No Talent

Subjects in which I'm a total ignoramus: algebra, trigonometry, calculus, chemistry, nuclear physics, solid state electronics, medicine, software coding, and auto repair. Very sketchy understanding of macro economics, portfolio theory, banking, and religion. As much as it pains me to admit it, I'm not very good with a gun, and I never learned an ounce of delayed gratification.

Recently, I made a list of all the jobs I've done. Its great length proved that I never held a job for more than a few months, and there were long stretches of self employment. Some of the work that I attempted was decidedly impossible. I flopped repeatedly. Fiction is like that, an impossible task for which I was ill prepared historically and too stupid to know when to quit. It finally dawned on me that poverty after a million words means something. I should have been a longshoreman. I did it one summer and liked it, no brain required.

Oh, crap. Eric Hoffer was a longshoreman. Baruch Spinoza lived hand to mouth by grinding eyeglass lenses. Gene Rhodes was a poker playing cowboy who drank too much and read books instead of riding herd. Jeez, it gets worse. F. Scott Fitzgerald was a terrible student, never made more than $50 in royalties for his masterpiece Tender Is The Night, and drank himself to death at age 44. Same thing happened to O. Henry, larcenist, fugitive, convict. He drank a quart of liquor daily, pickled his liver and fell over dead. Ray Chandler couldn't hold a job, fired for siphoning money from an oil company where he worked as a bookkeeper, and he hated Hollywood. So did I. Ten months in a cubicle at Disney killed all hope.

That's why I started writing, in 1997, feeling hopeless and useless. The only thing left to do was to write, because I was an untalented bum who no one wanted to employ. I interviewed and got shown the door. I had a mental crisis and needed therapy. An NHS shrink gave me strict orders to finish the fucking novel, as he put it. A couple years later, I received an email from him unsolicited, celebrating my authorship of The Freeman's Constitution. Those were heady days. I solved an old, intractable puzzle. I still believe it to be true, that history chose me to do something important. Thomas Paine was a penniless bum most of his life, too.

Logic is easy. Poverty is easy. Fiction isn't.

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