I never thought of myself as being an
interesting person. Over the course of my life, I have done
interesting things, I’ve read interesting books and I’ve been both
delighted and disquieted from interesting thoughts. I often think
about dinner. When it comes to dinner, there are just so many ways
you can cook something: you can fry it or broil it or boil it or bake
it. The real trick to dinner, plainly speaking, is to search out
those raw ingredients which delight the finished project.
My background is writing. I made the
decision to become a writer on a sunny day in November. I was with my
penpal, before we became penpals. She asked me what I wanted to be
when I grew up. I didn’t know. When I asked her, she said she wanted
to become a writer. “Me too,” I said. “I also want to become a
writer.” Perhaps I only became a writer to impress a girl.
Being a writer, for me, was a great way
to experience and express myself in the world. If I met an
interesting person who worked an interesting job, I would always ask
questions. I’ve met flour millers, radio personalities, air traffic
controls and once a sex worker turned tarot card reader who had so
much to say that I’m still thinking about the conversation.
Being a writer took me to Goddard
College in Vermont to pursue my MFA. Although an MFA may not seem
like much, it meant a lot to me. I became a college instructor, and
then the co-founder and editor in chief of Umbrella Factory
Magazine. My work with UFM
led me to Rockethouse Pictures
where I wrote screenplays for animated shorts and later directed
music videos and short films. My connections at RHP
took me to Ring of Fire Publishing.
Ring of Fire published
my novels Dysphoric Notions and
Undertakers of Rain in
2012 and 2013 receptively.
For
years I wrote or worked on my writing for eight to ten hours a day.
In order to do this, I worked in the evenings in restaurants. Working
in restaurants does not make someone an interesting person, but it
does expose one to so many interesting people that there is no end
to the possibilities. One night you may be drinking beer with a
future world leader, and the next night it’s the world’s next
notorious criminal. The service industry has no shortage of people
who are living marginally or marginally living.
Meanwhile,
back at home I decided to think about my life’s work. I had set out
to write a novel. Somewhere along the way, I had written several. To
further that, I was unable to really focus on any given completed
manuscript because I had more material, newer novels, to write. And
there seemed to be no end in sight.
I was
knee deep in a story about a young woman whose husband had been
killed overseas. As I was writing one day, I saw the end of this
particular story and I saw the end of all the stories. All the
stories I would write, anyway. And despite the trail of novels and
short stories and screenplays behind me, all the hours it took and
the break down of years, I knew I was at the end of line.
When I
began writing my last novel, I did it with joy and exuberance. Was
this the best novel I had written? No. What it was, really, was the
last ghost within me that need to be exorcised. And that was that. I
was free. Grand total: 25 years as a writer. There are some stats
too, but they aren’t very interesting.
Meanwhile,
it started to make less and less sense for me to continue working in
the restaurant. I was busy forming my plan when the universe made one
for me. I went to my Sunday morning job as the brunch bartender at
the Greenbrair Inn. I was sent home at ten o’clock because of a lack
of business. It was March 13, 2020. Within 48 hours of being sent
home, COVID-19 wanted me to become someone else.
I
decided to pursue art. I had been taking photographs for years. I had
been dabbling in web design and magazine layout with my magazine for
years too. Meanwhile, my wife had begun working at Front Range
Community College. We had a short conversation and off I went, back
to school. I began my degree for Multimedia Graphic Design in 2020. I
completed the program in 2022.
If I
consider my life like dinner, it’s easy to say that there are only
some many ways you can cook it. There are just so many ways one can
live a life. Most of us, it’s one day at a time. Some people plan.
But it’s the raw ingredients of a person that make the life. When I
consider the fortune I’ve had when it comes to education, yeah, these
are raw ingredients. Then there are the jobs I took out of necessity,
these were never my favorites. These jobs were my time in the US
Army, or the six years I worked for the Boy Scouts of America. Then
there were the jobs I took because I wanted to have a specific
experience. I became a bartender and a college instructor because I
wanted the experience.
Then
there were jobs I took because I thought they would make me a more
interesting person. These jobs were often mundane. These were jobs
that would not enhance my resume or add to my CV. No, these were jobs
that were the making of a good barroom story. These jobs were, file
clerk in the collections department of a massive insurance company,
ballot extractor for my local elections office and tortilla salesman
at a farmer’s market.
I
never thought of myself as an interesting person. I’ve just always
wanted to think and do, experience and see interesting things.