Work and Go Crazy...or...Write and Starve

"I have one of two choices --- stay in the post office and go crazy, or stay out here and play at writer and starve. I've decided to starve."
-Charles Bukowski

Saturday evening, just as night began to tiptoe down and blanket New Jersey with her obsidian cover, I too found myself engulfed in darkness. Mind you, it was not the star-dotted, veiled shimmer of the crescent moon sky that descended upon me; rather it was a putrid fog of obscure hopes and gray shadow-lined dreams.

It was an average moment in most respects and why, in that instant, years of unfulfilled passions and fading creativity came bubbling up, wild like fire, to the surface, I don't know.

But they did.

And along with them came bitter-hot, stinging tears that poured down my face with great abandon. My body tensed, quivered and my head throbbed something awful. In mere moments I'd gone from retaining some semblance of inner peace to a sobbing, confused wreck of a woman.

Why? Because, I suppose, at that moment, buried deep beneath the various layers of my persona, the core, the crux of who I am broke through, grabbed tightly onto my subconscious and screamed with its rasping, mechanical voice:

"You're living a lie!"

Days spent sequestered behind a cubicle, watching new ideas, new stories, new characters die off as I photocopy another document, email another insipid spreadsheet. I feign joy when lunch time talk turns to celebrity crushes. I offer a plastic smile and give the illusion of eager participant in office gossip.

I go through the motions of life, but I'm not really living. In truth, I think I'm decaying.

The essence of who I am is this: I am a writer.

The very prospect of putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and allowing a world solely of my creation to spill forth, fills me with unimaginable joy. Were I a prisoner locked away to fester in a rundown jail cell, a pencil and pad slipped between the paint chipped bars could easily transform my prison sentence into an artistic vacation.

In a very real sense, I'm at odds with myself. The societal push to constantly attain the biggest and the best has gotten through to me. I've bought into the lies. Which is why I switched my college major from English to Communications and took an office job in the Big City, where pristine skyscrapers draw your attention away from the aged and broken homeless man begging on the street.

Art, creativity, I gathered, was something that one couldn't pursue in the real world. Come graduation, it was time to grow up and suck it up. Get a nice corporate job, learn to use superficial terms like, "results-driven", "synergy", and "strategic", climb the ladder to the top, and then relish in all the material things you've attained.

Ttrouble is, that plan lacks passion, it lacks meaning. And it's only now that I realize I made a grave mistake in even attempting to follow that flawed life course.

Like a gay man who's yet to come out of the closet or a Victorian era housewife who longs for freedom, we can't deny who we really are. To do so would be a grave and, dare I say, dangerous task. One that strips away the opportunity for true joy and relegates a person to nothing more than a small cog in the machine of life, entirely apathetic as to when that machine breaks down.

I'm a writer. It's an essential part of who I am. To go the existential route: writing is what I was put on this earth to do.

And herein lies the rub: My writing can't survive if I haven't the time to do it. Yet I can't surrvive, if I haven't a job that provides an income to live off of.

I have faith that one day my writing will be my sustenance. That I will make a livable income off of it. But how do I get to that point?

And what of right now? As Bukowski put it, there are two choices: work and go crazy or write and starve.

He chose the latter, but I don't think I can. Nor can I accept the former.

But a writer friend of mine shared an interesting response to this rant.

"Writing," she said, "is more important than lots of things."

Now I just have to figure out what those things are.