Writer Unboxed

On the 14th of February, I began a five-day drive from Minot, North Dakota to Austin, Texas.  I drove a 14-foot U Haul, loaded down with the sum total of my worldly life.  Apart from a couple of stops specifically designed for visiting people I love, my days were a chain of monotonously similar events, with latitude and longitude the only significant variables. 

Kind of like this: hotel-gas station-truckstop-gas station-truckstop-truckstop-gas station-hotel.

I took one day off.  On Sunday, I didn’t drive.  My back needed a break.

The cab of a U Haul on a solitary five-day drive is not a very interesting place.  If not for a hastily purchased membership with Audio Adventures and a good supply of books on CD, I would have likely slipped a gear or two.

Me.  Not the truck.

But the stops?  A veritable goldmine.  I have pages and pages of notes on the people I saw.  The attitudes.  The modes of speech.  Whether or not they were predisposed to carry on a conversation with a total stranger (particularly a lean, caffeine-ragged refugee from a five-day road trip).

I saw a lot of differences as I moved further and further south.  But I was struck by the similarities.  Mainly, a lot of people simply asleep at the switch.  Drifting.  Unplugged.  Uninvolved.  Unhappy.

I was equally confounded and fascinated.  Here I was – admittedly tired from the road, bored with all the driving – making a cross-country trip to start a new life completely of my own making (in and of itself a foreign concept to a lot of folks; a friendly utilities worker I spoke to this morning said “so you don’t have a job?” when I told her I was self-employed).

Uprooted, downsized, transplanted.  Misunderstood, even.  The biggest grin of all time smeared all over my skinny little face.  Right now, my life is completely my own.  Finally.  At age 44. If somebody asked me a question about what I was doing, I told them.  If somebody gave me a chance to talk about my plans, I laid it all out. 

And I discovered that, if approached with intelligence, the unplugged people responded intelligently.  Even enthusiastically.  They … re-plugged.   

Which is where you guys come in. 

You.  Yes, you.  With that slightly loony look in your eye, working out of your house, your garage, a shed in your backyard, paying the bills by working the night shift at Kinko’s, just enough space in your studio apartment for a rickety 50-year-old school desk and a legal pad.

You are doing something you love.  It is inspiring to others.  Celebrate it loudly and publicly.  Share with others how wonderful it is to spend most of your time dreaming awake.

Some writers are embarrassed to do this.  Afraid.  A little ashamed, even, to admit their devotion to this wacko profession.  They imagine people whispering behind their hands, hushed conversations as they pass on the street.  “Oh, yeah … he’s that writer guy.”

Maybe that really happens.  If it does, so what?  Who cares if you’re crazy?  At least you are happy.  

These days, when people ask me how I am, I say, “living the dream!” without a trace of cynicism.

We are living the dream.  We are writing, or painting or drawing or doing whatever other creative things might cross our mind.  These activities create energy.  They expand, cross-pollinate, support each other.  A sculpture becomes a painting, which leads to a song, which becomes a story …

All of it energizes your life.  It keeps you awake, obliterates numbness, puts you back in the driver’s seat. 

Am I rich?  I just moved from a three bedroom house I owned into a one bedroom apartment I’m renting.  What do you think?

Rich?  Maybe not yet.  But it’s coming.  Oh yes it is. 

Am I successful?  Brothers and sisters, you’d better believe it.  I’m the CEO of my own company.  I’m the boss.  I call the shots.  If I want to get up at noon and work until midnight, that’s what I do (and that is quite often what I do).  If I want to take a break in the middle of the afternoon to ride my bike, I do that. 

If I don’t want to work at all, I don’t.  Mind you, I haven’t had what you’d call a “day off” in over a year.  I don’t need days off.  I love what I do.

When you love what you do, you wake up with joy.  Which is what everybody needs to be doing. 

Can I get an amen? 

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