There is little that I would rather do than take up an autodidactic lifestyle for the next few years of my life, putting aside the formalities of institutional education and the absurdity of society’s traditional lifestyle in exchange for wandering and exploring and researching and reading on my own - without worry and because I choose it. I watched the 60 Minutes piece on John Kanzius recently and wondered if the days of determined self-learning and inquisitive inventions are fizzling to an end (and no, Snuggies do not count as inspired inventing). While it is still too early to tell what John Kanzius’s impact on cancer treatment will be, I find myself amazed at his accomplishments while he was alive and the progress he had during his research - all without an all-important college degree.

It reminded me of Henry David Thoreau’s autobiographical Walden, a memoir that has stuck to the inner workings of my mind in the years since I read it as an idealistic 21 year old who was in the midst of searching. To Thoreau, his choice to isolate himself from society in his good friend Ralph Waldo Emerson’s cabin on the edge of a Massachusetts town for two years was much more than a quest for self-reliance, both in and beyond our world, but it was a calculated experiment which would evaluate the economic, spiritual, and social benefits of living a simplistic lifestyle. Noting people’s curiosity in his experiment, he created a book examining what he was doing and what he had learned that would undoubtedly go on to inspire thousands since its publication. He had only the occasional distraction of visitors and his visits to town every few days as he spent those two years reading classical literature and writing, and going beyond it by experiencing the sounds and sights and solitude of nature for himself, learning as much as one could ever learn about oneself in the process. He frowned on the consumerist and materialist attitudes of his time, a prison in which most of us are yet to escape.

Joseph Campbell, a writer I ferociously admire for his works in comparative religion and mythology, also took the untraditional autodidactic route to finishing his education. When his advisors did not support his choice of studies when pursuing his doctorate at Columbia University, he backed out, spending the next five years studying and writing and learning on his own, nine hours on average each day. He never again returned to graduate school, yet became one of the most respected and widely read writers in his field (and became close friends with one of my favorite American authors, John Steinbeck, in the meantime).

“Follow your bliss,” Campbell famously coined. And he did. And Thoreau did. And Kanzius did.

How many of us do?

I am not Alexander Supertramp. I just don’t have the necessary survival skills nor the mental determination… or hell, even the desire. But there would be liberation in shedding one’s traditional routine lifestyle of what society deems acceptable and throwing aside the bureaucratic institution of education for one’s own, crafted by one’s experiences, making one’s way across countries, learning from those met along the way, learning from whatever books read along the way, learning from seeing and doing and experiencing.

After all, just as I teach my students: is there an education more valuable than that which is self-taught and self-motivated?

There is a point in each person’s life when that person declares with complete sincerity that they want to be a professional basketball player, an astronaut, or a Hollywood actor. The parents nod and say, “You can do anything you put your mind to if you work hard,” but shrug it off with parental indifference, believing it to be simply a desire that the child will discover on their own is out of reach. Somewhere down the line, a point which differs from child to child, that inspiration is lost, often with the realization that the amount of work that must be put forth and the amount of luck needed for such a life is unattainable. It is then replaced with social laziness and acceptance with mediocrity, which is promptly encouraged by parents and guidance counselors with a pat on the back. Well done, young man, they say. You will now be a productive member of society.

Childhood ends, then adolescence. As one ages, dreams are replaced with reality. Possibility is replaced with probability. With it, one’s chances for being remarkable decrease, then cease.

The window that we get to live our lives is short. The window that we get to live our lives with the benefits of youth, even shorter. Decisions are faced every day along the way, whether that decision is what kind of sandwich to make for lunch or whether it is leaving a high-paying job for one that is much less pay, but much more gratifying. We must, of course, keep in mind how our decisions will affect those that we care for – and to a point, those that we don’t – but there is one obvious aspect of happiness that is often regarded as selfish, but I regard as essential to living a life worth living: you must do what you must.

It is an internal longing that I’ve referred to before as “the itch” (and no, it’s not a venereal disease). I’ve suffered from it since I was a little boy, reading through encyclopedias and National Geographics for my own amusement, always feeling inexplicably different from my peers, and knowing that there was a big, fascinating world out there beyond my backyard and school playground. I felt compelled from a young age to explore it and did my best as a child to quench my curiosity, whether by reading or writing, doing or observing.

The itch never really goes away though - at least not until it is scratched, which itself is only a temporary alleviation. To those it ails, the itch will come back and usually with more intensity. It can be ignored, yes, but not stifled. At least not completely. The itch compels one to do what others and society may deem irrational, but to one with the itch, that hardly matters. What is logical isn’t always right and what is right isn’t always the same for everyone.

We spend our days in the solitude of our minds and despite our social aspirations, our need to be accepted and admired and known, nobody ever really knows us and we never really know them. Think of the secrets locked in the back of your mind, the secrets that no one knows, not even your closest friend, the thoughts that are stored in your mind and your mind only. Examine those and tell me that there is somebody out there who really knows you.

Most of us will be old one day and when looking back at our lives, from our first memories in our childhood homes to the high school prom to the choices we made afterwards that led to everything deemed important by society, we will realize that it doesn’t matter how many people we were surrounded with or how much love was exchanged, because we will understand that when it comes right down to it, we never knew a damn soul and no one ever really knew us. We spend our lives alone. We may have masked that fact by praying to a god, or with constant social interaction, with booze, or drugs, or sex, but the fact remains: we are alone with our minds. When we die, we face the unknown on our own and there is nothing that we can do to change that. If we spend our lives looking to others for our happiness, we will spend the last moments of life in confusion and regret, wondering why we are facing the unknown all alone.

If you can’t look back at your life and respect the decisions that you have made – or at least, most of them – then what was the point? There are responsibilities, of course, that alter a person’s decision making, be it marriage or children or contractual obligations, but if a person chooses to live their life for their own happiness, without harm to others, they cannot be blamed. It’s a compulsion. It can’t be helped. And happiness is not the same to everyone. To some, it is love. To others, it is family, friends, careers, money, the things that they own, their reputation. To some – those with the itch – happiness is freedom. Freedom from judgment. Freedom from money. Freedom to not know what the next day will bring. Freedom to fall in love more than once, to experience, to see, to do, to learn. Freedom from the daily monotony of the socially accepted life.

Just freedom.

There is a time period in my life referred to as my Bad Place. This is not an experience unique to me. Everyone experiences it in some form for some length of time: an era of sheer stupidity, self-loathing, and self-pity, orchestrated by a vulnerability brought on by a not-so-catastrophic event that concerns no one but the person experiencing it. In this place that exists somewhere between reality and insanity, logic temporarily excuses itself.

My bad place lasted around a year (some might argue two) before I started to come to terms with a breakup that had been inevitable anyway - something, of course, in hindsight that I am thankful for happening, but at the time left me embarrassingly devastated and irrationally bitter. The time, as is often the case in people’s “bad places,” was a blur of tequila shots, cheap light beer, poor decisions, and rapid social expansion - continual new friendships defined solely by midnight encounters at the bar. Weeknights extended to 3 AM. Responsibility waned. Late night pizza was king. My exaggerated sob story of young love gone wrong must have been tiresome to my friends, who - great friends that they are - never complained or made visible their annoyance with my erratic behavior. Buying me another shot was probably just easier.

Sometime around three or four months after the break-up, during the first few weeks of the spring semester at college, I began to take notice of this attractive young woman who sat behind me in one of my college geography classes. She had dark bangs that rested over her big brown eyes, a nose ring, and a slightly hipster five-and-dime look to her. She was different and I liked that - a certain Empty Keg attendee vibe, the town’s resident art student bar, rather than the Hotel or Boro, the more fraternized scenes.

Could it be? I asked myself. Shall I love again? Never have I been the nervous type, but I felt queasy in my desire to talk to her - I remember specifically noting one morning how we were a few weeks into our class and I had not yet spoken to her. Would it not be perceived as strange to do so now? I considered this. I suppose that I had been too busy sitting in my seat, examining the posters on the wall over and over, and sipping my coffee in hopes of curing my hangover.

It took some time, but one morning, charm out of the equation, I struck up a forced and somewhat awkward conversation at the beginning of the class about our dorky, but nice professor - and, to her, I probably came off as the dorky, but nice classmate who sat in front of her. Which hadn’t been my intention.

Still, from that day forward, I made a point to talk to her before every class. Without the alcohol, pounding beats, and a dance floor sticky with rum and diets, I had apparently forgotten how to have a proper conversation with a female. We would speak about the class (“Did you get all of the homework done?”), the painfully obvious topic of weather (“Pretty cold outside today, huh?” “Well, it is February in Edinboro.”), I’d poke fun at her terribly beaten up notebook, we’d cover mutual acquaintances, our shared interests in movies and music - and there it was: we discovered that we were both huge fans of this relatively unknown band at the time called The Walkmen. It was my in. But not yet.

The following week, on the way to class, I swung by the Rite Aid and bought a new notebook. As I sat in my seat in front of her, I dropped the notebook on her desk, with faked apathy reserved for a middle schooler denying a crush, joking how she wouldn’t need to squish ten pages worth of notes onto the very last page of her tattered one any longer. She had, outwardly at least, thought that it was cute and thoughtful and this made me happy.

I soon found myself thinking about her outside of class. Maybe I’d throw a “get together” and invite her. Maybe I’d just see if she wanted to hit up the bar for a drink after class one day. Or I could get our mutual acquaintance to put in a good word for me. I kept thinking of scenarios for getting us together outside of class.

Then one day, in a moment of sheer brilliance, I remembered my in. I bought two tickets to see The Walkmen who were playing just a short drive away in Pittsburgh. I would ask her to join me - what a perfect opportunity! - knowing that I could also easily find some other friend to go if she could not. The next class, I asked her - abruptly, awkwardly. She smiled politely and said that she couldn’t go that weekend due to work. Victoria’s Secret was funny about workers requesting off without much notice. I nodded knowingly and smiled back and said no problem, shrugging it off like I had only asked casually, maybe even on a whim, I just had these tickets sitting around anyway and I thought I’d throw the offer out there to her first, since she liked them and all. No big deal.

She was a bright young girl. I think she was smart enough to sense my vulnerability and confusion - or maybe it was just the stench of stale beer emitting from my pores and the second hand smoke radiating from being absorbed in my hair - and she intelligently wanted no part of it outside of the pleasantries that we exchanged in class.

I had taken her rejection of going to that concert as a rejection of me. After that, like a bitter teenager, I ceased my pursuit, never once making an effort to hang out with her outside of class again. She sensed my sudden undeserved coldness towards her in class - or if not coldness, then a forced indifference - and while we continued to have increasingly brief conversations at the semester winded down, we never spoke again after the last class.

There were similar incidents as the months passed. I was forgetting how to connect with other human beings if it wasn’t clinking our beer glasses together. I seemed to do better under the guise of booze and loud music and dimmed lights and I would be caught in that cycle for some time longer. It’s strange looking back at this time period, which was more than a few years ago now, and try to put myself back in that mindset. I was 21 and young and angry and confused. Nowadays, it seems to me as if that person was not I, as if the memories had been planted in my mind in some Matrix-like scheme. But it was me all right. I was a silly bastard for a while there.

Our young adulthood is often tragically amusing and reveals our frailness. We can choose to deny it or hide it… or accept it. The Bad Place. Few, if any, of us are immune to the side-effects. One learns during this time that we only have so much control - and once a person is made aware of their own absurdity and accepts it, there is no reason for that bitterness and resentment and self-pity to ever make an appearance again.

Dear Jonathan, 

We have carefully considered your submission and regret that we do not have a place for it in our journal at this time. We appreciate your support and hope your try us again in the future.

Sincerely,

The Editors

I received my first completely impersonal rejection letter yesterday for the short story I’m shopping around and, you know, I’m feeling pretty good about it. From what I understand from other writers, this is a landmark in my writing career. I better get a frame.

My first two “novels” that I wrote are no secret. I have written about them a few times in the past on previous blogs, but I always find it interesting to revisit these first two ventures in what I truly believed at the time to be my “writing career.” I had dabbled in writing other stories as a child, such as my Tornado Alley stories about storm chasers who chased tornadoes not for the science, but for the rush of having to drive away when they were too close, as well as plenty of comics containing the likes of Tex (a strange hybrid of Clint Eastwood, Wolverine, and Super Mario) and Me Me & We We (a talking, skateboarding skeletal figure and his dorkier best friend, who happened to be a 6’3” hot dog - yeah, I know).

Butthese two novels were my babies. I had dreams of Hollywood adaptations (and as you can see, for the first, I even had my cast selected), red carpet book signings, and Super Nintendo game adaptations.

That first was my 78 page action-thriller titled LAPD, a story which certainly would have raised red flags had a teacher or other adult ever picked it up to read - although written in 1995-1996 at the ages of 9 and 10, this was still a pre-Columbine world and it may have just been attributed to an overactive imagination inspired by watching too much Die Hard, Turner & Hooch, and Lethal Weapon at way too young of an age. Which was the case. 

It was a long process in writing this first story. I recall sitting at my old wooden desk by the window, back when my family still lived on our old dirt road with the old rickety barn full of wasps in the backyard. Co-Co would be howling away in the behind the house as I wrote as fast as my little hand could keep up. The protagonist, who in my head was simply me as portrayed by Tom Cruise (due to my love of the 1996 movie Mission: Impossible - a VHS tape that I wore down to nothing), was shot well over ten times (once after a verbal argument with his own partner, who was based on my childhood best friend Tyler) throughout the story without much consequence and spit out cynical one-liners that was a ten years old’s interpretation of Murtaugh’s “I’m getting to old for this shit” or McClane’s “Yippee ki-yay.” 

Next was my first typed novel, Alien Havoc, a 60-some page quasi-sequel to the Alien movies and Aliens vs. Predator books that I had started reading. The story took my fifth grade classroom by storm, as most of the characters were named after my peers and they found it neat to be caught up in a violent, creepy sci-fi horror story. I had definitely improved significantly as a writer, speller, and storyteller since writing LAPD, but amusingly the story still followed the same trajectory - cynical protagonist, violence, nonsensical plotlines, more violence, get the girl at the end. 

The stories that I would write in the subsequent years are on floppy disks that may be lost forever, although I have been searching for them over the past few weeks. I remember a story about a son who  was struggling with the loss of his father Batch and in the climax he sees Batch’s ghost in a burning house fire. There was the story of Kevin Morris, a laid-back basketball player who never seemed to get the girl, probably inspired by all those Matt Christopher books. There was Exile, a medieval-type fantasy that would have made me instantly popular at any Dungeons & Dragons convention.

When I look back at the early years, I realize that I’ve always had stories to tell, whether it was on paper, the computer, as a bizarre comic, or sitting in church with Grandma and Grandpa drifting off into my thoughts, imagining up who-knows-what absurd stories in my own mind. It’s always been a compulsion, even if there was a long stretch during my teenage years that I was embarrassed by or apathetic towards my writing - which, thankfully, I got over at some point after my teenage obsession with being perceived as “cool” waned.

So, the writing continues.

We tell these kids to work hard. Get your diploma, we tell them. Over a million bucks extra over your lifetime if you go onto college. Study, study, study, because we’re going to test you to make sure you can graduate and go on and be productive and successful, here are the bubbles, fill them in, number two pencil only please, don’t talk, raise your hand if you need more scratch paper, bubbles, bubbles, bubbles, do not go ahead when you reach the stop sign, penalty is death, more bubbles, bubbles, bubbles, I’m sorry, you should have peed beforehand. Truth be told, I hate it, so why shouldn’t they too? I tell them they need to take the tests and be serious about it, don’t just fill ‘em in, they must do it because it’s for their own good. I tell them this when I don’t believe it myself. I’m a false prophet. Those bubbles don’t do a damn thing, and I am thinking it even as I watch them carefully fill them in, the stakes so high that if they were to pencil outside the bubble, the results would be cataclysmic. Those bubbles don’t do a damn thing except disrupt our usual daily schedule. Bubbles aren’t relevant to their lives and they know it, we know it, who doesn’t know it? Unless, of course, they grow up to make bubble tests for a living. Good money in that, I hear.

They get frustrated, then we get frustrated with their frustration. What is it anyway, this school thing, this teaching thing? It’s all about balance, they told me in college. What should I do about discipline? Well, you have to find a balance. Lecturing? You must have balance. Late work? Balance. But be consistent. Unless there are extenuating circumstances. Then don’t be consistent. Just find a balance. And be consistent in your balance. Balance is key. I learned to be a goddamn tightrope walker in college. Man on wire. As long as I am consistently consistent except when I am not needed to be, then all is well.

Frankly, my life is not an inspirational tale about a young idealistic teacher going into a difficult position, meeting resistance from students before ultimately reaching them (“How do I reach these keeeeeds?”). There are no thankful embraces. Learning moments are sporadic. As much as I’d love to be Tom Berenger in The Substitute, I’m more Mr. Feeny from Boy Meets World. Sometimes I feel like Arnold in Kindergarten Cop. And I don’t have the answers to anyone’s teaching woes either. I only can speak for what has, and maybe more importantly hasn’t, worked for me and how I ended up where I am - not physically, but as an educator. If one were to come to me for advice, all I could do is share the plenty of idiotic things that I have done along the way as a means of providing them with comfort concerning their own stupid actions or insecurities - and maybe, just maybe, it might guide them away from making the same mistakes that I did early on as a teacher.

Or maybe not.

That’s the thing about teaching that they don’t really express in college - at least not in my experience. One can read all the literature, study all of the theories, talk to all of the teachers who have been there and done it for thirty years, but the first time that a person walks into that classroom - not student teaching where the co-op has your back, not subbing when the discipline can be left for the permanent teacher - and there are thirty faces staring, eyeing up every move, absorbing every word, waiting for their first chance to bend the rules to gauge the reaction, it’s pretty damn intimidating. Convincing oneself otherwise is dabbling in a fantasy world. Go tell friends and mom how smooth the first week went, how this teaching thing is a cake walk, that the kids really seemed to be paying attention, but deep down, the feeling is universal: what the hell did I get myself into? It doesn’t matter what age group.

Teaching is not an easy job. There are, of course, those who undermine the profession with tired cliches (“Oh, they only work 9 months out of the year and they still complain?”). I chuckle at the thought of anyone I’ve run into who has said something so stupid being the person in charge of a class of thirty tired, restless, temperamental, horny, rambunctious seventeen year olds. The reality though is this: as a teacher, you are putting on a performance every day. You are the director, writer, producer, and the lead actor.

Every.

Single.

Day.

Even more difficult is that this isn’t putting on a weekend performance of The Sound of Music - or even Shakespeare for that matter. It’s improv and the teacher is acting in front of an audience that is the best in the business. Unprepared or no good at it and a teacher is going to get laughed off the stage. Eaten alive. The kids are zombies and making a teacher’s day difficult is their brains.

There will be off days for a teacher, as that is part of being human, but it doesn’t matter. I repeat myself: it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if there was an explosive fight with the significant other that very morning. It doesn’t matter if the dog is sick, if the bills are unpaid, if the car broke down, if grandma died. The students are worrying about enough in their own lives already to be taking on the burden of worrying about the teacher’s. The show must go on and one must be ready regardless of the circumstances.  

The kids aren’t bad. They aren’t being jerks (well, some of them are). They are simply doing what kids do: learning… and not just facts, but how to interact, how to be social, how to deal with superiors, how to rebel, how to fit in, how to be cool, how not to be cool, how to create an image of what they want to be. Dear teacher must remember that they are only but a blip on the radar that is their life, a mild annoyance or just someone tolerated because they are learning it’s easier that way. Some of the students may remember that lesson planned by teacher to perfection in twenty years. Most won’t. 

Because most are not as good of teachers as they want to be. This is the culmination of doubts. One can step it up when being observed, the principals applauding the innovation and energy, but most aren’t teaching like that daily. The kids won’t always respond and it’s tiring. It’s tiring every time a project planned to be innovate and exciting for students is met with universal groans. It’s tiring trying to get students interested in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and how it ignited World War I. My god, it’s violence, murder, assassination, everything kids love! Why aren’t they listening? These questions eat at teachers. Spending so much time prepping lessons, so much time rehearsing stories until memorized, the infliction deliberate on every word, playing down the boring parts, highlighting to violence to accommodate their thirst for blood… and yet, half of the class is still snoring or staring at the clock or passing notes back and forth. There are even photos of the car, the bloodstained clothes, the gun, and the location to supplement the story - and still, nothing.

But, you know, sometimes all that work pays off.

Sometimes, the story hits. Sometimes the lesson will take off. Sometimes the students will have their eyes fixated without wariness, but with wonder. Sometimes they will latch onto every word said, every single word, and they will tackle the assignment with such ferocity and independence that one can only sit there, leaning on the desk, arms crossed, watching the kids work and work willingly, and feeling pretty damn good about the day.

And that’s when one knows: I can do this. 

Despite all of those hardships, one knows in that moment that, while perhaps better off in another field, this teaching thing is starting to make sense. It’s getting easier. The amount of lessons bombed per unit is starting to decrease. 

And the kids will be on a teacher’s side, if the teacher lets them be. Anymore, all they want is the bubbles to stop.

They want to be given something, anything that doesn’t include bubbles. Listen to them. Stop yelling. Stop complaining. It solves nothing - and besides, the students will do enough of that without you doing it too.

Or maybe, if you’re seeking it, don’t take this advice at all.

Because when it comes to teaching, I’m making this up as I go.

Writing has come along slowly lately. It seems that all the time and energy that I possess are channeled into work or graduate school. While I enjoy both, they’ve seemed these past few weeks to drain me of the inspiration needed to sit down and stay focused when writing. Ask me to write about the importance of integrating content across curricula in education and I can whip up something in no time that is exorbitantly provocative with the research to back it up - but it is when I stare at the blank pages of an untitled document from my folder titled “FICTION” that the excuses begin to peer through with their ugliness. 

And I say to myself that I will have all the time needed this summer - isn’t that a perk of being a teacher, after all? - that I will wake up at 7:30 AM and spend fifteen minutes stretching, listening to Morning Edition on NPR, following with a run while the fog has yet to settle, breathing in the cool morning air before I come inside to drink my morning coffee and type away on my latest project with feverish persistence until the cuckoo alerts me that it is noon. That is, of course, what I said I would do last summer and I came up with every excuse that I could think of to find a reason not to write.

Ideas come and go, but the importance is to write regardless, to pursue a story and when that story hits a dead end, to take it down an unexpected path (Stephen King’s writing rule: kill someone off - that’s his way of getting the story moving again when he hits a point of uncertainty), or simply set the story aside and temporarily pursue another.

Reality check #1: Writer’s block is a myth. It does not exist.

Reality check #2: “Lack of inspiration” only serves as another in a long list of excuses.

I don’t have time. I’m too tired. I can’t think. My head needs cleared. Just one more rerun of Bizarre Foods. I have to swing by Wal-Mart. It’s too early. It’s too late. I’ve had too much to drink. I’m hungover. I’m hungry. I’m full. I’m angry. The cat needs walked. 

They’re all excuses and I do a damn fine job of convincing myself that they’re in any way relevant to reality. Which, naturally, they rarely are.

It is well documented the idea that there is always vanity in writing. In the same essay from the excerpt above, Orwell eloquently described the four great motives for writing: sheer egoism being the first he listed, followed by aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose. Furthermore, the vanity in writing a blog about the process of one’s own writing is astounding. How vain anyone is to sit down, pour hours into writing something completely imagined, and expect anyone to be even remotely interested - like the friend who is always angered after trying to explain to his group of friends about his dream that is interesting only to him and nonsensical to everyone else.

One must wonder though how the Twain’s and Hemingway’s and Steinbeck’s might have utilized the internet were they around. Writers desire readership - not money or fame or even literary immortality, rather, there is the craving (and subsequent anxiety) of knowing that someone’s eyes have gazed upon your words, and what better way to receive instant reactions to one’s writing than the internet? Twain most certainly would be quipping daily witticisms on Twitter, Hemingway perhaps writing letters to the world with poetic simplicity on his blog, and Steinbeck’s scathing honesty might pepper his Facebook page between his publisher’s posts on the Kindle price of his latest novel.

I am not unaware of this vanity, although the reality is that the difficulty of approaching a blog from the persona of a writer rather than a casual observer of the world comes with its own set of pressures - the least of which being a burning desire to delete a blog entry immediately after publishing it, before friends and family and the world of accidental search engine visitors can read and critique it (“Pssh, he calls himself a writer?”).

There is, of course, even more vanity in the assumption that anyone is reading at all. Or even has interest in doing so. And even more vain is the writer who continually puts their writing out there for the world to read, yet claims he or she does not care about people reading it. Of course they do. Our greatest hope, I suppose, is to become the first entry listed for a popular Google search term.

It has always been inevitable that I would come back around to writing and writing seriously. I’ve written in the past few years a handful of stories with the intent to write something “mainstream” or “readable” - where I picked up on this backwards idea, I am unsure - but the focus became the audience and the lingering questions on potential for readership. I went into writing for the first time in my life with misguided intentions. Writing those stories became a drag, a chore, a source of frustration. I was never pleased. I kept rereading what I had written already, editing, editing, editing without ever taking the story forward. This was my way of avoiding carrying on a story in which I had no desire to tell. It was not my story. It never was. It was their story. 

There is vanity in writing, as I said, and I again realize what made writing so enjoyable for me in the first place, back when I penned my stories in battered spiral notebooks late at night under my blanket with a flashlight. I am writing for myself.

Never before have I submitted a story to a legitimate literary print journal, but this past week, I began the process. I don’t know why I waited nearly 26 years to do so, although I suppose waiting 26 years to do so is not so bad of an idea.

Jonathan James is a writer and high school teacher located in the outskirts of Erie, Pennsylvania. His work has been featured in… uh, his university newspaper. Um. A high school literary journal. And, like, his blog. And his brother’s blog. And a movie blog. And somebody quoted him on Twitter once.

Yes, not so impressive of a “Writer’s Bio,” which is a requisite to many of the short story submissions. I can only hope that my writing speaks for itself - which is, after all, the point anyway. Credentials mean everything and they mean nothing in the literary world.

Why have I waited so long to take my writing seriously? I don’t know. 

Writing is indeed a terribly personal experience. In writing, a writer hopes to reveal truth through words, explore the frightening realities of our own psyche, to evoke emotion, to be, above all, honest. And it’s scary to write with such honesty and then, even more agonizing, to have someone else actually read it. Moreover, it’s difficult to write without a perception of the audience (“Oh, what is my mom going to think when she reads this?”, “Jeez, I hope this doesn’t offend so-and-so”) - although those thoughts usually are not present during a writer’s moments of clarity, those times when the writing takes over, the story catches fire, and it, in no other way to describe it, begins to write itself.

There are dozens of stories, mostly completed, taking up space on my flash drive - and literally hundreds more documents (I was pushing 300 at last count) containing first chapters or fragments or outlines or single sentences. Somewhere along the way, I tend lose control of my stories. I lose focus. I edit a single page with so much ferocity, to the point where I can’t stand the story anymore, I hate the characters, I have no idea where to take it anymore. So I let it be.

I recently took a trip to Washington, DC with Pamela to see my good friend Samuel. On the bus trip, I was reading George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying about a young idealistic writer named Gordon Comstock. Orwell, always the master, described very well the situation writers often face after pouring their souls and years of their life into a story:

It was too big for him, that was the truth. It had never really progressed, it had simply fallen apart into a series of fragments. And out of two years’ work that was all that he had to show - just fragments, incomplete in themselves and impossible to join together. On every one of those sheets of paper there was some hacked scrap of verse which had been written and rewritten and rewritten over intervals of months. There were not five hundred lines that you could say were definitely finished. And he had lost the power to add to it any longer; he could only tinker with this passage or that, groping now and here, now there, in its confusion. It was no longer a thing that he created, it was merely a nightmare with which he struggled.

Why do I write then? I don’t know.

I just do. It’s a common enough question for self-proclaimed writers (and plenty of the pros have reasoned this with more eloquence than I could ever imagine), so one might think I’d have a better answer - but I do not. I only know that I do write and when I don’t, something feels wrong. I feel off. There is discomfort in my mind, a physical ache in my body, until I’ve sat down and said what needs to be said. It doesn’t have to be read by anybody. It only has to leave my mind, exit through my fingers, and find permanence on my computer screen.

As young as preschool, I felt this also. I was compelled then to tell stories on paper, drawing characters with accompanying text - characters like Tex, a gruff spherical hero with a cowboy hat (Clint Eastwood), a raccoon tail (Mario), and metal claws (Wolverine) who was in charge of protecting his island of other spherical beings from an evil spherical being named X. I recall sitting in church next to grandma and grandpa, glancing around the sanctuary, crafting imagined stories of terrorists rappelling down the sides of the building to burst through the windows, taking us churchgoers as hostages, myself the unsuspecting hero (Why were the terrorists there? I’d ask myself. He needs money to pay for cancer bills! I’d decide). I remember vividly playing on the NES, being bothered by the lack of motivation for the characters and created entire storylines in my mind to go with Mega Man or Streets of Rage or Street Fighter - stories filled with love, betrayal, and against-all-odds triumph. 

Sometime around thirteen years old, I realized that I was strange - a true nerd if there ever was one (I actually liked libraries, for goodness sake!). I began to reject my creative persona. Before, I had had a sense of pride over my writing, sharing my novels with my classmates and teachers and anyone who would take the time to read them. But I was in the high school now. Now, I felt a sense of embarrassment. It wasn’t cool to write, I thought. My stories were weird. I was weird for writing sentences in my mind describing my walk through the hallways. I hid my writing from that point on, doing so from then on only in the secrecy of my own room or during study hall at school under the guise of English homework, filling up dozens of notebooks with my ideas and outlines and prose (“Oh, not much, just writing an essay for Molnar”). 

Then, probably around 18 years old, I read Orwell’s essay titled Why I Write. This was, mind you, before even my first encounter with the essential writing tool that is Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Orwell’s prose reawakened something inside me. His clarity, the simplicity of his writing, his insistence that one cuts out every unneeded word invigorated me and I began to write again. I began - slowly, at first - to show people here and there.

Mostly, I focused on my blogging. Much of this first generation blogging as an eighteen year old was absurd - complaints about trends, pop culture, and popped collars on pink polo shirts - but it did have me writing again and doing so regularly. But, writing for an audience - which I consciously was - has its pitfalls. Quality of posts is replaced with quantity. The amount of daily visitors to the site becomes a selfish and unnecessary priority. Needlessly forced wit replaces introspection. It served, even as I again began to focus on my fiction, more as a distraction than an asset. It may have been moderately interesting, but it lacked honesty, the most important ingredient in writing. Positively, it also held me accountable for my writing. Once a post was published, it was there for the world to read. It made me consider every word that I chose carefully. It helped shape my borderline obsessive tendency to edit, edit, edit before letting other eyes see it.

With this blog, my first in over a year, my intentions have changed. This serves the purpose of chronicling the coming years as I focus more on my writing, to provide a hub for these writings, as a means of examining the process of writing and potentially the quest for publication, and, perhaps most importantly, provide the inspiration needed to keep writing. As for the short story, I look forward with much eagerness to receiving my first rejection letter. I already have the frame for it - but I will keep sending it out until it catches the eye of someone. If not, I’ll send another.

Jonathan James is a writer and high school teacher located in the outskirts of Erie, Pennsylvania. His work hasn’t been featured anywhere. He doesn’t much care either. He’s going to write anyway. If someone happens to read it along the way, that’s nice too.

Why do I write? I write because I’m a writer. For now, that’s the answer that I’m sticking with.

He was an unremarkable man. Twice divorced. A grown kid who wouldn’t even return his calls – her mother filled her head with lies, all those lies. He decided long ago that despite working in a job with no potential to climb the corporate ladder, well, it was better than being unemployed. And he liked it just fine. The wages were decent at least and he enjoyed the people that he worked with. Most people couldn’t say that. Things never go as anyone plans them anyway, he knew that much, and wondered why if everyone always said that all his life, it took him so long to realize it. Never listened to his elders, he supposed. He was fine with it though. He could adapt. He always had.

“Another cup?” said the waitress.

“Oh, no. No,” he said, startled only as one is when they are drawn from their deepest thoughts. “Thank you, though.”

“All right,” she said and grabbed the empty cup, then paused. A moment before awkwardness took hold, she continued: “I’ll bring you your check then.”

“All right.”

He sighed, exaggerating the exhalation, hoping the waitress might strike up a conversation, ask him how he was doing, and he might just say he was fine, but at least she would have asked. He didn’t find her pretty or even that interesting, just thought it might be nice to talk to her for a minute. He’d come here for years, she’d been here for all of them, and he still wasn’t sure of her name. He used to know it, or he thought he had at one point, back when she used to wear a name tag, when her hair still held its color and her bottom wasn’t so round, but that’d been years ago and he’d since forgotten it.

She returned with his check, the same price he saw every day for his coffee and bran muffin. He studied it anyway. After looking over the numbers twice, he pulled out a five dollar bill and handed the check and money to her.

“You working tomorrow?” he said.

“Sure am,” she said.

“All right then.”

“All right,” she said and turned away.

“I’ll see you tomorrow. You keep that change.”

She walked away without another word. He wasn’t sure if she hadn’t heard him or if she just chose not to respond. He wondered if maybe he bothered her, if he was one of those morning regulars who the staff groaned about every morning when he walked in with his newspaper and tote bag, arguing who was going to take him today, forgetting that he was once young, he once had dreams, desires, ideas - same as them. Same as anybody. But no, he thought. No. He tipped fine and kept to himself. Mostly, at least. He’d want to wait on a guy like himself were he a waiter.

It didn’t matter anyway. None of it really did. He could always get coffee somewhere else, that much he had control over. Hell, he was going to get coffee somewhere else. She didn’t want to listen to him, then fine, he’d just find a place with somebody that’d listen to him. He tipped well enough, he ought to have some conversation. It wasn’t so much to ask. And she was acting as though she were something she wasn’t, but she was just a waitress, been one probably her whole damn life, and he had a fine job, made decent wages, supported both his wife and kid at one point on it and still had money saved up. He’d just find another place to get coffee. That settled it. 

He stood up and walked towards the door, passing her as she was leaning over a table to wipe it clean - the last time he’d walk out of the damn place.

“You have a nice day now,” the waitress said. “We’ll see you tomorrow, Rich.”

“All right,” he said. “See you tomorrow.” Then he walked out.

Despite our youthful insistence of embracing cynicism, inward lies a stubborn optimism, refusing to be denied. It will work out. We will do that. We will be somebody. Hope turns to apathy turns to despair. Bitterness. Self-deprecating acceptance of circumstances. It’s a smooth transition - a gradual fizzle, not a smother. We will be anybody. There is no coming of age. There is no mark burned into a timeline to highlight the moment when we veer towards our adult complacency, begging for someone to bring us back to where we were, sneering at those who have managed to hold on, while the realization strikes that we will be nobody.