Somewhere between 13.5 and 14 billion years ago, there was nothing, and then it exploded. A lot of other crap happened, life began somehow on at least one planet, and my parents had sex there. That all seems fairly straightforward, so let’s talk about the complicated stuff that happened after I was born.
I’m 24 years old today. I’m still testing out the way that feels, kind of like when you go to the refrigerator thinking you’re going to down a gulp of milk but get a gulp of orange juice by mistake. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good orange juice. It’s just not what I expected, so I have to sit here for a while moving my mouth around trying to get my taste buds to come to order about what the hell just happened.
My last year of high school, and for most of my schooling, the opinion was pretty much unanimous that I was going to be a scientist. Not just a scientist, mind you. A famous scientist. I was even voted “Most Likely to Succeed” with that thought in mind. While I’ve wanted to be a writer since my parents cussing at each other first drove me to hide behind the freezer with a pen and a paper, who was I to argue with popular opinion? So I went to college for a while.
I liked everything but loved nothing. Eventually, I got invited to work in a lab by a professor who enjoyed me in class. I got there, did some work, and realized that if I had to spend the rest of my life doing research science I was… going to be very unfulfilled. You thought I was going to go with “commit suicide” on you, didn’t you? Be honest. Well, I may think hyperbole is the best thing to happen on this Earth, but cliche is like jacking off with a glove made of sandpaper so… ahem… moving on.
Despite the fact doing her all the time makes me unhappy, I like Science. Science is a perfectly wonderful lady, and she’ll make many people very happy some day. I even consider Science to be one of my best friends. We talk every day over the internet, even though we’ve broken up. I just don’t want to be married to Science for the rest of my life. So I left Science for her much younger sister, Telling Stories. And although I enjoy Telling Stories about Science for the occasional freaky three-way, Telling Stories has my heart.
I love Telling Stories. Not the masturbatory romantic high school love I may have once had, but the kind of calm collected “this makes me feel at peace” sort of love you get once puberty goes away. I love putting my hands in someone’s skull and dropping images like exotic feathers from high flying story birds. It’s the only form of communication I’ve ever understood, and if I didn’t have stories to tell, I might as well not exist for all the interaction I would have with the human race. I can’t have one-on-one conversations without clamming up and sweating. I can’t wrap my mind around friendships, or relationships the same way other people do… but give me a crowd of more than one person and I’ll relate the only way I know how for as long as I have. I’ll tell a story.
So that’s where I am at 24, as I drink the surprising orange juice of my expectations. I’m telling stories, perhaps a little self-indulgently and a little sloppily, but decently I think. I think decent is a pretty excellent place to be at 24. I write stories, and people I don’t know show up of their own accord to read them. Not an enormous number of people, but not so few I feel like I’m shouting at traffic. I feel so fortunate over that, I don’t especially mind being broke.
I think I have it within me to be good at this job, and if that means that no one who doesn’t read this site is ever going to think I’m good, and I have to work a minimum wage job for the rest of my life to keep the lights on and the computer humming, I’m fine with that. Hell, I’m happy with that. Let’s make a deal, the both of us. I didn’t expect this orange juice, but I find it’s to my taste, so if you keep reading, I’ll keep posting. One thing is for certain, I sure as hell won’t stop writing.
