Writing and Stuff

                                              In the Beginning

I started writing instead of just talking about writing. I was 35 years old.

   The first time I remember thinking I would like to be a writer was when I was 11 years old. I remember talking with my fifth grade teacher about it. I was 12 the first time I attempted to write a story. I don't remember too many of the details, but I know it had several references to caves and possibly took place in a cave. We had recently studied spelunking, so it was a fresh, exciting topic.I don't remember if I finished it, but I think I did, though was not satisfied with the ending. A pattern that continues to this day. The next story I wrote, and the first I remember finishing, was written when I was 20. Somehow it involved two sets of twins, two murders, and a cross that became a double cross, that became a double-double cross. Patterson eat your heart out! I don't remember what I was trying to say, or how I said it, but I am sure the piece was of great philosophical and literary significance, and it is a shame it has been lost and the world will never know its treasure.

   For the next 15 years I spent a great deal of time talking about being a writer without doing any actual writing. Sometimes I would buy but one of those handheld, spiral notebooks, make a couple of entries, and then misplace it.

   The summer of 2007. I am 35 and in prison. I have decided to write, because what else have I got to do? I had pens and pencils and lots of free time. I had a yellow legal pad. I even had a muse.

                                            C...

C. and I were living together when I was arrested. She is two years younger than I am, and from the old neighborhood. She dated one of my friends while we were growing up. When I was released from prison in February of 2007, I found out no one I knew actually talked to each other anymore, they just sent messages on MySpace. I also found out that everyone I had ever known was somehow connected and talking to each other. I ran across C., contacted her, talked several times a day, and a week and a half later I was traveling by Greyhound from Bloomington, IN to Buffalo, NY to live with her. Things move fast when you are in love!

   C. picked me up at the bus station. Later she would write about out reunion, writing that she had never been in a bus station before and that it smelled like tacos. I think it says something pretty substantial about her, the fact that she had never been in a greyhound station. It could be good or bad, depending on your perspective, but for me I am not sure if it is good for someone to go their whole life without ever having stepped foot in one. I think the Greyhound experience builds character. She was pretty close to the girl I remembered, except now she was 32 and not 20. Tall, skinny, intelligent, witty, and liked to have fun. The only thing that seemed to have changed was that her factory stock red hair was now dyed jet black, and was shorter. We stopped at the sub shop for sandwiches and the liquor store for wine, before heading to her apartment.

   The living together phase of our relationship lasted about a month. One afternoon, as we walked down the stairs on our way to my mother's for dinner, the Village of Hamburg Police walked up the stairs with a warrant for my arrest. Of course I tried to give them a fake name, and of course they already knew my real name. C.'s sister had phoned them to tell them who I was and where I could be found.

   I had missed a court date. It is hard to make your court date in Indiana when you are drunk in New York. Believe it or not, I was leaving on the bus the next morning to turn myself in. I had even contacted the court in Indiana and told them where I was. They weren't going to come after me, as long as I did what I told them I was going to do.

   I had been released from the Indiana State Farm on February 5th and was booked into the Erie County Holding Center on March 20th. Not my most successful run.

   But during those 40 days (worked for Jesus) something happened. I started writing. Drunken ramblings on MySpace, but it was writing. C. and I would sit around drinking and try to see who could write the craziest blog. They were the same as every other blog on MySpace-- unnecessary personal information, written in choppy, grammatically incorrect sentences. (Come to think of it, that describes all my writing. I believe the phrase "Over Sharing" was invented with me in mind.) Most of them contained an anecdote involving myself and the latest person I had reconnected with, since this was also my first experience with social media.

  C. and I talked about writing a movie together. We would pool our resources. With my darkness and her wit how could we go wrong? We went to the bookstore to purchase a book on screenwriting, but the parking lot was crowded, the weather bad, and we needed a drink, so we went to the bar instead.

   I was extradited back to Indiana after a week in the Holding Center. C. came to visit me before I left Buffalo. She brought me money, boxer shorts, t shirts, and socks. We talked about how this was going to be a good thing, how I would get this over with and we would get back to our life, but this wasn't my first rodeo and I figured this would be the last time I saw her. So far I am correct.

   I was in the county jail in Bloomington for six months, and talked to C. every night on the phone. We wrote letters almost everyday. I wrote a couple page draft for a story while in the county about C. taking a cigarette break and thinking about how she was going to stick by this guy and trust him. I sent it to her. I suppose I was trying to convince her, manipulate her under the guise of literature. I was so full of shit at that point of my life, even more than I am now.

                                             Prison Bound

I left the county jail, passed through the Reception and Diagnostics Center, and made it to prison. I decided that I had wasted too much time in the county jail playing poker and not writing. I decided I was going to write every night at 9:00, which is when the lights are turned down. There are security lights, so it is never actually dark, but it quieter and more conducive to creativity. Even though you are still surrounded by people the dimness creates the illusion of intimacy. It is as close to privacy as you get. This was when I would work.

   For a few nights I stuck to the plan. I sharpened my pencils. got my legal pad out from under my mattress, and forced out a paragraph or two of words which would later be crumpled up and thrown away. Most of it was me whining about the situation I was in and the life I had created for myself. I needed a lot of help, not just with writing, but that was all I was interested in focusing on.

   I went to the prison library ad found a book which claimed to have a foolproof creative method contained in its pages. A Surefire Way to Short Story Mastery! The book stated that people couldn't rely on plain old inspiration and creativity, that even the greatest writers of all time dried up sometimes and needed a little shove. Now I was going to get somewhere! I was smart enough to follow a recipe, have been a cook for most of my life, and this was pretty close to the same thing.

   The equation in the book was easy enough to grasp. You needed a couple hundred three by five cards, something I had no access to, but two boxes of letter sized envelopes would do the job. The book broke down life into categories, many of which I can't remember, but the basic idea is still there. You separated your cards (envelopes) into groups of ten. These packs would make up the individual examples under each of the category headings. The categories were things like: Ten People I Admire, Ten People I Don't Care For, Ten Places I Have Been, Ten Places I Want To Go, Ten Jobs, Ten Traits I Want To Have............... and the list kept going. When you were done with all your lists, all you had to do is shuffle the cards, deal one from each pack of ten, and string the details into a story. Who needs to be creative?

   I made it about a quarter or the way through the book and decided if this was what I was going to have to do to become a writer I didn't want to be a writer. Creativity was the reason I wanted to write. What the fuck does creativity mean when you take the creativity out of it? I wanted to struggle. I wanted to be the tortured artist, sitting in my one room apartment, pulling the words one by one from the painful part of my gut. (I had read a lot of Bukowski while in the county jail.) If I wanted to follow a plan it would be easier to be a plumber. Or a Christian. I threw  away all of my envelopes. I decided that I was a purist, a real writer, and that I was going to continue to write, but do it the old fashioned way.

   This is about the time C. stopped writing. She never set up a phone account so I could call her. My muse ascended. This has happened a few times, since most of my muses seem to be women, and one could argue that I pick the wrong muses, but I think like the ancient Greeks that the muse picks the writer, not the other way around. And who says a muse has to be permanent. They come and go. I stopped writing, except to send C. letters, which she never replied to.

To be continued...............................