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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This Is Not Law School.

This is my first weekend as a student in an MFA Creative Writing program. I had classes this past week and now have actual stuff to do!

You know, when I was doing my MA I secretly harbored the masochistic desire that it be harder. The romantic in me kind of wanted it to be as terrible as law school or medical school, something truly challenging and intensely difficult. I am not saying that getting my MA degree was easy, it certainly was not, but it could have been harder.

Sometimes when I’m running (which I have not done since I got to Portland and which I might take a crack at later today), my body says, “Whoa there buddy, these are your legs calling and we think it is about time that we go a little slower.” And my brain says, “Well sure, that seems like a reasonable request.” But then my runner’s ego pipes up and says, “Wait just a minute! Are you dead? No you’re not? Then keep running.”

Doing my MA, I was often able to downshift (listen to my legs, as it were), but I’m not sure if I am going to be able to do that sort of thing anymore. I am looking at my to-do list for this weekend and the coming week and thinking, “Well shit, that is a lot of stuff to do.”

That masochistic part of me is excited, but all the other parts of me are asking, “What have you gotten us into now??”

This is going to be an interesting couple of years. Wish me luck!

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