I’ve touched upon it couple times, but never really got into any kind of detail about why it was that I decided at the age of seven that I wanted to be a writer. And, as I sit here, countless notions for a column flying through my mind, refusing to touch down, I thought I might remind myself just why, exactly, I fell in love with the written word and chose this life when I might have had any number of alternatives; to put forth what I feel it means to be a wordsmith, and why I think that it’s important. I’ve danced around the wherefores and the fallout resulting from my… my chosen euphemism of tenacity, but I’ve left untouched the genesis of this entire foolhardy affair.
I’ve been a reader since before I can remember. In every home in which I’ve lived, an overflowing bookcase was a sign of pride. Not a statement of elitism (hardly possible with all of the Star Trek novels upon the shelves), nor a trophied ostentation, but as a testament to love, a memorial to the lives we’d spent in the company of the protagonists within. During my grade school years, I always sought out books at least a year or two ahead, relishing not only the challenge of assimilating new vocabulary, but the exposure to more mature concepts and richer presentations of nuance. Around the time I fell in love with writing, I was reading Madeleine L’Engle’s classic “A Wrinkle In Time”. I read “Dracula” (Unabridged) for the first time when I was ten, and discovered Tolkien when I was eleven. Tom Robbins, George Orwell, and Douglas Adams ruled my High School years. I lived and died more purely and intensely with every tale than with anything which crossed my path in life, and I was a Bi-Polar Poet in search of Love, so…
I used to have that paper. I kept it close and treasured, like my Declaration of Independence and Constitution combined. That piece of paper stayed with me for fourteen years, and was the foundation upon which I laid down all my hopes and dreams, until one evening in December of 2000, when, in Port Orchard on the way to see my girlfriend who was locked up in the county jail, I managed to have it all taken from me in the space of about thirty seconds. I’d gathered everything I’d ever written, the original Vaults of Uncle Walt, and taken them with us to drop off somewhere safe sometime after we’d rendezvoused with [redacted]. It had sprinkled earlier that day, and the roads were just slick enough to counteract any friction that might have come to our aid as the brakes locked up on our descent toward the valley floor and the back of a rusted red pickup truck. The driver honked her horn, and I mashed my feet into the imaginary pedals before me on the passenger side. We were only going 35 when our vehicles collided, but as ours was a Mary Kay Pink Dodge who’d already seen far better days before today, and his was an American Pickup, fully stopped and protected by a cushion of rust, it was really no contest. A tow truck was called, and I grabbed what I could from the back of the car, assured that we’d go out to get the rest within a couple weeks. And there I was, stranded miles from home, having failed to even find the jail in which [redacted] was housed, and suddenly bereft of my life’s work.
My girlfriend was released, and, after a particularly trying patch of time living homeless in the Great Northwest in the prime of winter, we found a basement apartment which we could almost afford on the job I managed to acquire. It was a chance for redemption for the both of us, but by the end of January, the lifestyle I’d been so desperate to get us away from had returned. Turns out living on the straight and narrow was too hard a task to manage. Knowing things were coming to a head, but terrified at losing almost four years of love I’d lived with [redacted], we bumbled through until that day in mid-March when I announced to sanity that I’d rather like to start seeing other states of being. We’d gotten the information (after three months of curious reluctance from the driver), and driven out to the towing yard where every poem, story, photographic negative and drawing (save what I’d salvaged from the car that night) rested safely in the back of that wrecked automobile. Or would have been, if we’d arrived with $200 no later than the first week of January. Every ounce of passion I had focused into a single goal had been crushed and incinerated. Three days later, in the aftermath of a nervous breakdown, I checked myself into the mental ward of the nearest hospital.
It was a single-page assignment, twenty-five lines long, with the figures printed in the margins colored in with purple and yellow. My handwriting was nothing spectacular, but at the very least, years later, it remained legible to myself and others, something which cannot be said of the atrocities which could not be even generously compared to chicken scratch (without mortally offending scores of poultry), that I commit to paper regularly these days. At the top, in capital lettering, read “THE ADVENTURES OF MIND MAN”. On this page began a labor of love which would remain for twenty-eight years, returning and renewing with commitment and clarity every time I allowed myself to falter. Within these words, so awkwardly arranged, so hurriedly scribbled as not to do injustice to the ideas with which I could not, then, keep pace, within these words remain the faintly flick’ring flame of inspiration wakened within me by the simple instructions: If you could be a Superhero, what would your powers be? What would you call yourself?
I remember the revelation (if not the actual moment) that I didn’t have to wait for someone else to write the stories that I so desperately wished to read; that I could, myself put pencil to paper and allow my dreams to flow with the same force and validity as anyone who’d ever told a tale. I created a boy hero whose abilities were of imagination. And then I copied that idea onto the page as a Grown-up who would use the power of his mind to reshape reality in the face of evil. To be fair, that synopsis is far superior to anything I wrote before the age of seventeen, and I most certainly was not thinking about it in those terms. I had a feeling when I was little, that I wouldn’t be the biggest, nor the strongest. I didn’t know about the smartest, but I knew I was smarter than some, so that was where my fantasy was directed. An extraordinary man who didn’t need guns or gadgets, bulging muscles or super-speed. but used his ability to out-think his opponent.
Some of the highlights from the following years were “Who Killed Babyface Barbra, Jr.?” (a title I cringe at to this very day, as I have never met a woman with the suffix of Junior), “Nightmare on Oak Street” (a tale of horror written with a nod to movies I had never seen), and the Unicorn of my prepubescent writing career: “Mission: Titan”, a story which I would try to resurrect on at least three occasions over the coming years. Later I would develop a stronger style, oft times writing merely to show off or prove someone else inferior, but I lacked the gift to power through my apathy and found my salvation in Outraged Love, or The Poetry of Despair. And then the Dark Days came, and then the mere banality of life. But here I am, come through the other side, focused on the first lesson that I ever learned: I get to do this. No matter what may happen, I get to do this if I want to. Maybe not for money, and maybe not for fame, but something so simple even a kid could have it figured out: I write because I can, and because there are stories within me which I’d like to see now come to life.
I wish I had that paper still, but not for me. The irony of my life’s work (and I hope, my legacy) being the written word, is that my son is not too keen on reading, and his writing is, from a mechanical point of view, unreadable. I wish that I could show him a piece of who I was when I was his age, so that… you know what? I had a whole thing I was going to launch into about the magic of writing and the adventures hidden in the written word, but then I realized: I just wish he could see me as someone who was once his age, someone capable of understanding what he was going through, someone more relatable than the grumpy old man who drones on and on about homework and bedtime.
But beyond inspiring filial devotion, I’d to think I might have been able to encourage him toward his own moment of clarity. I have no idea what notion will eventually fill his head, crowding out the lesser calls to action, and leading him with unwavering certainty to the path in life upon which he decides his destiny has placed him, but I hope that I will see it. I’ve witnessed far too many people wander through their lives without any clue as to what they hope to accomplish within their fleeting time among us, chasing money, highs, or power, yet never knowing why they do it, beyond a vague assumption that something has been missing. Modern man is missing a clear purpose in the world, a sense that he’s important, a sense that he belongs.
Despite the years of their Participation Ribbons and Mommy’s Little Snowflake snuggles, children are reminded day in and day out they are not important, that they are best barely seen and never heard, that their goal should be to learn how to blend into the background, camouflage themselves in mediocrity. When they grow up, these children will have all but faded, and despite their protestations that they will change the world, they won’t have even the slightest idea why they should. I want something better for my son, though it might not be something that I understand. I want him to ne able to find some happiness of inner purpose, to find his place both in his heart, and out there in the world.
-Tex
