This is the first line of the rest of my life.

      Its the morning after my fortieth birthday, and as someone famous once said " what a long strange trip its been". Not sure how I'm going to get it all out and get it rendered for posterities sake, but I'm going to give it my best shot.

 

    The opening lines to my three favorite and most influential reads are as follows:

*First this: God created the heavens and earth-all you see and all you don't see.

*Far out on the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

*Tyler gets me a job as a waiter, after that Tyler's pushing a gun in my mouth and saying, the first step to eternal life is you have to die.

 

     I've been spouting off about pouring myself out long before now. Pouting and flailing in writing classes as the teachers guide me through examples of various forms. I hated it all. Who needed form when I had passion and charisma?!

    In my first creative writing class, at PCC, and at 28 arrogant years young, I raged against the curriculum and the instructors audacity.

How dare they force us to read, aloud, together, paragraphs at a time, one or two a piece, one chapter at a time, a book written as a journalistic expose of how the middle and lower class are stuck, striving for a sense of success and a life of thriving, contentment over survivable uncertainty. I was a 27 yr old drunk, hell bent on channeling Hemingway, Bukowski, Gaiman, Adams, and Burroughs (Augustine, not William.) and I wanted to pour my heart out in a way that would have me seen, felt and heard to an extent spoken word has never satisfied. To be taught how to bleed onto the page...

And here I was sifting through the struggles of a high paid columnist that had taken it upon herself to walk back down the societal steps of success to live a year of scarcity with us common folk. Chapters on Walmart jobs and house cleaning to make ends meet, roommates and food pantries. shock and surprise after putting in 60 hr. work weeks just to open their paychecks to find they couldn't cover the meager budget they'd set for survival. At first I thought it was arrogant and pretentious, holier than though "Undercover boss" shit.

"Lets see how the common folk live in squaller and print it for the masses to invoke some semblance of connection and feigned sympathy for the downtrodden."

 I was battling the bloated arrogance of first hand experience and the frustration of being forced to take in an outsiders retelling of my existence. I got angry, and let it spill into the few assignments we squoze it in between chapter titles. I resentfully rehashed the content, and spitefully threw words to page protesting my distaste for the source materials.

"Im no hack! Im going to be one of the greats!"

I hastily scribbled Cover to cover, assignment after assignment; protested and floundered trying to get the bright eyed complacent teens in the chairs next to me pissed about this monumental waste of time when we should be honing talent and learning the meat and potatoes of REAL writing. I got an A-, points were lost for attitude and participation, and the point was lost in my disillusioned misunderstanding of the "Why".

For ten weeks I stayed pissed and sulked in the credit hours necessary to pass; for years after I referred back to the class as a waste of time and a frustrating mess of single focused study. I laughed at the grade I earned for projecting my distaste for the materials and approach. I'd vent about it to any of my friends that had the fortitude, until one night, half way through my second pitcher of Pabst, and a little less than half way through my well rehearsed rant, the realization, like a cold beer dumped in your lap, widened my eyes and I laughed hysterically on the bar floor.

once id composed myself I stepped outside for a cigarette and some fresh air between drags, I thanked the course Id detested, the teacher I narrowed my eyes at, and the book I still resent having to have read. Somewhere in my mind I heard Hunter Thompson, between gulps of his preferred swill, laughing at me, a slurred Jonny Depp impersonation mocking me. "You'll never know what you want to write until you know what you don't".

The following semester I fell in love, instantly with the sharp 20 something hipster in horn rims that was my 1040 instructor. On day one we started studying depth of meaning by dissecting sentences and etymology and cultural perversion of words like "decadent". I loved every second... and dropped the class three weeks in, choosing to take what I hadn't learned and started writing at the bar across from campus, often finding myself 4 beers deep before I had to loosely saunter over for College algebra.

All in all I learned this; After a life time of chaos, hostility, and struggle to be seen and heard, being taught what I want will never lead to the fulfillment of my desires, And Its only in the perceived struggles and pushing back against whatever authorities are looming over me at the time, will I ever find the aggressive spiteful motivating fuel to spill my brain space into the world of written word.