My entire life I have wanted to write. If you go through my millions of notebooks, you'll find a library full of half finished short stories, novels, poetry, and rants. Well, maybe not anymore. Two years ago, I decided to pull a Jim Morrison and took a large box full of my most important (to me) notebooks, and threw them in a bonfire. Almost twenty years worth of material burned away. The next morning a fucking forest ranger gave me a ticket for camping too close to water. It cost me almost two hundred dollars. I wonder if that meant something. Anyways...
I tried to find a voice, a direction. I tried to stylize, and compare myself to the people I admired. By the time I was in my early twenties, working kitchens and gas stations, I was claiming victim.
"The system! It holds me down!" I would say.
"I'll be like Emily Dickinson! You'll see!"
"Opportunity will come to me!"
Arrogance.
Usually, however, it would come down to the terribly destructive inner monologue of "This is all shit, and so am I." Regardless of what Hollywood sells you, self-depreciation does not create beautiful works. It does not make you cool and mysterious. It sucks the life out of you and leaves you empty, constantly doubting, constantly unsure, void of confidence.
Sure, maybe everything you do really is shit. Hell, maybe even you are, also. Maybe you steal food from the poor elderly. Maybe you tie your children up in the basement and feed them only potato eyes. I don't know. Chance are though, you aren't, and even if you TRULY only make shit, you don't have to. You can grow. You can force yourself to be better. You are capable of more.
This little thing I am writing, you are reading, right now? It's far from the best thing I have ever written, sure. It is also far from the worst. In fact, I am only writing it to keep myself in the practice of writing. On New Years Eve, 2009, I made a promise to myself that I would take my love more seriously. I would write (and finish) a short story or something equal to it, every week. It was daunting, to say the least, once I sat down to actually do it. The first thing I wrote was a seventeen page short story called "Nowhere to Warsaw in Eight Days". It took fourteen consecutive hours, and is terrible (although less terrible than I initially judged it to be). After that I wrote more and more, ending 2010 with seventy-three complete pieces and somewhere around twenty unfinished. From nothing to almost a hundred in a year. It may be a weak effort to a seasoned writer, but to me, it was a hell of an accomplishment. This year, I set another goal. 3000 pages, including at least one novel.
I am two hundred pages into the novel. It may seem like a tremendous goal, and to tell you the truth, it seems absolutely impossible to me, but I am going to do it. I can't see the future, but I am not going to let myself do anything less than amaze myself, even if no one else sees it like I do. Even if people read it and say "this is trash." Fuck you. It's my trash.
I'm not just jerking off on your toes. There is a point to all of this.
I, as well as millions of people my age, am a member of what has been referred to as the "lost generation". The generation that did everything we were supposed to, and got shit on. We were born under Reagan, took our fluoride, got good grades, graduated with honors, went through college, got jobs, and busted ass. What did we get in return? An ever-rising cost of living that no single entry-level income could possibly support, government programs being yanked out from under our communities feet, layoffs en masse by no-faced employers who expect nothing but loyalty without ever reciprocating. We got insurmountable debt. We got wars all over the globe. We got a generation-wide feeling of "why am I doing any of this?"
Ten years ago, being successful was being happy. Today, among my peers, save for a few stragglers, being happy has little to nothing to do with financial success. It is all about spending your life how you want. Not droning away in an office chair carpal-tunneling your way to middle management like our parents, no. It means getting just far enough to be able to do what we want on the side. We work for rent, electricity, food, clothes, and gas. We no longer work for the sake of working. Sure, we know that having a decent car and a little bit of spending cash is nice, but what is the point when almost an entire generation is paid close to or under the poverty line and when we get a little ahead, taxes, or some "bank error" (in November 2008 I lost $10,000 thanks to the crash. Seriously.), throws us right back in the shit-pit?
We have watched the youth of our parents fade. We watched them stop doing the things they love. Fixing cars, painting, dreaming. We watched them age and spend forty to fifty years worrying about their last ten. My mother went to an art college. She painted, and beautifully. She was able to create intensely vivid and detailed landscapes like it was second nature. She would post them around the house, and in a life of eternal winter, it made her smile. Eventually, she stopped. She worked more and more. Saved, and slaved. I haven't seen a new painting in over fifteen years. It was her dream, that she gave up, so she could be in nearly the same position I am in now.
This is what that generation has taught us. Do what you love, or don't, you'll still end up in the same boat. Ask the elderly Wal-Mart greeters. It's all a matter of if you want to be happy.
My point is, if you have to slave away, don't give up on the things you love. always make time for them. Even if you aren't feeling it, do it. Don't let weeks and months and years go by. Don't let it ever be "too late". It's exactly what I am doing now. I don't even want to write this shit today. I have a strong feeling that it is unfocused, sloppy, and preachy. But I want to write, and if I ever want to write something I am truly proud of, that maybe some other people will like, then I have to do this. I have to practice, and I have to try to be a WRITER. I am going to work my job. Save a little cash when I can, and maybe I will achieve the ending to life I have always imagined (old man, back porch, summer evening, staring at the water, smiling). Maybe I won't. But no matter how I slip into the darkness, I want to be happy when I do. So, I am going to continue to focus on what I love. It's really all that matters in the end.
-A.
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