Tuesday, 14 March 2006 : Why write? Who knows.

I find myself at times drawn to the keyboard, welling with creative force that must find a roost. So I goes and I sits and I types and shit pours forth into the world. My agent Ted told me once that I was lucky in that I could write a sentence and tell a story, whereas most writers can only do one or the other. I think he was being overly generous and was prolly happy that my royalties contract with him allowed him to finally buy a condo on the Left Coast. Or not.

Here is why. The first is an example of how I would like to write, and the second is how I actually write.

The winds came with mountainous resolve, alighting through twisted arroyos, rocking the sparse pipe organ cacti on their spiny trunks. For those sitting in the earthen dwellings that dotted the desert floor, the slight pressure against their eardrums was confusing. That confusion only lasted for a few seconds, for behind the wave of dragon’s breath that descended upon the Ra’atu village came the dragon’s blood. Super-heated walls of hydrogen plasma removed from the surface of the planet in a moment that which had taken thousands of years to foment into creation; the only civilization left on Earth.

God farghin’ blast it all to heck! There I was, NOT in the Congo, but in some wreck of a Chevrolet sedan sitting on the side of the 101 needing to piss really badly and wondering why the passenger’s door was missing. I was pretty sure someone had been in the car with me, but I went to the Congo in my mind, had sexual relations with a tribal princess, and re-fathered Sigmund Freud. Yeah, I know… but that’s how my mind works. I was hoping for Kepler or Copernicus. From somewhere on the roof a head pops into view as I am looking at the vacant door. Fucking Chris. I figured it would be him, but that was who I left Bakersfield with, so it only made sense.

I suppose if I put my mind to it, I can write any way I wish. But eloquence is not mine with which to barter. I didn’t even finish High School, preferring to get lost in the pseudo-hippie scene that was dragged through the mud of the 1980’s. My talents consisted of the mantra, “One for five, three for ten.” If you don’t know what that means, good for you. I also did not surround myself with particularly academic people (except Alex, who eventually graduated UCLA after smoking half the weed in California during the five or six years he was in ‘school’) All of my friends were burned-out, dropped-out. I am surprised I was successful at anything in my life, actually.

The karma of this life has control, so I worry not. Whether good or bad, I accept it as it comes. I may be dead tomorrow or in sixty years, only of that I am certain. Until then, I simply abide in Samsara and try to help those around me to do the same. Writing, while so important and powerful, is just another thing that I can do. Or not.

That is all. - Jim