I'm a writer.
Some people write for a living and they're writers because writing is what they do to pay the bills. I'm a writer in the sense that the voice inside of me has no other means of escape than through my fingers.
I picked up a guitar when I was young, and for a long time, its strings gave my fingers the means to let that voice get out what it could - to the extent that an average talent allowed anything at all. For three decades, that guitar was how I communicated with those around me. My mouth, merely adding more confusion and complication to an already disheveled existence - it came down to my fingers, working across those strings for order and a calming structure, to blunt the mania of a life in constant threat of a complete collapse into full blown anarchy.
Still, there was only so much that those strings would allow my fingers, or that my fingers could deliver even if the strings gave them more than what they possessed in themselves. After all, there were more than 12 notes screaming inside my head. Even if you factored in every potential for accents, timbre and rests providing those 12 notes with proper context and environment, that voice was seething with frustration at being trapped within a skull that had no idea how to give it the kind of liberty it craved.
Then, one day my brother set a laptop in front of me, and offered me a job tossing together market-speak to prop up his end of the corporate PR free-for-all. All I had to do was learn how to use the damn thing and come up with a bright idea every now and then.
That cheap laptop. That Sophie's Choice of white collar idiocy or the hell of crap day jobs to pay for a life of well established creative frustration. In the end it became the best thing anyone has ever done for me.
After a life of maddening failure, my poor fingers finally found the means to let that writhing beast out to get a little fresh air now and then. That keyboard, with the simple capacity to instantly change what I'd just typed without a major physical disruption in expressive flow, was the transformational genesis I'd needed since the day I mangled my first word to the appreciative response of whoever it was that caught it at the time. That cheap piece-of-shit keyboard gave me the rest of my life. It's literally been the difference between what was my life and what is my life.
I'm a writer. Not so much in the sense that I write in order to make a living, but more that I write in order to make sense of life itself. My thoughts come together through my fingers. They always have. It was like that, long before I ever tapped a keypad. I still play my guitars, and I still love them. I think I love them even more, now that I've taken the burden of my whole life off them.
Yeah, I'm a writer. I'm H.P. Lovecraft with a crowbar under my jacket. My Kurt Vonnegut with a body count. I'm Mickey Spillane with a thesaurus and a little range. My hell is a darker hell. My heaven's a more grateful, and a bit more surprised, heaven. My god is a god that really doesn't give a shit whether you're saved or not - just so long as you deliver on the promise of your existence and try not to fall into the gear arrangement while you're in play.
My dream is to someday take the kind of shit that'll finally show me just how hungry I've been all along but was always too full to realize. My goal is to go out fighting and leave a mess that makes the EMTs blow chunks all over each other. Then again, I'd trade it all for a good punchline to walk out the door with when it's all over. I make no apologies for anything I write. After all, that monster has been trapped inside there for 40 years, and it's got a lot that it's been thinking about during that time. Frankly, I'm fed up with the goddamn thing, and it's time to let the rest of you deal with it.
I wish you all the luck in the world with that.
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