So, What do you do for a living?

So, I've sat down tonight to do some writing. It's been interesting...


Earlier this week, I awoke remembering an amazing and tangible dream, a dream in which I was not one of the players, but rather an omniscient audience member, and each scene played out to my dream consciousness like a movie. Whilst in my usual groggy early morning state where I undulate between my dream life and my waking life, I urged myself to remember the exquisite "dream movie" I was previously experiencing. "Remember the man with the robot wife," I repeated to myself. I awoke later with no recollection of the dream.

It wasn't until I was in the shower shampooing my hair that my subconscious spoke to my consciousness and suddenly a flash of a particularly sublime image from the dream popped into my head accompanied by that fantastic "AH-HA" moment--one like I haven't experienced since my years as a writing student. All of you writers out there, you know the exact feeling I'm describing. Its the one where you know you've just tapped into something so visceral and human, your entire body tingles and you just cannot wait to put pen to paper or fingertips to keys. By the time I got to work, I had again forgotten the dream.

About thirty minutes after getting to work, my subconscious took pity and urged another image from the dream into my head. I cut my employee off in midsentence, scrambled for a scrap of paper and jotted down on the back of a bright orange flyer "the man w/the robot wife, cops, junk shop, wife like a sketch doll, joints, blonde." I wasn't going to lose this again.

So fast-forward to this evening. I'm watching part two of a History Channel documentary on the founding fathers that I got from Netflix.  At the end they quote Thomas Jefferson (my current intellectual crush). Part of it was "...I like the dreams of the future better than the histories of the past..." As the end credits rolled I thought, "you know what, Tom, you're right." I was instantly inspired to put my dream down in story form. I fired up some incense and a trance cd by Dj Tiesto for mood, boiled up some tea and opened up Microsoft word. I was really doing it, my first honest attempt at fiction writing since graduation in summer of 2007.

I started off in a frenzy. The mood and tone of the narrator came to me instantly since I'd been mentally writing my story all week. My intro is priceless, it introduces the world of the story, the basic setting and the character of the junk shop proprietor in a really lovely way. Then after nearly 500 words that old nag started talking to me. Call it whatever you want, the ego, the inner goblin, call it the little devil that sits on your shoulder, but that voice came to me and threw a wrench in the spoke of my inner writing machine. "This isn't good enough, why do you bother, who cares about this guy, why are you doing this, what is the point, etc, etc, etc."

So I sat back in frustration, made a fresh cup of tea, and distracted myself by nipping up my pet cat, Missy, and watching her go nuts with her toys. Then I gathered my senses and pulled out a fun little book called Page After Page by Heather Sellers. I opened it up at random and stopped at page 171, chapter 23 entitled "When do you say it?" Here's a quote from that page: "To say 'I'm a writer' implies you have made a crucial move from the land of the knuckleheaded to the land of the brilliant, the famous. To say you are a writer was to stay something akin to 'I am a professional pitcher for the Atlanta braves.' You'd better really be on the team, or you sound pretty dumb."

This really made me chuckle because I ask myself this all the time. I haven't written any fiction in over two years yet in my heart and soul I know myself as a writer. So where does this disconnect come from? This obvious gap between who and what I know myself to be and the actions (or nonactions) of my daily life? Is it fear of success or failure? Laziness? Lack of discipline? I knew immediately that I needed to document all this in my blog, I wanted to remember this moment fully and in entirety. The moment where I stopped asking myself the question.

And now we've come full circle to this very moment. Dj Tiesto is still playing, but the incense has long burned out and tea has long gone cold. I know who I am. I know what I love to do. I don't have to analyze it in order to be it and do it.

So now I pose the question what do you do for a living? Are you an accountant? A mechanic? A barista? A sales clerk? Or are you more than that? I know what I am, I'm a writer.