Writing is Hard

I don't know why so many people try it, frankly. It’s solitary, tedious and sweaty. Worst of all, it's not particularly rewarding. Oh, I suppose if you're really important or famous or sleeping with some really important famous person you could make a tidy sum by churning out a well-timed biography. But writing, for the most part, is like voting - pointless.

Sure, people will argue that there's more to the literary arts than big advances and book tour groupies, but people are assholes. And so are the authors we celebrate most. Shakespeare? Had gonorrhea (I have no idea). Hemmingway? Six-toed cat fetish (close, right?). Wordsworth? I'll tell you what a word is worth - squat. Yesir, anyway you slice it, writing is a dead end.

That's why I'm going to quit. Right now. No more reaching for the old thesaurus, pondering phrases or even cutting and pasting from the internet. Nope. No more having to listen to all those half-hearted “I really enjoyed that, um, thingy you wrote” from friends and family. I'm retiring.

Of course I’ll have to keep up my correspondence. I owe Leonard that much. Leonard is my pen-nemesis, with whom I became acquainted via an ad in the January 1996 issue of Mid-Atlantic Woodcarver. It read, “Seeking thick-skinned, erudite chap with whom to trade trenchant invectives by mail – no Irish.” How could I resist?

Now, I don’t know the first thing about Leonard (other than his address, of course), but over the last 14 years he and I have bluntly affronted every conveniently imagined personality trait we find most despicable in the other. For my part, I’ve decided Leonard to be a Limbaugh Republican who drives in the left lane, chews with his mouth open and sings in the band Nickelback. From what I can gather, Leonard imagines me to be an undocumented alien who enjoys making conversation at urinals and undressing people’s daughters with his eyes.

Frankly, I don’t think I could rise each morning absent the sweet anticipation of Leonard’s vitriolic missives. And I surely couldn’t suffer the indignities of a typical workday unless I was sure that I could pin them all on that dick-face Leonard. So I’ll limit my writing to cathartically berating Leonard and that’s it. Done and done.

Not that I’m prone to sentimentality, but before I hang up my pen I think it might be appropriate to briefly appraise the highlights of my writing career. Won’t you join me?

I first distinguished myself at the age of six, when, completely unprompted, I composed a most thoughtful letter to President Reagan upon his having been shot by that Brady guy (Bill, I think. He was dating Jody Foster). "Git well son" it read, next to a drawing of The Gipper in a Superman outfit. A handwritten response on official White House letterhead soon arrived. "Thank you for your kind letter," the President wrote. Actually, I’ll bet that he wrote something like "monkey dike harpsichord" but Nancy or James Baker or somebody cleaned it up in the final draft.

Two years later, in the midst of a multiplication-table induced rage, I passionately carved the phrase "fart attack” into my desk top. Our teacher, Ms. Jennings, was understandably upset, but I knew even then that it was only because she was sleeping with the janitor whose task it would be to delete my etching.

My final splash in the literary pool came in the fifth-grade (I'm 34 now), when I wrote my Uncle Bernard in Florida as part of a letter-writing exercise. I nailed the greeting ("Deer Uncle Bernard") and the salutation ("Your's...Stan"). Sure, the body of the letter was merely a line-by-line transcription of the first page of the index to our science text, but my Uncle and I had always related in a very cold, literal way.

So that's it, really. The intervening years have been filled with equal amounts hard work and rejection. Rejection of manuscripts, plays, screenplays, poems and pick-up lines. Not that I'm bitter. After all, it’s better to have tried and failed than to have been bitten on the face by a goddamned woodchuck.