Regarding Pigs on Mushrooms

I’ve been trapped in an existential goddamn crisis for a while now. I imagine this is how a pig farmer feels after he does mushrooms and realizes we’re all animals or pigs have souls too or whatever the trees tell him. By which I mean I’m fucked. I feel like my job is allowing people to feed on me. And the problem is, it’s true. But I’m the pig in that analogy, and also the butcher, who we didn’t mention.

Listen. Forget the analogy. It was a bad analogy. Fuck analogies. The point is, I’m letting people fucking feed on me. (Present company excluded, obviously.) Because I have a mental illness that requires me to process thought in little sentences and make them sound pretty. Because one time, many times, at least a few times, I read a book where an author served up part of their soul and I fucking feasted, and it saved my fucking life or at least changed the trajectory. And I thought—and I am aware of how repulsive this is—fuck, that would be cool as shit. To write something.

In my defense, I did start by trying to write fiction. I just wasn’t very good at it. But I started reading Bourdain, and I heard him talk and it kind of clicked into place—Oh. Shit. You’re supposed to write like you talk.

First attempts at that sucked too. I didn’t talk the way I liked until I moved back to Texas and picked the accent back up. Tried to write it. Not quite there. I needed more Amarillo in the mix. Shorter sentences, but keep the Austin, weed-hazy twang. The writing started sounding the way I liked about the time the accent started sounding right, to me. I swear to Christ I don’t know if I know how to write so much as I just have an accent.

Next problem was what to write. And that was kind of obvious since I grew up in a goddamn cult. Until I tried to sell a book and it turned out, so did everyone else. And they were all writing books.

Gave up.

Sold an essay about being a fucking cable guy, of all goddamn subjects, and here we are.

Did not mean to get into any of that. I was going to talk about writing about myself, and maybe write about myself. I haven’t decided yet. Maybe we’ll get there. Maybe not.

Let’s get back to that subject at least—whether or not I should be writing at all...