On Fancy Bags.

When I was properly college-aged I spent about zero time on college campuses. Later in life, having abandoned my adulthood to be a properly starving artist, I have spent a lot of time on college campuses.

I am always envious when I see the Art students moving purposefully across campus with their big black portfolio cases slung over their shoulders. Quite automatically an unreasonable thought always zings through my mind and makes me want to holler after them, “I want to do a thing that requires a big special bag!”  

Now I’m sure that those bags are a huge hassle and pain in the ass, especially if you have to take the bus or if there is a gust of wind, but still, they are kind of cool, right? I also like those long black (or sometimes ever dark leather) tubes that (in my mind at least) carry to transport blueprints and stuff.

At first I thought that maybe I have some secret desire to be a visual artist (like a painter), but now that I am being honest, I think that what I really want is just a really specific bag. I mean, I’m a writer. I always carry a good pen and a little notebook, but those don’t exactly scream, “LOOK AT HOW FANCY I AM!”

There is a great scene at the end of the movie Naked Lunch where Peter Weller (sort of playing William Burroughs) gets stopped at a quasi-Soviet border and the borderguard asks him what his business is. Weller says, “I am a writer” and the borderguard asks him to prove it and so he holds up a pen and says, “I have an implement of writing.”

I can’t just go around saying that to people. Or, at least, I shouldn’t.

Shortly after I moved to LA a million years ago I saw a guy in the Starbucks near Melrose and Fairfax wearing a black ballcap and that said in white letters: Writer. Man did I mock the crap out of that guy in my head while I waited in line and he pretended to work on his screenplay. Keep slinging that buddy, one day we will all believe you.

This why I need a fancy (but not ostentatious) bag to announce me!

(If you can’t tell yet, I am writing this post so that I can put off doing other work that I need to do.)

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