I Am, Therefore I Write

Every once in awhile I like to step out from behind the curtain and write something first person. Long-time readers will know what I mean; it’s actually me, and not some persona I’ve invented to be the catalyst for whatever message I’m attempting to bore you with on that particular day.

So it is that on this particular day I’ve chosen to bore you with how I came to write.

First, I should present my credentials. Herewith is the sum and total of my qualifications: one creative writing class in 11^th grade. Yep, that’s it. We got dual grades; one for content and the other for grammar and punctuation, and I always got an A over a D minus. So, from a purely technical standpoint, I’m not qualified to do what I do. Sue me.

Not counting “required reading” in school, I probably haven’t read more than a couple hundred books in my lifetime. Which sounds like a lot, but really isn’t considering the number of years since I learned how to read. I’ve read Kurt Vonnegut and Erica Jong and Phillip Roth and Tom Clancy, and The Ballad of John and Yoko, and The Coming Crisis of Western Civilization, and a dozen or so books on astrophysics, but not a whole lot else.

My dry sense of humor can be attributed to Mad Magazine, which I devoured as a pre-teen, and National Lampoon some years later. I have 12 chapters of a novel I began writing at age 19 packed away in storage. Unfortunately, it’s three re-writes of the same four chapters. Or, maybe it’s four re-writes of the same three chapters; I don‘t remember exactly. I do, however, remember it not being very good.

Why do it then? What exactly is the point? Must there be a point?

I have no idea. I can tell you this: I do it because I like to do it. And, I suppose that should be enough. But that’s not the only reason I do it. I do it because my TV gets 957 channels and right now there’s nothing on I care to watch; because I couldn’t care less which YouTube video got the most views today; and because I believe that we as a society have lost our collective soul. I do it because I believe I have crested a hill, and on the down slope the view is much different, and I am nagged by the sense that if we do nothing else we should at least attempt to leave a footprint of some kind, for however long it lasts. If I were born 10,000 years earlier it would probably have been an etching of a bison on a cave wall.

So, I write. You can write too. Or, you can do something else, or - nothing at all. It really doesn’t matter.

Or, maybe it does.