For late-night lulz

"Love all, trust few, do harm to none." -Shakespeare

Look man, I know we can't all be Shakespeare, but you're pushing it with this one.

I wish you were still around to explain to me how a human being has ever managed to employ two of these three principles at the same time, let alone all three. As I interpret the maxim above, it is written as a paradox. To break it down into digestible possibilities, I have fashioned this chart-thing:

1. Love All	+ Trust Few	= Impossible
2. Love All	+ Do Harm to None	= Impossible
3. Trust Few	+ Do Harm to None	= Impossible

From the top...

1. Love All + Trust Few = Nope.

For the sake of communication, I shall assume "Love" is meant in the purest capacity, which exclusively implies unwavering "Trust." If one were to "Love All," he actually must "Trust All." If he doesn't "Trust All," then he cannot "Love All."

2. Love All + Do Harm to None = Nope.

Let me explain how it could work, for the sake of all the good in the world. If every human being followed Shakespeare's suggestions, it could work. However, Shakespeare himself pieced together a fictional embodiment of why everyone cannot live by this advice. I present Exhibit A, a quote from Shakespeare's Iago in Othello:

"He hath a daily beauty in his life

That makes me ugly..."

Still taking "Love" at maximum capacity, Shakespeare is asking us to simultaneously "Love All" (read as "Trust All") while doing "Harm to None." Let's just think about that for a second. If you were to "Trust All," the one being harmed is You. Why? Because people who "Love All" yet "Trust Few" are generally  possessive folks, and if you go around loving and trusting everyone blindly in a monogamy-centric society, you will eventually piss off an insecure asshole enough for him or her to go full-stabby on your blessed, bloody heart.

Not saying I wish it weren't this way, but the whole "be the change you want to see" thing doesn't get you very far when you're the victim of a crime of passion. Which leads me to...

3. Trust Few + Do Harm to None = Nope.

 If you "Trust Few," you damn well can't expect to "Do Harm to None." Again, for the sake of communication, I'm taking "Trust" at full capacity, which includes all the juicy, subconscious trappings that people rarely think about when that word leaves their lips. For example, everybody claims to believe in the ultimate "Good" of a fellow human being, until that human being signs up for welfare. After that, half of the country doesn't trust that the human being will only use that money until they can find a job in an earnest search. It doesn't matter who's right or wrong, because we're talking about "Trust" here -- the inherent lack of trust given out by you and I, as a matter of fact. 

Getting back to the philosophy here: "Trust Few" implies "Love Few," as Love and Trust cannot have conditions that oppose each other. In that regard, if one were to "Trust Few," they would also "Love Few," which inherently cannot result in "Do Harm to None." Those who "Trust Few" are the jealous, insecure assholes like Iago who can't live a complete existence if they're not comparing themselves to other, more desirable pieces of ass.

So! How could we make Shakespeare's statement into good advice? All we'd have to change is one tiny word. Laws of logic shall carry us from here:

If "Love All" then "Trust All"

If "Love All" and "Trust All" then "Do Harm to None"

And then Tah-Dah, World Peace. But until Mr. 'Speare rises up from the grave (or better yet -- proves that he actually existed as the notable, mis-quotable William) to edit his own logical fallacy, people are gonna keep holding onto their "Love All" while going cheap on the Trust, still wondering where the fuck all this Harm is coming from. 

Target Practice

At least one night a week, I get an itch and I can't find it.

Most of those nights, I assume I'll find it between the layers of cat hair and sawdust that blanket my garage. Most of those nights, I don't find it there. Lately, I haven't found it anywhere.

I've been stuck walking in circles, looking for words I might have dropped beneath every surface I've ever walked upon. Between cobwebby stacks of journals; in the undergraduate-grade "artwork" that desecrated the cinder block walls so many years ago. Sometimes, it dawns on me that I might look no different from a crack addict who's dropped a big fat rock through a crack in the floorboards. It drives my significant-O nuts, because he gets to watch me come upstairs at 8 a.m., exhausted and empty-handed.

Today, I stopped looking, and five minutes later I tripped over a treasure that I guess I dropped sometime between June and now. Direction, intent, focus, belief. Propellant, pressure, kinetic force. The vehicle; the simple machine; the Jaws of Life... there are a lot of words that stick to such a thing.

Yeah, it sucks to spend months building and sharpening arrows with the ferocity of a crack addict, and it sucks for everybody close to me, as well. But it's fucking awesome to have a thousand sharp arrows in the bag when you finally come across the goddamn bow.

Nature

I think a lot about the nature of human beings...I think a lot about what the world could be if everybody understood each other.

There are many academic disciplines that research different aspects of understanding -- science and math prove with matter and numbers, philosophy proves with ideological frameworks, psychology proves with behavior patterns, language proves with sound. Anthropology attempts to connect them all through the loop of culture, but math and science don't operate on anecdotal evidence. Science records measurable results, but only recently has it encountered something it can measure, but can't dissect; it won't publish a fact about dark matter until it has a sample of the stuff. Psychology wants to understand the human psyche, but it can't bring itself to accept a statement that doesn't apply to the entire population. Language itself dragged us into evolving civilizations -- once we were able to communicate with each other, everybody got smarter -- but the study often distracts itself with tiny details, sometimes to the point where it shuts itself off from the rest of the world. And history is nothing but a collection of stories told by those best able to communicate.

I think they could all answer each other's questions. I think about that a lot. A lot of people probably think about that.

I hear distant echoes of it in great works of literature, in politics, in the arts. I see it in the eyes of awe, on the lips of purpose, in the ectoplasm of altruism. I think we might all know all the answers, but only in tiny glimpses -- and as creatures bound by time, the glimpse isn't long enough for us to process it all.

The oldest things that still exist seem like the most obvious clues.

What is religion, assuming no gods exist? What evolutionary purpose did religion serve, and why is it still around?
What if everything operates pretty much the same way? What if the story of God, Mary and Jesus is actually just an analogy of a father, a mother and a son, and can be applied to any earthly creature? Is the Bible telling us that once we've had children, we'll change from jealous and selfish to all-merciful and unconditionally loving?
Was the story of Jesus telling us that some people are simply too good for this world?  That when somebody dies in the process of overturning the status quo, that person's work will not end if he has inspired enough people? If he has communicated clearly enough to achieve true understanding in enough people, maybe he does become immortal in a sense.
If it's all just a giant metaphor, the root of it still lies in communication -- it's just that metaphor is a really effective way to make people understand big ideas. In fact, you can use a metaphor to inflate a small idea just as well -- it makes big things small and small things big. It has the capacity to make an idea climb to the top or slide to the bottom of our internal priority lists. Politicians do this incessantly.

Jesus used a lot of metaphor, and his teachings were built on analogies. Does the longevity of the Jesus story reveal something very basic about how we've come to be what we are? Is he still around because, as a species, we must never forget the evolutionary importance of communication? If no one understands each other, we turn inside of ourselves -- we let ourselves become a petri dish for anti-civilization tendencies. We'll stop trusting each other, we'll assume others are the ignorant ones, and it'll become nearly impossible for us to truly understand what another person is trying to say. Was the world like that before Jesus?

Did he bring salvation from eternal (or internal) damnation in the form of metaphor?

I think about this a lot. I think about themes like "To understand God, you must know Jesus," and "Jesus is the only door to God's kingdom," and their potential relationship to metaphor. Is the Bible telling us that metaphor was actually God's gift to us, that allowed mortals to grasp the concept of immortality -- and in that, our own mortality?

Is God a construct of the human psyche that survived because it made us consider understanding things that are greater than us?

Before the Bible, we know that Greece didn't need it to flourish into an advanced society. They did, however, have their own extensive network of gods, and that network is very interesting -- all the Greek gods were behaviorally similar to mortals. In their myths, the gods pick favorites, they hook up and cheat on each other, they even rape humans. They are not fair or just or kind or forgiving, and the Greeks were subject to their whims.

Ancient Greeks also developed astronomy, early calculus, logic, long-form epics, arts, and the very notion of science. They lived in separate city-states, which operated independently and generally got along with each other. They created the first public school system, implying that education was expected of a citizen. They operated under the first form of democracy, and ran a system of checks and balances...And I might be reaching here, but I think it all came from having to live beneath the incessant drama of their gods.

I think their society was so successful because their gods showed them what not to do. They knew the importance of checks and balances because Zeus was a giant asshole with a lot of power, and they avoided any notion of glorifying a human king because Zeus would get the red ass. Is that the only way to maintain an egalitarian society? An invisible dictatorship?

Of course not, because all societies flourish differently, and they will continue to. All the variations are right answers, and all of them work at some point in time. They are born and they die; they are all as mortal as we are.

What if everything operates pretty much the same way we do? What if we're both microcosm and macrocosm of every mystery we've attempted to solve? What if everything is subject to whim, chance, and death, just as we are? If dark matter is just a dense spot of nothing in the ever-expanding nothingness of space, will we be able to accept that? Or will we deny it until the sun blows up, just because we couldn't create a ruler that can measure nothing?

I think the very essence of us is somewhere in the latter -- the reason we're at the top of the food chain, the reason we're driven to attempt to live in peace, the reason we started drawing pictures on rocks. The reason we want to be better than ourselves and leave knowledge behind for future generations.

The divine contradiction.

For human society to propagate, it must be driven to be better than the beasts. In a universe of chaos, on a planet where the odds are so very much against a fragile human body, we can probably assume hope was hard to come by in those early years. But hope isn't the only motivator...it's just an effective one. We read about Ancient Egyptians worshiping the very mortal Pharaoh, and we dug up their graves to find their massive emphasis on the afterlife. But in that society, at least in the earliest phase, only the Pharaoh had an afterlife -- the citizens didn't get that privilege, yet they still worked the fields and built incredibly sturdy monuments to their society. Where was their motivation? Pleasing their Pharaoh, their God.

Pleasing somebody was enough for them.

I sometimes wonder what it was that first made a human being happy. I like to think it was another human being. I like to think that when it happened, both people felt something bigger than themselves, and they couldn't understand it or measure it or forget it.

I like to think that communication grew out of that moment, because those two people had to find some way to express what they felt. Perhaps they'd never felt the need to do it before then; perhaps there was just nothing worth writing down. But this, this was more important than either of them, because it gave them a reason to stick together -- they now had a mission, a purpose, to relate this feeling to everyone they could find. It was too good to keep, the supply was unlimited, and it could be created out of nothing. But how did they find a way to talk about it? I'm not sure that they did. Love is hard to describe -- people are still trying to do it, in fact. In the Bible, it's said that God is love, over and over again.

But if we understand that God's only son is metaphor, then we get this: Love is the father of Metaphor.

And further:
Love created Man.
Man shared part of himself with Love to create Woman.
Love told Mary that the baby in her womb was (a) Metaphor, and was to be the savior of Mankind. No penetration required.
Metaphor got the message of Love across to the population, using allegory and parable. They started to follow Metaphor, because he gave enough of a shit (due to Love) to teach in a form they could understand.
Powered by Love, Metaphor turned water into wine; multiplied bread and fish to feed his followers -- Metaphor created something out of nothing.
Metaphor was nailed to a cross and died, in the society's effort to maintain its framework -- Metaphor was a threat to humans in power.
The disciples of Metaphor wrote books describing Love and miraculous events through Metaphor. The books maintain that the only way to describe Love -- to know it, to feel it -- is through Metaphor.

Is Jesus still affecting the world today because he broke the love-language barrier? Maybe he wasn't the first one to do it, but he definitely told the right words to the right people somewhere along the line. Nobody would have listened to him if he hadn't called himself a savior, or the son of God, so he told them exactly that. If it meant that much to him, I refuse to believe he wasn't in love with a lady.

I think too much about a lot of shit.

For Reverend Green

From one moment to a next
Reading in the papers to know what's best
Sometimes you don't know yourself
Eating loads of vitamins for your health
From one moment to a next
Red negativity in the street
Maybe it's the earth, maybe it's the heat
A baby on the bus smiled at me so easy

Now I think it's all right we're together
Now I think that's a riot
Now I think it's the best you've ever played it
Now I think that's a riot
Now I think it's all right to feel inhuman
Now I think that's a riot
Now I think it's all right, we'll sing together
Now I think that's a riot

A running child's bloody with burning knees
A careless child's money flew in the trees
A camping child's happy with winter's freeze
A lucky child don't know how lucky she is

From one moment to a next
A thousand wasted Brooklyners all depressed
The ins and outs of supper's chest
He'll only be a friend if he touches your breast
From one moment to a next
A shifting in the plates of what you ingest
From sugared tits to honeyed pests
Bulimic vegetarian wins weight contest

Now I think it's all right we're together
Now I think that's a riot
Now I think it's the best he ever played it
Now I think that's a riot
Now I think it's all right to feel inhuman
Now I think that's a riot
Now I think it's all right, we'll sing together
Now I think that's a riot

A running child's bloody with burning knees
A careless child's money flew in the trees
A camping child's happy with winter's freeze
A lucky child don't know how lucky she is

This one's for Reverend Green

Temporary

After I wrote the previous entry, I decided it's time for a break. Shit's been a little dark in my head this month. I've been stressing myself out over all these words I want to write, all these projects I've come up with and all the deadlines I've assigned myself -- when I don't finish something in a matter of days, I get this awful darkness over my head and I can't snap out of it. I just sit there and think about how little I've done. I stay up all hours of the night staring at sentences that I want to believe in, but none of them seem to have any motivation of their own, and I don't have any to lend them.
I thought I had given myself plenty enough time to recover from my stint as a full-time writer, but now I'm pretty sure I haven't even started.
What I've been doing is experimenting with madness, on a level that feels far more serious and permanent than any darkness in my past. Depression is not something I've ever been good at, but I'm looking at it eye-level right now, and I finally understand how it's possible to stay in this state indefinitely. It's almost addicting to watch the world swirl around me while I sit still, waiting for it all to mean something...waiting for something to strike me enough to stand up and join the party.
And I know better than that. I've seen enough people in this state to understand that the thing I'm waiting for won't happen if I'm not standing up to look for it. I understand that waiting for the world to strike me is more selfish than sad, and that depression is what grows in the absence of awe. And jeez, there's just too much of that around me to justify my hiding in the garage this month, claiming a lack of inspiration.

I might still find it in me to write a blog entry here and there, but I won't be writing anything else, nor working on any of the dozens of giant writing projects I've been stockpiling. I just have to turn the lights on for awhile.

Lifetime Guarantee

There's a crack in the bricks.

A space created between
supporting concrete,
where spiders and other
delicious pestilence will
pass through to your sterile bedroom.

The patented mortar fell short  --
"but it was guaranteed
for a lifetime!"

You fell for it.

Of course, you know that a lifetime
didn't mean forever, don't you?
You know you can't take it with you?
There are no guarantees or lifetimes
in the eternity you're sure that your soul will float off to
and that mortar doesn't care what a lifetime
means to you.

Still, we like those kinds of words;
the ones that anchor us
to things we think
are too heavy,
too strong,
too important
to crack
or fail;
to die
and rot.
Like earth and concrete
and the stuff that
glues it all together.

It's not false advertising, you know;
they meant what they said.
At the end of your life,
there will be no need
to shop for mortar.

Guaranteed.

 

I went into the old War Room today.

 A choir of keyboard taps and cellphone buzzes scored the approaching deadline as the musky scent of questionable editor hygiene filled the air. The hiss of that blasted overhead fluorescent light was familiarly missing; an absence that good editors have taken comfort in during after-hours panic sessions. Their faces glowed in the wake of laptop screens, both aware of the other's presence, yet silent in understood acknowledgement.

No other room on earth has the ability to make me more aware that it's Monday. And, boy, did that produce a malfunction in my nostalgia valve.

I didn't miss the room so much as I was overcome with gratitude for the time I spent inside of it; for all the things I learned in it and for all the amazing people I met through it. At its crux, it provided a location for my feet when they had no ground to stand on, during times so unstable and adventurous that I wasn't sure if the whole world had been built on a foundation of eggshells. It was alive and the paint was always wet and willing to be mixed with any color we chose; it was creation and destruction, never equal parts of either, and the scale only balanced once a week when we were reminded that it was our job to produce a newspaper from all that chaos.

And out of that chaos, I came to understand, among other things, what it means to have a case of the Mondays.

For the Love of the Batman

What I like about the Batman is that he doesn't have any superpowers, and neither do his enemies. They've all just been driven mad by their own demons, the Batman included. It's an exaggerated (and beautiful) way to say that events and circumstances go a long way towards building worldviews, and a great reminder that everyone is a human being before they look like the Joker to us. And I think it's an awesome analogy to our two party system in the year of our Lord, 2012 AD.

I hate politics with a greater fury than I hate the Victorian period of literature. As such, this is all I'll say on the matter.

Republicans on the payroll know their voters well, and tend to target peoples' deepest fears/prejudices/issues, and can cast a net to pull in emotionally-charged votes. They're aiming the rhetoric at people who work their lives away for their families, people who either didn't go to college or went with a one-track mind. They're aiming at people who weren't curious/exposed to/didn't give a shit about the roots of human philosophy or science. People who don't think because no one pays them for it. Because they've avoided challenging their long-held notions about the world, those kinds of folks are more likely to have prejudices, irrational fears, and...and, fuck; fuck them for directly appealing to religious people, because devotion to religious law is so often black-and-white, and they know a Christian has to fucking vote for the guy who says "God" more frequently.

I know everyone is responsible for their own morality and information, but the truly religious are a lot more complicated than that. For instance, those Christians who actually are Christ-like...you know, the ones who devote their lives to God and not CNN...they hear Romney say he's against killing babies, and that the incumbent is somehow not against it, and that is a clear-cut choice. No matter what bottomless puddle of shit flows from anyone's mouth after that, the Christian is going to vote for the "not a baby killer" and go back to his/her life of quiet devotion. Good people get good things from the Bible, but goddamn if I don't wish Eve's apple had come from Some. Other. Fucking. Tree. And, well, the political Christians deserve whatever hell they believe in. I hope it's worse than they think.

All the while, Dems over here are cursed with that blasted "greater good" handicap that assumes people would help somebody in need, if given the chance. A la the Batman. Ever notice that the Batman is always up against a bunch of brainwashed and/or rich cronies along with the supervillain? The greater good is something everyone agrees with, but when it comes to saving one's own ass, everyone's just gonna assume Batman's taking care of it. Which he usually is, with the help of technology, engineering, billions of dollars, one old Alfred, and...knowledge. And he is not thanked. They aren't without their flaws, the donkey asses; but shit, I'd vote for Bill Clinton again over these two.

It sucks that he had to remind everybody that we're all growed-up now -- we can stop spitting spitballs at the other side of the room now, but now everybody get out your kinder-mats because it's naptime. Jesus.

The thing that makes it a handicap in this political climate is the charged atmosphere. Republicans are now vying for emotional votes IN LIEU of intelligent and informed decisions, because if they scare their target audience enough, those people will be voting in some sort of survival mode in a world where money is evaporating and they'll have to pay for everyone's birth control -- surely, in that world, being taxed for a more egalitarian society sounds like crazy talk, because it means they'd have to change their entire worldviews to be happy with it. Wars are started and cultures are vaporized over challenged worldviews, and the elephant in the room says it's the only thing that can save us from actually pursuing real knowledge. God for...bade, I guess.

Most lifelong repubs I know are acting like...fucking, Reivers from Firefly or something! They, like the Reivers, have gone to the edge of the universe, and have been driven mad from staring into the abyss for too long. When they read anything good about Obama -- or even just his name -- I could swear it wasn't this bad before. "He's a Muslim! He aborts babies! He gives all my money to black people on welfare because I'm a racist! [b]Shoot 'im![/b]" It's like Obama is the Viet Cong or some shit, where the US soldiers had to strip an entire nation's population of their value as human beings and simply called them all "Charlie," because that's the only way they could live with themselves after killing mothers and children. Obama isn't booby-trapping the rainforests in Viet Nam, but he gets unchecked hatred from the ever-forgetting elephants. Without all that time-consuming fact checking, of course.

I'm not campaigning for Obama or anything, even though he's asked me to dinner a billion times this month, but that kind of behavior from the conservative side says a lot more about today's Repub mindset than it does about Obama's first term. If I didn't know anything Obama did in his four years, I'd see Jesus regretting his crucifixion at the sight of the disgusting horde he died for, and I'd fucking vote for whoever they aren't supporting. It's repulsive. And with a sack like Romney, pushing the country into thinking America is falling apart is really his only fucking shot at it. A man with no provable moral character, no regard for facts, and no plan to help anyone other than himself.

I'd compare the Joker to Romney as an analogy, but I like the Joker too much. At least he admits he's fucking shit up because he doesn't believe in anything, and he'd never run for POTUS in a million years. I respect that in a man.

I'm Gonna Leave With You

in the summer that you came there was 

something eating everyone

in the sunshine fun was low

we couldn't greet you

with a simple hello

and the watchers of the flood

were busy in their chambers

making sure there was new blood

to sustain their dying veins

but i believed you

no need for further questioning

i'm gonna leave with you

you can teach me all you know

which way will we go now

in our trip to higher windows

i really don't know now

i really don't know

These Are A Few Of My Favorite Things

1. Cold snaps; the kind that really do feel like a "snap;" they remind me of snapping light sticks on night hikes during Girl Scout camping trips. When the weather changes here, it shocks people into saying more interesting sentences. I say far more interesting things when the temperature has just dropped 20 degrees, and people I bump into are more likely to start interesting conversations. As a result, I start thinking about all the wonderful, interesting people in my life that I haven't had recent one-on-ones with, and that makes me realize how many wonderful, interesting people I have yet to meet. The nugget I always end up with is a delightful crescendo of appreciation for the world, and humanity at large; optimistic to a degree capable of drowning out the negative parts -- all the "what is the world coming to?" that has carbonized in the heat of summer.

2. Conversations in which I end up accidentally teaching myself something; the ones where, in the heat of advice-giving, I hear something come out of my mouth that I've never thought before that moment, and something clicks in my head and I realize I've just given myself an explanation that I didn't know I needed. Tonight, I answered a question about myself that I'd never thought to ask before. Josh disputed my comment that I like the history of music more than I like the music itself (which I had also just realized). But because he challenged my statement, I was challenged to explain what made it true -- why am I so interested in the making of music when I rarely remember to turn on the radio in my car?
After a few half-sentences, I said, "Because I'm interested in human history, and our history is hidden in music...it sings our own history back to us."

3. Waiting tables. So I might have gotten lucky with the place I work. The service industry is so famously disgruntled, and behind the safety of kitchen doors, those who haven't been on both sides of them are always blamed as the enemy. After seven years on both sides, I don't see it that way anymore.
Sometimes, I think the reason servers get so angry is because the American gratuity system doesn't allow us to consistently earn what we think our time is worth -- in fact, there are times when there's absolutely nothing we can do to earn a decent tip from a cheap table -- and the server rage only festers when we begin to let ourselves think that a tip is a measure of our worth. I've been treated like a child, a heathen, a leper, a slave, an idiot, and a female object in my years as a server, and I went through a period when my self-esteem would plummet when an unassuming friend would say something like, "How hard could your job possibly be?" It was hard to face the futility of explaining how hard my job could possibly be to someone who has not only never done it, but had no real desire to understand. Until a person has been on the standing side of the table, they'll likely never grasp the experience of a job that essentially requires you to walk up to a group of hungry strangers and ask them to judge you on any criteria they desire, decide what "your job" entails, and then pay you at a rate of their choosing, anywhere from eight to 20 times a day.  "Your job is just to bring people their food and refill their drinks, right?"
Even though it sucks sometimes, when a table engages me in a more thought-provoking conversation than many people get from their closest friends, I feel like I have the best job in the world. And instead of the normal grumbling about a mediocre tip as I clear their table an hour after closing time, I'm reminded that real human connections can't be bought, and that the conversation I've just had with a few strangers should never, ever be judged in dollars.
I'm not sure when it changed, but a low number on the tip line doesn't do anything to me anymore -- at least not psychologically. I might leave a five-hour shift with three bucks, but watching a normally civil human being as he justifies (or doesn't think anything of) his sub-human treatment of a stranger in public is the real gold I leave with -- he has taught me something about humanity that he won't ever understand, because he'll never be brave enough to put an apron on and look it in the eye.
For instance, tonight I waited on a guy who told me he thinks people who don't like the Beatles are uncultured idiots, due to the factual superiority (record sales) of the Beatles discography. I told him that if he's using record sales as a measure of how great a band is, he'll probably never be proven wrong, but only because nobody buys records anymore.
He said, "Yeah, so I'm right, right?"
I saw the exchange, and the ensuing lame tip, as ever more proof that monetary exchanges can't possibly reflect the worth of a human being -- not creative talent, musicianship, nor work ethic; not argumentative prowess nor character -- which is something a lot of people say, but waiting tables has shown me that very few people truly believe it, and even fewer realize the extent to which they've bought into the opposite. Some customers get such a thrill from knowing they control their server's income, I wonder what hell their private lives are.
Perspective is humanity's true currency, and though the service industry isn't the only way to earn it, I'd have a lot less of it if I'd gotten some other job when I was 19.

Blue Moon

The hurricane has gone, left us with new dead wood to sand down into nostalgia nightstands that will later hold our room-temp coffee over rehashed stories. When the wind is at its strongest, so are we; and when the debris is settled against our bedroom windowpanes, begging for amnesty, we lie here in our bed next to each other, commas in a world otherwise pauseless.

I have loved you all my life.

An Open Letter To Cigarettes

Dear, Dear Cigarettes,

I regret that it has come to this.

You are the bane of many lives, and burn like cancer through generations of writers, bartenders, musicians, and artists. Cigarettes, you will not burn through me. I was a writer before you, and though I'm having some trouble tricking my brain into believing this, I will be a writer without you.

I shall delight in replacing you with glorious air-conditioning in the summer, and in wintry times, a cozy blanket. In the pleasant months of the year, your space will be filled with the scents of blooming flowers and fresh-cut grass. The hundreds of dollars I spend on you per year will be redirected to items such as shiny new pens, Kraft Glue, and coconut oil.

I know it's my own fault that I have to write you this letter, but on the real, Fuck You.

Christie

What Are We, BR?

I decided to start writing a novel today. Five years from now, it will be regarded as a terrible idea by everyone close to me, but I'm gonna do it anyway, because there are way too many metaphors, microcosms, and paradoxes in this city to let the historians and dying publications have all of them.

I need them all in one place, bound by something tangible, with a thread long enough to tie everyone together. The pieces are floating around in the air, and the humidity is so heavy right now that even smoke from a cigarette can't drift anywhere but down. I might have to pave every square foot of this city with paper to catch all of it, but shit, I'm already halfway there anyway and I have so much free time it's oppressive.

The proposed subject matter kind of ties in with my drive to put in some time in the nonprofit sector here, anyway, so I can theoretically work on this project while I learn how to write grants for people.

In a blog post after my first week at Dig, I wrote, "A week in, and I can already tell that this will be the period of my life when I realize how much, and to what depths, that I hate myself." Maybe that's a cover-all sentiment I can use as a permanent bookmark, to remind myself of those precious few moments I decided to pull the anchor back onto the boat, kick off from the dock, and get something the fuck done.

A day in, and I can already tell that this will be the period of my life when I realize how much, and to what depths, that I hate myself. Here goes round two.

For All Our Sins

"Recall then that you have received the spiritual seal, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of right judgment and courage, the spirit of knowledge and reverence, the Spirit of holy fear in God's presence. Guard what you have received. God the Father has marked you with his sign; Christ the Lord has confirmed you and has placed his pledge, the Spirit, in your heart."

"Deinde leviter eum in maxilla caedit, dicens: Pax tecum."

"Then he strikes him lightly on the cheek, saying: Peace be with you."

Every Thursday night of my Sophomore year of high school, I carpooled to Catechism with this awful girl named Kristy and her mother, who was a teacher at the church. The only way she could get her spoiled daughter in the car was to suggest the possibility of stopping at the Cracker Barrel for an Icee afterwards. When two hours was over, Kristy's mother was predictably stressed -- from what, I never learned -- and the maroon Buick's ignition was Kristy's cue to flip on her whine switch.

I remember entertaining the thought that she didn't actually want the Icee, because even though she'd get the "bucket" size, she never finished it -- the car's cup holders were stacked full of melted, leaky cups that would have to be tossed to make room for the fresh one. I didn't care for Icees, but I got a small one every week anyway, on Kristy's mom's dime. It was the least I could do to inconvenience those awful people for being who they were.

On the extra-angsty Thursdays, I'd even leave my full Icee in the backseat cup holder, in hopes that Kristy's mom would sleep a minute less at night wondering if her family's bad habits were rubbing off on me.

I was a monster.

Catechism at 15 years of age is generally in preparation for the Catholic Sacrament of Confirmation -- the ritual honoring a young Catholic's passage into adulthood. It's supposed to signify a conscious choice to enter the church, after having been primed for the Sacrament in a Catholic household. The normal bible studies of younger years shift into a Q-&-A-style forum, and the point was for us to ask the tough questions about our faith before we became permanent thorns in Jesus' crown.

I took this opportunity very seriously, as I had skimmed a book on Buddhism at Barnes and Noble that year, making me an expert in Eastern religion. Every Thursday at 6 p.m., I showed up to Catechism armed with a battery of logic ammunition.

For example:

If God loves me unconditionally, why do I have to ask for forgiveness? If someone living in African-level poverty is never told that Jesus Christ died for their sins, where do they go when they die? Why is God such a dick in the Old Testament? If Jesus was a Jew, shouldn't we be Jewish, too? What kind of God would torment his children with the option of not living a Godly life? And, perhaps most importantly, how exactly did Christ's death open up a new portal to heaven? What kind of God would flaunt the death of his only son -- surely, he could have had more sons, had he wanted them -- in front of billions of sinners, claiming that his child's death was more important than the demise of any of their children?

Perhaps, I thought, that kind of God is one who has never known the pain of being mortal.

I thought I was brilliant. I'd hurl these gems at my poor, unsuspecting, devout volunteer teacher once a week, spending them frugally just to keep her on her faithful toes. I wanted her to question herself, sure. But more than that, I wanted her to fear me. I was a monster on top of a mountain of questions that Catholicism could not answer; and every Thursday at 8 p.m., I would descend from my existential mountain and enter a maroon Buick that ran on Kristy's melted Icee buckets and the fumes of bad parenting.

The rides home weren't that bad, because I had won. It never occurred to me that my path of destruction through the Confirmation process, with little to no belief in the Catholic dogma, meant that I was participating in doublespeak. I didn't believe that Confirmation meant my soul would forever be Catholic, anyway -- it was a game to me, and the ritual meant more to my mother than it ever would to me.

The next year of classes were purposely more intimate, and the teachers were carefully selected for that final phase of preparation. We met once a week, in the instructor's home, for three intense hours. Our eleventh-grade class was intentionally split into thirds, to fit about eight people in the host's living room. My host was a celibate, 42-year-old lesbian named Terry, who made a mean batch of twice-baked potatoes.

"I just haven't met the right man," she said. "I'm waiting until God leads me to him."

We ate dinner with her every week, and she was always happy to take requests for the next week's meal. But before we even sat down, we were required to grab one of the eight rosaries hanging on the coat rack by the door. Every week, we prayed the entire rosary. All five Mysteries, no shortcuts. That's around 50 Hail Marys, five Glory Be repetitions, and I forget how many Nicene Creeds.

The ritual took up one of the three hours we sat in her living room every week. Most of us knew those prayers by heart already from our lifetimes of Catholicism, but if any of us had a lapse in memory, that tedious weekly practice would forever seal the cracks.

"We'll answer all of your questions, but God comes first," she said.

Going past the recitation of memorized childhood prayers, Terry made it a point to meticulously pick apart the syntax of every prayer during our time with her. Hilariously, I fancied myself a writer even at that stupid age, and was more than eager to soak up the dogmatic rhetoric like an oversaturated moldy sponge with a bad attitude.

"So in this prayer to Mary, I'm asking her to pray for us sinners, from now until the hour of our death," I stated during the Hail Mary analysis. "Why do I have to ask 50 times per rosary?"

"The rosary is a meditation," Terry answered. "Your gift to her is thinking about every word, no matter how many times you say it."

I left her home every week sullen. She was different than the other Catechism teachers they'd thrown my way -- she wasn't easily broken, and she had more patience than Buddha. Despite her obvious homosexuality, there was this calm about her, as if she had come to understand that her faith in God was more important than the gender of any human being she might fall in love with. In short, she made my mission look like Satan's work, to me, without ever knowing the torment I had previously fed upon. For someone who didn't believe in the divine, it was nothing short of miraculous.

"What do we, as Catholics, believe?" she asked.

"...in Catholicism?" I jabbed.

"What is Catholicism, then?" she countered.

"A room full of Catholics."

"What is a Catholic?"

"A person who chooses to apologize to God once a week for the way he created us, while thanking him for doing so."

Terry looked at me with patient, burning eyes. "Do you understand the sacrament you've chosen to receive in a few months, Christie?" she asked.

I paused.

The ever-invasive Catholic dogma has survived thousands of generations by inserting itself into wedding vows, and my parents had promised God to raise their children Catholic back in 1981. On paper, that translates to "until Confirmed inside the Catholic Church," which is why my mother told us that church would become optional after we went through with it.

In that frame, I understood the Sacrament of Confirmation as my one-way ticket out of the religion without upsetting my saint of a mother. It was the best gift I could ever give  her: It would earn me my religious freedom without breaking her rules, while also allowing her to feel she had satisfied her promise to God. I knew that nothing else I would ever do in my life would leave her with that kind of peace of mind.

Yet, I would never let the endless amount of love I had for my mother rob me of the unique pleasure I got out of taunting the volunteer soldiers for God.

"I understand," I said. "I understand that my mother had to promise my soul to God when she married the love of her life. I understand that her soul needs to be protected, because she let God glue it back together after it broke in ways mine never will. I understand that her faith in God made her an amazing mother, and she made my soul unbreakable and inextricable from me. God cannot have my soul, but technically, that's his fault."

Her eyes burned patient holes through the silence of my classmates.

"...And, really, I can't think of a better way to thank the both of them."

After that, we were all assigned our "spiritual sponsors" -- anonymous confirmed Catholics who would send us periodic words of encouragement, small religious gifts, and decorative bibles until the day we made our Confirmation. The mystery sponsors would reveal their identities in the church pews, and would walk us to the altar to seal the deal.

We were told that once we reached the altar, the Bishop would ask us questions about our assigned patron Saints, and that we had better know our chosen Saint's life story. If we answered the Bishop correctly, we would earn the right to take the name of that Saint in the eyes of God and the Catholic Church.

My patron Saint was Saint Maria Goretti, an Italian girl who died from multiple stab wounds incurred when she refused to submit to her attempted rapist in 1902. She was 12 years old.

"Christie, could you start us off with the first line of the Nicene Creed?"

We were analyzing the nuances of the Catholic prayer of all prayers -- the one that states, in terms clear as day, every conviction held by a truly faithful Catholic. I obliged.

"We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty."

My voice rang tinny against the silence of the motherless home, all eight pairs of indifferent eyes on me. I had said this prayer hundreds, maybe thousands of times in my life, and it had only ever meant one thing to me: The halfway point of the hour-long Sunday Mass.

"Maker of Heaven and Earth, of all that is, seen and unseen."

Maker of all that is, seen and unseen. The prayer exited my lips like it never had before, but nobody in the room seemed to pick up on it. My voice sounded tangible, like a thing I could reach out and hold onto.

"...God from God, Light from Light," I continued. "True God from true God; begotten, not made. One in Being with the Father."

I closed my eyes and I was in a classroom from 10 years ago, rubbing my palms together in front of my first grade religion class at Saint Isidore Catholic School, shaking with anxiety before I recited the Nicene Creed in its entirety.

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, I squeaked out, my tinny voice nervously bouncing off the white cinderblock walls. The last time I'd said the Creed alone was in first grade, when I was forced to prove to the class that I'd memorized it.

"Through him, all things were made, for us men and for our salvation, he came down from Heaven," I recited. "By the power of the Holy Spirit, He was born of the Virgin Mary, and became man."

There was a moment of simultaneous shock and dread as the words turned into a familiar story I didn't believe. Words that I had repeated at least once a week for most of my life, in indifferent solidarity with the Sunday congregation. Until I found myself sitting in that lesbian's home, preparing to walk willingly into adulthood as a confirmed Catholic -- in all my years of silent protest, tactical logic, and intellectual hubris, I had failed to see that it had never been a choice at all.

"The first line is all we need right now, Christie," Terry said.

"For our sake, He was crucified under Pontius Pilate," I went on. "He suffered, died, and was buried. On the third day, He rose again in fulfillment of the Scriptures. He ascended into Heaven, and is seated at the right hand of the Father."

"You can stop there, we're going to go through it line by line," she insisted.

But I couldn't stop. I didn't know how to stop.

"He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His kingdom will have no end."

I was handed a one-size-fits-all, blood-red robe and confirmed on a Thursday evening. Terry was my sponsor -- she stood next to me in the pew, smiling kind of like she always had.

"Who is your patron Saint, Christie Matherne?" the Bishop asked.

"Saint Maria Goretti," I replied.

"Oh, Saint Maria," he said wistfully. "She was such a young, devout martyr for Christ. And how did she die in her faith?"

"A man tried to rape her when she was 12, and she chose to die rather than to let him have her innocence."

"Yes, as you will take her name in the eye of God, may you always look to her for strength in the face of evil." He opened his book of Rites.

I thought about Saint Maria Goretti, canonized after dying at 12 years old, innocence intact. I thought of my mother, her devotion, and the guilt she must have felt -- the guilt she must still feel at the mercy of a dogma that canonized a 12-year-old for having the guts my mother couldn't find at that age. 

I thought of Kristy, and her mom and all the Icees I had passive-aggressively left to melt in her Buick; all my subtle mental terrorism campaigns against people whom I'd deemed unfit for my respect. I thought of how hard it must be to raise a child -- how terrifying the world must look to a new mother when she sees her child's innocence and cannot remember her own -- and how, perhaps, Kristy will remember a soggy cupful of hers.

I wondered how many kids Terry had stood next to in these pews, how many believers and nonbelievers she has guided to the altar, wearing one-size-fits-all robes in blood-red. I wondered what she must think of her students as she watches them line up to be inducted every year -- her contribution to the faith, her legacy; her penance, her apology, and her gratitude to God, for the way he created her to be alone, in his will, for the rest of her devout life. 

"You have received the spiritual seal, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of right judgment and courage, the spirit of knowledge and reverence, the Spirit of holy fear in God's presence. Guard what you have received. God the Father has marked you with his sign; Christ the Lord has confirmed you and has placed his pledge, the Spirit, in your heart. Deinde leviter eum in maxilla caedit, dicens: Peace be with you."

It was the least I could do.

"And also, with you."

Deep-Fried Conversation

While on the road, I designated a half-full notebook I'd been carrying around all year as the "good idea book." I figured that Josh and I on massive amounts of caffeine for a month would generate some things I should write down, as he's always been such a force in my life. I'm really glad I had a notebook around.

Among the pages of streamlined thoughts and ideas, I'd also written down words and phrases that came out of our mouths in the most caffeinated and sleep-deprived moments of the road trip. These are things that I wouldn't have bothered to write down a year and a half ago, because it looks like gibberish to the naked eye. But because I was present, they each are a souvenir of a conversation I might not have recalled otherwise.

Some of the conversations we had on the road changed my thought patterns in ways I didn't recognize at the time. Each sentence in quotes, every pair of descriptors will turn into its own essay eventually. One of the things I realized somewhere between Oregon and Montana (maybe it was Idaho?) is that I actually do not care if those things get published.

Publishing isn't my goal. In a way, it never really has been. It's a thing I thought was the only vehicle for my real goal, which is getting people to read it. I want people to be affected by the words I write. I do have to make a living, and it'd seem easier if the words earned me money, but I've been on that end of it, too, and it's not as easy as I thought it would be. The paycheck wasn't excessive by any means, and of course, I got way more gratification from public feedback on my work, both good and bad.

Everybody kind of wants to change the world with their craft, and in that way, I'm no different. I want to change the world, and it's a goal that has always stressed me out, because it's somehow built into my mindgrapes. I can't do a damn thing before I verify that I am, in fact, making an impression on the world. It's egotistical and it's taken me a long, long time to come to terms with that. In that way, I'm no different from anyone, and that's an ego struggle I have never been brave enough to discuss with anyone. You have to be different to change the world, right?

In one exchange of thoughts, I said something that's far smarter than I am, and it wouldn't have happened if I'd been in a room by myself. We were talking about the reasons people go to college, and the general attitude people have towards knowledge and learning. I blurted out that I never assumed I'd get a "job" related to my creative writing degree, and that I thought of learning as something I'm not really doing solely to better myself -- that I now view my degree as something that benefits the human race as a whole. That's under the assumption that the more I know, the more we know.

Now, it sounded so super fucking smart and wise and shit, that I'd love to snatch it up and say that's always how I've thought.

It's not. I'm not that insightful. It's not how I thought about it when I skipped class half the time, and my years of "learning" were done rather selfishly. It's true that I was never under the impression that I'd get a "job," but my general ethos was by no means "wise." In that way, I am no different.

But I am different. After that came out of my dopey mouth, I sat there and thought about it, talked about it, thought about it some more. I've never really defined my goals in PowerPoint fashion because my brain is a pretentious asshole that rejects all forms of planning, but maybe it's time I step a little closer to that realm of thought. What do I actually want to fucking do with this skill I've dedicated 10 years to? Well, Mr. Mackey, I want to change the world.

In what way? Good question.

I want to change the way people think about creativity. I don't just want to tell people that they should get in touch with their "inner artist" -- I want people to know that it exists inside of them. I want everyone to have something that cannot be taken away from them -- a thing that isn't a thing. It might sound like I'm talking about God here. That's because I'm kind of talking about God here. God, defined as that inextricable part of a person that cannot be removed. It can be changed, shaped, smashed, and reformed, but all the pieces are still in there. They might hurt sometimes, but there is no way to remove what's in that space. It can only be added to; there is no exit. It is a well of infinite capacity, with infinite spatial possibilities and incarnations, and it will never, ever not be there. An artist is merely someone adept at describing theirs to the world. I want to expose my God on paper with a degree of accuracy that makes others curious what theirs might be like.

I want to rid art of money, not because it's worthless, but because it's priceless -- and producing a lithograph of the art inside of you is a gift that should be given, and if it is given, it can't be stolen, taken, bought, or sold.

I want to create frameworks with people who inspire me, people who like to be inspired. People who aren't first interested in money or due credit, because when they're excited, there is no room for concern about such things. I want to see everyone's lithographs and be stricken by their intricacies; by the delicate filaments that make up their particular fabric.

I want to see eyes light up when I hit the nail on the head -- when I can ignite someone's dormant star-stuff by rearranging some letters on a page, when I find the combination of words that create the weight of an emotion that everyone has felt. All I want is to create reminders that we can all feel the depth of each other; that we are tied together; that we all kind of want the same things; that we all hurt for similar reasons. I want everyone to lay their deepest cards on the table, lay out our unmatched bits so we might see where our own missing pieces are -- the North to your South, the nitrogen to my roots, the phosphorus to our matchbooks -- and by that, become something more than the sum of our parts.

I want to understand myself and to be understood by others. I want to know the mechanisms with which my experiences have formed my God, my sense of self, and my sense of purpose; what those things I remember are made of, and why my extra pieces ended up shaped like another's emptiness. I want to understand the bottomless universe inside of every human being just as much as I want to explore my own.

I guess I'll go first, then.

Syntax

I saw the filaments of a light bulb magnified through tiny holes drilled into a hollow gourd. They represented the binary language, the way we stack our words, what our syntax does for the way we build our worldviews. At first, I wanted to learn it -- trace each filament back to its point of origin, decode the cultural cipher of language; I wanted to understand how each one works, down to its most microscopic elements, the space inside a pause, the pounds of pressure per square inch of space between words.

And I tried. I stared and I studied, but I got lost in spirals of thought that are surely each a different rabbit-hole unto itself. There was a moment where I found myself satisfied to lay there, staring at the ceiling where the panned-out map of the human condition was projected before me -- unable to reel in the slack in my jaw in the face of such a perpetual picture. This kind of thought -- the collection of these states-of-mind I've written about before -- I've never been able to quantify it as well as I have just now.

Maybe I found the service road for my brain's rush-hour traffic, or the fuse box for my tripped circuit. Maybe I tripped into the maintenance driveway by mistake, the entrance to the underground tunnels. The duct system in my skyscraper.

Weird shit happens when you read a language theory book before taking a hippie trip.

How the West Was Burned

With this mysterious bottle of wine I found in my kitchen upon my return, I shall attempt to marble my way around explaining what happened to my June of 2012.

It woke up like a demon in a birth canal on the fifth, hungry and ready to point the laser eyes of summer at every snow-capped mountain, frigid campsite, and Fahrenheit degree that crossed its path. A few days shy of four weeks later, I'm reading reports of all the wildfires blazing the states we crossed. It's an odd thing, looking at the greasy atlas, retracing our penned routes -- I could almost use the same lines to draw in which forests we stayed in are burning to the ground at this very moment.

Now, in June, I've managed to learn quite a bit about forest fires...and I've managed to see a few places that are still recovering from fires 50 years ago. It takes a long fuckin' time for a forest to regrow.

I'm bewildered that I got to see all these places -- some literally days before they would endure an event from which they may never recover -- in the nick of time. I waited so long to travel; every shred of my being wanted motion for as long as I can remember. And when I do, I manage to do it just in time.

Also, I seem to have quit smoking cigarettes. Hooray.

Soup

I had a weird reaction to my last deadline today.

My body didn't know what to do with itself. It was physical; not so much mental. I grew very quiet, wandered around kind of confused, and ate one bite of about 16 things in my fridge (mostly single ingredients). I looked for the cats, but they didn't provide occupation for my hands and feet -- not the kind I wanted, anyway.

So I went to meet up with my buddy David Smith, who's in town briefly from Montana. Everybody was eating dinner and laughing and drinking, all in good spirits. I was not capable of doing anything more than faking enjoyment while nursing a glass of champagne. I was unbelievably tired, even after having slept a full nine hours last night.

Left, bought ice cream cookie sandwich from the gas station next door. Ate. Drove to the office at 10 p.m. to clean up my area. Had a little moment of panic when I realized I had no idea what I wanted to occupy my hands with.

I expected a certain amount of purposelessness, but it wasn't quite that. Far more tangible; not the kind of thing caused by feeling useless, because those things induce thought and require actually feeling useless. I didn't feel useless at all -- I have so much ahead of me and so many things to look forward to -- but all I could think about was a car hitting a brick wall at 80 miles an hour.

The whiplash subsided by the time I got home, leaving no evidence of its course through me. I came up with what might be the best idea I've ever had, and no matter what the result of it is, it is intrinsically fail-proof. I've been sitting down here in my garage stewing in my own motivation soup for about five hours now, researching and plotting and enjoying my life in a way that I don't think I ever have before.

I've spent a long time tallying how much this job has taken from me. Now after the fact, I'm starting to see how much I've gained, and it's way more than whatever was lost. My head is full of plans instead of thoughts; gears are turning more efficiently than I knew was possible. I'm debugging the programs before I even lay the groundwork, testing my executions and soliciting advice from the relevant minds I've met through my work.

It's good to finally have the still air I needed in order to build my own machine. Likewise, it's good that I took a ride on someone else's when I didn't know where to start.

For the English Grads on Commencement Day

I had gotten so comfortable in that desk, swaddled in my cozy nest of mistakes, that I had forgotten why I paid all that money for the privilege of attending a university.

 The first time I looked back at those six years, it really did appear that I'd made a grave error in choosing a BA in Creative Writing.  That was two months after I graduated. As I re-read my fiction portfolios while drunk on a particularly hopeless night, I wondered what the hell I'd actually learned. The things I'd written there were shit, but they gave me a degree anyway.  Had I become a better writer? Did I come any closer to saying what I had to say? Did I actually have anything to say, or was I just hungover the whole time? 

How dare them, I thought. How could they throw me out into a world I'm not ready for? They should have told me I was wrong; that I'm not actually a writer; that my 22 grand would've been much better spent at a trade school. It took me six years to figure out that I wanted an English degree at all, and it happened as I was walking across the stage at the PMAC. I concluded, then, that I may as well have spent six years banging my head against some bricks -- that's what 500 hangovers feel like.

I had learned everything but what I needed to know: it failed to explain exactly how much $22,000 is, or that my years there would cost so much, excluding all the bar tabs. It didn't warn me that most of my friends would move away after graduation, or that I would have to re-evaluate myself, my ambitions, and what I always said I'd do once I had a piece of paper that said I could write. I had big dreams! I wanted to travel the world and revolutionize the print industry, write bestsellers with little effort, and give commencement speeches and whatnot. Instead, months went by, and I was still refilling iced tea and serving dressing on the side; scanning Craigslist scams and hoping for the best. I'd go to bed homesick -- not for my family, but for my alma mater, and the golden age of postponed decisions it represented. My writerly dream at LSU had been driven by being forced to wake up at 9 a.m., to trudge my dehydrated ass to class, where I could drink overpriced coffee and wonder what I did last night.  

I was not a writer, and I had the degree to prove it.

The months wore on, and I managed to kick myself out of my own pity kegger -- at least enough to make a list of things I was good at. My skills were as follows: I can manage money, I can chain smoke, I can bullshit a paper that could fool my Harvard-taught, Medieval specialist Chaucer professor. I can hit an occasional deadline, I can sort of speak German, and I can play solitaire for an entire day -- maybe longer.

As this didn't make me feel any more qualified, I started a list of things I wasn't willing to do with my life.

My list was as follows: I'm not willing to sit in a cubicle, watch the clock, or do algebra. My posture will never be scrutinized by anyone other than myself. I will never work nine to five, and there will never be early nights or mornings. I'm not willing to work a job that doesn't engage me intellectually on some level, because  I have no method of making myself care about boring shit. I'm not willing to exchange my freedom for a career that earns more than I need, because that's what souls do a few years before they die or have kids.

If I have any advice for new Creative Writing graduates, it is this: skip the list of things you're good at, and go straight for the list of things you're not willing to do with your life. Take your degree and scratch out "writing," because you're not qualified for that yet. Your degree is in Creative Living.

Looking for writing jobs based on a list of things I was good at felt a lot like writing a villanelle. By that, I mean it's like trying to fit a world of possibilities into an illogical, useless, and extremely difficult format that rarely looks or sounds right, even after centuries of editing. And when done correctly, it only impresses the pretentious fucks who move to Austin after college because "Louisiana is just not inspiring." [Note: save your fiery words about these people for next year, when they move back to their parents' house in the garden district. Those words age like a good cabernet.]

Nearly three years later, I still refer to the first draft of what I now refer to as my "Dignity List."

My first instinct was to blame someone, but there's no one to blame. All aside, this is what I was given. I graduated college in the middle of a peculiar economic collapse; in a land where waiting tables pulls in too much money to qualify for food stamps. I was educated, uninsured, and seriously in debt; but I was not special -- not by a long shot. A few years after I left the safety of Allen Hall, I came to the conclusion that no one was going to give me money to spend 10 years writing a masterpiece, a la Milton, and it was highly unlikely that I'd ever pay any bills by getting published in niche-driven literary magazines. I didn't want to be a teacher because my posture sucks and I feared creating a generation of cursing, slouching, lazy brats. And you know, without all that pressure I'd put on myself to be a great writer, it became clear that my useless degree was actually the best choice I'd ever made.

The piece of paper is a metaphor for itself: it's flimsy enough for me to bend it into whatever shape I want, and the words printed on it make no mention of a career. It says that I didn't spend 22 large investing in a job, which is good, because I get tired of shit really fast. It says I spent six years learning how to manage my money, my words, and my alcohol, which are the only three things a writer needs to manage. It says I can enjoy selling minivans to soccer moms during the day because it means I can use the shit they say as dialogue at some point. It says I will never have a bedtime, because staying up all night editing three sentences is a pleasure I'm not willing to give up, no matter what I have to do the next day.

It will always be worth it -- worth more than my job or my comfort zone or my stability -- because I didn't make the mistake of going to college for a career. I went to college so I could build the life I wanted, the one my parents told me was impossible: the colorful, sad, excited, difficult, manic, interesting, sleep-deprived playground of a life without a tether. An existence that isn't dictated by employment, because I refuse to live in that soulless limbo. When I show up for a job, it isn't because I'm trapped -- it's because I have to eat. I pay rent because I need a place to put the chair and the desk. I pay taxes and tickets because I don't think jail would fit in with my plan, and I've already decided I'm not going to the slammer for anything unoriginal.

It is not a life of glamour or comfort, and it is not as easy as it was to write an essay about it. There are late and lost bills, frequent pawn shop visits, and jars of cheap peanut butter. There are times when I have to choose between a single grocery item and a bag of cat food. There are fits and panics and shut-off faucets, and I'm as afraid of checking my bank account as most people are of cancer.

My first introduction to freelance journalism was a forwarded email from my cousin, who works as the web designer for The Advocate. The newsroom manager wrote, "Tell her we don't have 'jobs' -- we have 'opportunities.' Oh dear, she'll hear that a lot in her life." The tone of her words caught me off guard, but nearly three years later, I understand the exhaustion. 

Since then, I have written love letters for rich assholes on Match.com, worked catering gigs with my dad, sold bullshit fluff pieces to shitty publications, shredded paper for eight hours at a time, painted office walls, created a tiny business selling old textbooks on Amazon, and written a screenplay for a law firm's centennial celebration. I have transcribed interviews between refilling iced tea; I have walked to an interview after running out of gas nearby, and later caught a ride to the office to hit my deadline. At rock bottom, I found myself in the middle of a Word document filled with ways to make your Valentine feel special. 

I learned what makes a writer last year, about an hour after my heart careened off a metaphorical S-curve in the Andes, strapped to the hood of a flaming simile full of explosives, when I wrote and submitted a charming 900-word piece about the history of National Sandwich Day.

With as much passion as I've ever hated or loved anything and the urgency of involuntary bodily functions,  I carved some of the best sentences I've ever written.  Despite internal implosion. Despite having been awake for 38 hours; despite all the overdue bills; despite my friend from out of town, sleeping on the couch across the room.  Priority Number One: National Sandwich Day.

I lost myself in National Sandwich Day just as deeply as I'd ever lost myself writing poetry in the bathroom  at age 12, when I thought of writing as a compulsion instead of an art form: a selfish, indulgent, and violently private act, which required no reason from me, nor validation from anyone. When I finished, I sat there and basked in the glow of my awesome sentences, not giving a flying fuck about the absurdity of the topic. My heart had just been killed in a war zone, and I needed desperately to know that  I could still lose myself in writing -- that there was still a self to lose.

Earning a Creative Writing degree is like chemotherapy, aimed at the pretentious asshole who inevitably germinates when a young writer meets the necessary dead authors. But it's a persistent pestilence, and sometimes the chemo only kills the 12-year-old. Few 12-year-olds get out of college alive, and their bodies must go somewhere. That was the source of the weight I felt after college, and the reason I had to fill thousands of pages with boredom and bullshit before I could teach myself how to write again: At some point, I had become a pallbearer instead of a writer. 

 

Real Creative Writing requires at least two years of post-collegiate purgatory, as you must atone for believing that your degree makes you a writer. Being a writer after college only happens after the surgical removal of acquired pride; after careful memory excavation; after you're able to honor the start of your timeline by piecing together what sent you here. The Ground Zero; the moment you forgot what color the room was because you weren't actually in that room after you put the pen to paper; the depth and significance of what it felt like to write for no reason at all.

At 25, I locked eyes on my 12-year-old self; she was dirty with passion and hormones and words she didn't understand, trying over and over again to organize a feeling that I'm only beginning to find words for. I asked her if we really had something valid to say to the world. Are we writers? Or are we just pretentious, self-absorbed degree-holders, waiting for the world to realize and pay us for our God-given way with words?

With all her inexperience and without my writing degree, she didn't have much to say, of course. She was too busy writing to hear me.