ART AS A BYPRODUCT OF BOREDOM
If you don’t want to read all this, here it is in a nutshell: Alaska sucks. You have to walk seven miles through the snow just to wrestle Eskimos to buy Whale Blubber at the grocery store because that’s all there is to eat, and there’s no internet or telephones …
I used to write. I was pretty good, too. I’d come home dog crap tired from a job I hated, making money for jerk offs, and I’d settle into my favorite chair at the expensive desk I’d bought for myself, in my room at the little roach infested hotel I called home. Then I’d knock out a bunch of words, cleverly arranged in lines called sentences, grouped together in cute packages called paragraphs, and I’d pass out onto my sofa in a dirty sleeping bag and call it a day.
This went on for years. I had nothing to eat.
Eventually fancy, smanshy publishers found my work and I was hailed as ‘The Next Bukowski!’ — right after the last guy infested with that plague, and before whoever they called Bukowski after I left the scene. Nosing around the small press, I notice a few guys calling themselves ‘The Next Bukowski!’ — good luck.
I stopped writing.
I fell in love. I fell out of love. Fell in and out of love a couple more times. Seriously entertained getting a real job. Got a real job, and carried three years worth of money in my pocket in cash. Then I was the jerk off making a lot of money.
I live in Alaska, now. I love it here, and with a little luck and some effort I’ll die here when the time comes. I don’t want to ever leave. It’s that great.
When people ask me what it’s like living in Alaska, I play into their fears and tell them ‘ …and I have to walk seven miles in the snow just to fist fight Eskimos for whale blubber at the grocery store because that’s all there is to eat; there’s no telephones, no internet, and every day is a struggle to survive …’
Actually I eat a pretty fat free diet. But the point is, the best parts of everywhere I have ever lived …cue ‘I’ve been everywhere’ – by Johnny Cash… where I live has the best parts of every where I have ever lived with none of the bullshit. But I won’t tell you that. Fuck no.
There’s mosquitoes here. It’s fucking cold. No jobs. …and the prettiest woman, and friendliest dog I’ve even known.
And I write. Every day. Like what you just read, for instance.
So, there’s that.