This Carbon Based Life

By David Glenn Cox

If your child ever tells you they want to become a writer, slap the pen from their hand. It’s not like they show you on TV or in films. It isn’t glamourous, it’s hard and it’s lonely and largely unrewarding. I always want to say more than the space will allow. I always have more to say than I am able. But writing is like canoeing, it is hard to paddle in a straight line when you can so easily be drawn off course.

I live alone, just me and a derelict house cat. I don’t go anyplace, and I don’t do anything, except read and watch and write. That’s all I want to do. It’s funny, when you reach a certain age. You go from wanting things to wanting to get rid of things. My old life was so luxurious, that it’s hard for me even now to believe it was real. A big 3,500 square foot home backed up to a forest preserve. A new pickup truck in the driveway and my baby, a 1965 Mustang with a 289 High Po (Shelby Spec professionally built) engine with a four-speed top loader transmission. Did I have a shop full of tools? Yes. Did I have gym and weight room in my basement? Yes. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep. I play a game with myself. I try to think of things I’ve never owned. A projection TV with a six-foot screen in a theater room? Sure. How about a chain saw? Two! How about a welder? Yes, but a small one. Guitars? Yes, four of them.

I had all of these things, but my life had very little meaning. I was the four-term President of my Home owner’s association, but I had to give it up after becoming homeless myself. I was at a McDonalds in downtown Minneapolis, buying a cup of coffee and using the free Internet all day. When in from the cold comes a haggard man in a faded green military coat, lugging two green duffle bags. Someone at the next table said, “That’s a hell of a lifestyle.” And I thought to myself. Homelessness isn’t a lifestyle any more then cancer is lifestyle. Everyone thinks “Oh, that could never happen to me!”

But I’m here to tell you it could. You have more in common with the homeless than you do with the people who write your newspapers and your news magazines. They look down on you in the same way you look down on the homeless for their poverty. They drive new cars and take luxury cruises and vacations, do you? How many times have you been to Paris? How many times have been skiing in Vail? Walter Cronkite loved to go sailing on his yacht. Geraldo Rivera had a real nice yacht too. Do you have a yacht? Do you tell the limo driver what time to pick you up tomorrow?

My day starts between three and four in the morning. It’s quiet then and my mind is active. Generally, I have some idea of what I’m going to write about. Sometimes, maybe just a speck or a germ of an idea. That’s how you know you are a writer. You can take a grain of sand and make it into a beach. I’ve heard tell of aliment called writer’s block. Fifteen years later, and I’ve never suffered the slightest symptom. My problem is stamina. I’ll get a cup of coffee and start writing and three or four hours later, I haven’t touched the coffee. But I am tired out from the stimulus and the concentration.

I suspect, I’ll never suffer writer’s block as my sense of outrage just grows and grows. If I had the stamina and the time, I could write maybe ten articles a day. Twenty, if Trump is involved.

I was an average student in school but a voracious reader. I came from a family of readers. I developed one hard and fast rule even in childhood. I never read junk. I never wanted fantasy, always fact. I wouldn’t read a novel unless it was a classic novel. I fell in love with Rome and the classics. Give me “The Odyssey” over Star Wars or Stephen King. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich over Hobbits. I’ve always wanted to know about the real world, not the imaginary ones. What can I learn from someone else’s imagination? What could Lord of the Rings teach me over the Roman Empire?

Give me truth and facts. Tell me about the olden days! Show me the great minds and the great thoughts. I soak up history like a sponge. Anything history no matter how mundane. The history of wood screws or the history of brewing beer. How do steam engines work?  Egyptian mysticism, Irish folk tales, Freud, the Middle Ages, Shakespeare, especially Julius Caesar because it is political. My family was very political and if you wanted to speak at the dinner table you had better have something political to say. And so, in schooling, my teachers were sometimes reticent call on me. They’d casually mention Henry Ford inventing the assembly line. Then I’d go off on some long-winded diatribe about Ford’s anti-union and anti-Semitic pathos far over the heads of my fellow sixth graders.

I took a placement test in the eighth grade. I was reading and had the vocabulary skills of a college Freshman. But lest I were to get a swelled head. I had the mathematics skills of a fourth grader.

I had a friend who retired and every day he would park his boat on the lake by a textile mill and fish. One day the mill’s security guard called out. “How’s the fishing? Are you catching anything?” My friend  replied, “I haven’t caught YOU yet! No telling what you’d dump into this lake, if I wasn’t sitting out here watching you.”

That’s my story exactly, I’m watching them for you. When the media and political criminals try to pump sewage into the public consciousness. I’m watching and I’ve got my eye on them.

It’s not fun, it’s a strain, but I love it and cannot escape from it. You start out by seeking to become a writer. Then suddenly, you discover the writer has become you. The two voices become one and are inseparable, until you can’t imagine your life without it. It’s sort like heroin addiction, without the nice warm buzz.

“I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim or too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard travelling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you. I could hire out to the other side, the big money side, and get several dollars every week just to quit singing my own kind of songs and to sing the kind that knock you down still farther and the ones that poke fun at you even more and the ones that make you think that you’ve not got any sense at all. But I decided a long time ago that I’d starve to death before I’d sing any such songs as that. The radio waves and your movies and your jukeboxes and your songbooks are already loaded down and running over with such no good songs as that anyhow.”  ― Woody Guthrie