The Writer

Back before alcohol and a hot girlfriend I was a writer.

I even wrote a book of essays as a junior in high school. It was about my summer vacation and all of the meaningless experiences I had had. Somehow, all of that meaninglessness took on a great deal of meaning when it was transcribed with a black Bic ballpoint pen onto clean college ruled notebook paper and nestled between the black fibrous plastic of an 89 cent binder from Jewel-Osco. It was pretty god damned funny, too.

Then I got a girlfriend. A string of them, actually, although if you ask the first one, I was merely a diversion while her pompous prick boyfriend attended a north suburban college. There was no follow-up to the book of essays. No sequel.

The last of the string unwound for eight months. It was the first "significant" relationship of my life. She loved my talent for writing, but hated me for possessing it (as opposed to her, a dolorous chemistry wonk) and thus hated its product. It was her competition I suppose. In the end I learned only that having good sex would come less naturally for me than writing erudite five paragraph essays.

I brought this knowledge with me to college. What I didn't bring was a fake ID. Thus "Significant Relationship II: The Sequel." Same characters. Same plot. Shorter run.

Second semester was one of discovery. I got drunk for the first time. As I laid on my back, sprawled across the patch of ice that I had slipped on, serenading the spinning stars with the chorus to Duran Duran's "Girls On Film," I sensed in a warm, vague but somehow undeniable way that life had changed forever.

Before things got out of hand, however, I managed to win the top columnist job at the university newspaper. I wrote the winning effort rather effortlessly on a weekend that my not-quite campus double needed his ID both nights. I was back.

But sophomore year was fun. Friends. Drinking. Shagging and hooking-up. Pedestrian classes squeezed between the hours of 11 and 3. Social blossoming led to creative wilting. The weekly column suffered. Mostly I wrote it hungover. Instead of dazzling the campus with sardonic wit, I used my podium to display a bloated contentedness with campus life. Bitter rants rang hollow. Brilliant insights appeared half formed and poorly buttressed. I epitomized the very thing I was being paid to illuminate and/or repudiate.

So I quit at the end of my term, pissing down the toilet the name-recognition and the readership that I had inexplicably cultivated with my humorous yet sluggish tomes. "Why take a lesser slot when I've already had the best one?" I replied to those who asked whether I would continue writing for the paper. I should have just told the truth: I was tired of sucking and unwilling to do what it took to get better. Instead I wrote a dozen false starts and one gag Christmas story that I half-heartedly handed out to my friends one night when everyone was already drunk. I was too happy doing other things - like getting drunk, too. It took a less effort.

For the remainder of school (just one more year, thanks to AP credits), I used my talents to tread water and get out of academic jams. Often I would hand in first drafts that weren't even proof-read. Once I turned in a paper with an entire page missing, but the writing was so seamless that I got an A anyway. I turned many B's into A's with eleventh hour heroics like these, and felt pretty fucking good about it. But it was really nothing more than jumping through hoops. There was no art to it, and no substance, just the perpetuation of bad habits. My personal journals were nothing more than cold bowls of alphabet soup - graveyards for the fragments of inspiration I used to besmear 25 column inches of creamy white newspaper with every week.

After graduation I went to England for six months to work and drink even more. I toured the continent for five weeks after that. All I brought back was a horse shit journal written mostly to show off to a girl I planned to date when I returned. In reality I grew quite bit over the course of this adventure. None of it made it onto paper, either directly or indirectly. Too meaningful, I guess.

I grew even more upon my return. I couldn't find a job for a long while. When I did find one, it really sucked. Finally, at the end of one of numerous attempts to relive my European and campus excesses, I lost my drivers' license to the Michigan State Highway Patrol, and subsequently to the Illinois Secretary of State. I had to quit my job and everything.

None of this really mattered, though. In fact, this false start was much like the countless pieces that I had either outlined or penned introductions to and then abandoned without further regard. That's because I had a hot girlfriend. So I crumpled this intro up with the rest and moved back to campus to live with her and the friends that were dragging their feet through Year Five.

Thus began "Significant Relationship III: The New Beginning." She also loved my talent, but understood not a word of what it produced. Expectationless.

Nonetheless, I learned more than I knew was possible about human relationships. I learned how to love someone other than myself (or those I was bound to love by blood and habit). But yet another watershed event came and went with nary a flick of the wrist or stroke of the keys. I even worked at a sleepy library during the day - the perfect setting for re-engaging my lost craft. But no. I was too busy drinking and fucking (and for once, more of the latter than the former), and settled in once again to bask in a new and ultimately specious self-contentedness.

This Pyrite Era ended when I abandoned everything again to take an internship with a Chicago communications firm. In my arrogance, I figured I could win a permanent position by somehow strutting my stuff (despite not having produced quality work since my freshman year of college.) I was right. Make that lucky. A stray bit of inspiration, embedded in a joke memorandum about inane busy work, and a natural eye for design (naturally uncultivated) got me considered for hire. I got the nod.

Within two months I was almost fired. Missing commas and apostrophes added an air of unrefined genius to my take-home finals in college, but they didn't cut it in Section A of The Wall Street Journal, especially with clients who had paid double my annual salary to put the ad there. My creative ideas were little more than unpopped kernels falling from the now nearly empty bag from which I had pilfered column ideas four years before. My bad habits had finally reaped their bitter harvest. My lack of attention to detail was appalling, and my creativity receded in the face of corporate life's seemingly endless string of anti-career devices. I was out of chances.

So I buckled down. I worked long hours checking and re-checking everything I touched. And then, through a couple solid (not spectacular) writing performances, I was able to ease off the throttle and coast on an old friend – a friend whose warm and shallow comfort I had not felt in some time: potential.

Socially I was off to the races, living a lifelong dream. The North Side of Chicago, with its bars and clubs, unfolded like a vast open plain before me. There were no turns, just 8-hour floored straight-a-ways every weekend, interrupted only by occasional engine flood. I was running harder and longer than ever.

And now the string is over. The tank is empty. The last fumes are coughing from a spent engine undone by its own design. Talent must develop into skill or dissolve. Potential must blossom into success or fade into failure. Life must assume meaning or end. Now the string begins.