As I sit here staring at the Facebookingly Twitterfied, Bloggerific youtube-afied (the days do tend to drag on) worlds that seem to collide with each other day in and day out, I cannot help but to return to Warhol’s ridiculously overused but oh so brilliant quote "In the future, everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes.", Warhol’s statement has never been closer to seeing it’s full fruition as it has right now. In 2011 everyone’s a filmmaker, everyone’s a musician, everyone’s’ an artist, and everyone’s a writer...and that’s where my dilemma began.
I have always enjoyed the art reading, and up until a few years ago I would read anything I could get my hands on, books, magazines, newspapers, well you get the idea. I believe what was behind my passion for reading was knowledge, just the sense of devouring all of this info and cataloguing it away for a future time when it would be needed for the masses. People would routinely tell me that I should do something with all of that “stuff” that was just floating around in my head, write a book, or turn it into some kind of a career, but I just thought they were being nice, trying to make me feel better about myself since I didn’t seem to have any kind of direction in my life as far as a career ...that was all placed on the back burner, until now.
A short while ago I was quietly told that my job of almost five years was no longer available, I was let go. There I sat in my minivan my mind racing, thinking, I’m 41, married with a young son and no means to support them, and in the same thought I was crushed, beaten down...where was I to go? What could I do? Sure I could go back to the big box giants and become one of their minions serving out my last days in a blue vest working for minimum wage, or, maybe I could take that leap...you know where I’m going don’t you?
As I alluded to in my opening paragraph there are probably hundreds of thousands of disillusioned people typing away at their dirty, crumb infested , coffee stained keyboards, and they too are attempting the jump to calling themselves “Writers”. Now , I don’t consider myself a writer, I consider myself a person that can retell the facts and fill them with a bit of color or style, O.K. maybe that’s a writer.
Strangely, since I started my new BLOG “Self Serve Gas Station” I have found myself enjoying it, “it” being writing. Sitting at the keyboard just banging away , letting my mind wander with ideas that I had thought had been lost years ago, and when I’m finished a paragraph or two I just sit there and stare at the text with excitement that I created that, that those words came from my mind, my imagination, it’s pretty cool.
Now, I can already here the screams of protest from friends and relatives to the tune of “You have a wife and son to support, how are you going to do that as a writer?” Or from the any number of people that have spent x number of dollars going to the finest schools to craft their writing skills, and to those people I have no answer, I really don’t. I know I will have to get a regular job to put food on the table and clothes on our backs, but I really think I have a good shot at making this thing work.
I don’t pretend to know what I’m doing, don’t even try to test me on the meanings of writing terms like Alliteration or Double Entendre (that just throws all kinds of crazy into my head). My work will be filled with all kinds of grammar mistakes, but that’s cool because if we were all perfect it would be a very imperfect world.
Joe Cornelisse-SSGS
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