my meandering thoughts on paper and actually get a good grade for it without bothering to memorize a “right” answer. I started writing horrible, sanguine poetry to cope with the burning zephyr of emotions I possessed. Mostly I was high when I wrote, or listening to Counting Crows, documenting everything in a green hardcover journal. The creativity was off the charts but the poetry belonged in the trash.
I moved out to Fort Collins, Colorado before they could change their minds and rescind my degree. I developed a cottage industry of writing papers for the rich Colorado State students who were out partying so much that they neglected to meet their homework deadlines. $40 for a 3 page paper, $60 for a 5 pager, and $100 for an essay thesis of 10 pages or longer was really good money in those days. A few of my regular customers would hand over the syllabus, assignment schedule, and books on the reading list the first day of class and sit back and let me hand them their A papers the night before they were due. I had the most fun helping my best friend, Mitch D, pass his college literature and English classes and graduated by writing all of his papers. Mitch assumed that I was smart enough to get him A’s = in fact he was so practical and common sense smart that he was incapable of the theoretical bullshit it took to pacify his hippie professors.
As the weed got better so did my writing. I evolved to stream-of-consciousness prose and rudimentary character profiles when I moved to Colorado. But somewhere in there, deep below the fact that I was trying to hard to write like a writer, were the whispers of a voice that would grow strong in the future. Things got crazy in Fort Collins when I had to go to jail briefly and barely dodged four years in prison for a crime I (sort-of) didn’t commit, and it charged my writings with a desperate energy. By the time I moved to San Francisco I was producing entrenched in post-apocalyptic dream sequences and anti-government rhetoric, for the first time introducing politics and societal inequality in my writing. Stories like Yard Birds, Swimming with Meridian Fishes, A Nation Unashamed, They were only paying rent to God, and Sharp Things explored all the things in life that could hurt you with a newfound consciousness and rebellion. The elements of emotion conflict developed in my writing but it was uber-gritty and had an almost Burroughs-like (William Burroughs) chaos.
San Francisco was too damn expensive and I was frustrated working a dead end job that made me miserable at the ripe old age of 27. So I planned my great escape and hit the road. I backpacked around the world for a year straight and wrote like a man possessed. I filled both sides of every page of seven notebooks documenting this odyssey, a project I called “Push-ups in the Prayer Room.” I witnessed so much beauty and truth and pain and sadness, such a survey of humanity, that it took years for my psyche to unravel it all. I remember staring out the window on a twelve hour bus ride through the Philippine countryside, in a sort of contemplative trance, feeling so connected with the world and all its experiences that I thought it would impossible not to get a book published.
But that was the problem – I was writing to get published, writing to finish a book, and not writing, well, just to write. I didn’t necessarily enjoy the process, the art, and that makes all the difference. I made feeble attempts at filling enough pages and chapters to send off my work to publishers, but it was doing things inside out, like buying a car so you can get new floor mats.
For ten years I did not write. I got busy with work and chasing money and reluctantly cloaked myself in the material trappings that society tells us makes you a responsible “adult,” whatever the hell that means. My creativity became dormant. Ten years is way too long to abandon your dreams. The entire time something deep down within me screamed to get out. The years were flying by and I had nothing to show for it but a big beautiful empty house, a couple nice cars, and a lot of disappointment in the human race. I was getting older and had no legacy to leave the world when I was gone. The fire that is my passion to write grew warmer in my soul until it was impossible to ignore. It was an uprising that would allow me to take back possession of my life.
I planned a trip to Costa Rica for a month last winter. I desperately needed some R & R from all the pressures and people who were ripping me apart and walking away with the pieces. It was the best thing that could have happened to me. I realized that I needed to reconnect with who I really was and the legacy I wanted to leave this world. I had to do what made me happy, and that was to share my experiences on this earth through my writing. So in Costa Rica, in the warm Pacific breeze in a surf town called Tamarindo, I began to write again. The floodgates were open and this time I did it for me. This time I wrote just to feel my legacy etched in the stone of eternity, and this time I wouldn’t stop.
(Next installment soon - the interview part)
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