Nathaniel

Shockey

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October 29, 2007

I Wanted to Be a Cow, But I’m Stuck Being a Writer

When I was four, I wanted to be a cow when I grew up. I guess I just really liked cows. Now, I prefer to eat them.

A few years later, I wanted to be a veterinarian, until I was told that every veterinarian has to spend something like half a century in college. After that, I wanted to be in the Air Force, because who wouldn’t want to fly a plane capable of blowing up Rhode Island? Soon after that, I wanted to be an orchestra conductor, until I realized that I was much too lazy.

So now I’m a writer.

The image of sitting in coffee shops with a laptop, drinking black coffee and smoking cigarettes is quite seductive. Writers have it made. But then my wife said that cigarettes were bad for me, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be a writer anymore. Since then, I’ve become a bit more thoughtful, and consequently, somewhat disillusioned.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that writers may be one of the most obnoxious groups of people in existence. There are only two reasons to be friends with one: a) He constantly says interesting, witty things, such as “another round on me”; or b) he is smoking/drinking himself to death, and you are under the delusion that some healthy social interaction might discourage another writer-suicide.

I seem to have a habit of imagining my favorite writers in their 60s with a thick head of hair, at which point they still go fishing, are incredibly charming, and have houses on Puget Sound, Lake Tahoe and the Mediterranean.

Unfortunately, the truth is that any writer worth his salt has more divorces to his name than houses. Take Hemingway, for example. He’s my favorite author, and I have always tried to think of him as such a cool guy – like a James Bond who writes books. He loved fishing, drinking, traveling, drinking, bull-fighting, writing and the occasional drink. But then again, he was divorced something like five times, was severely depressed for a good portion of his life, and killed himself with a shotgun when he was 62.

The thing about writers is that we’re always offering up our opinions on things, whether you ask us or not. “Did I like ‘Casablanca’? Well, yes, it was a compelling movie, but I happen to think that its twisted idea of love being so utterly different, even opposed to respect and commitment, well . . . let me put it this way. If you ask me, I think ‘Casablanca’ is enormously responsible for the lack of commitment in relationships even today. ‘Casablanca’ is a prime example of how Hollywood is destroying American culture. Of course, that’s just my opinion, but you see what I mean.”

And this is very possibly what I’ll say to you if you ask me about “Casablanca”.

But as I said, that’s why we make such lousy friends. Up until the point that we do ourselves in with whatever firearm or chemicals we can get our hands on, we’re doing you in with secondhand smoke, and what’s even more suffocating, our opinions. Writers spend so much of their lives convinced of their own importance that when they wake up one day and realize that they don’t care about anyone but themselves, and that, if they’re lucky, people care about their writing, but certainly not them, they genuinely hate the world. And then we pout, sometimes so fiercely it ends in suicide.

My wife tells me I pout, which has both positive and negative implications. It’s good, because it means I’m becoming an actual writer. But it’s also bad, because it means I’m becoming an actual writer.

It is a serious issue, I think, and perhaps the best advice I can give myself and others like me is to understand that I am, first and foremost, a husband, a brother, a friend, and hopefully, before too long, a father.

For the time being, I write because I like it, because it makes me feel important, and because then I can tell people I’m a writer. We always think of the lucky ones as those who can pay their bills doing something they purportedly love. But we might all be luckier still if we could stop defining ourselves by how we pay the bills and start defining ourselves by why.

Perhaps all professions have their psychological pitfalls, but writing seems to have one of the most severe. Quite frankly, those writers who ended up going off the deep end would have fared a lot better following their four-year-old dream of becoming a cow.

© 2007 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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