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i had another job once. it paid well. it was often fun. i got to hang out with some pretty interesting people a lot of the time. there was travel, a lot of dancing and even the occasional hob nob. i hated it. eventually the money and the social stuff just turned to razor blades in my throat and i knew something had to give. that something was me. i quit that job. I stepped "out into space" as my father used to put it. no parachute, no prospects, no idea what was next or how i would navigate whatever it was that would come. i'm like that. impulsive. after that i had another job. not quite as interesting, nowhere near as lucrative and far more labor-intensive. i eventually grew to hate that too. it wasn't so much that the job itself was so awful- it wasn't. it, like the one before it, just wasn't me. so, after a good deal of prodding from the woman who is now my wife to get off my ass and write seriously, i got off my ass and started writing. seriously. in many ways i think she saved my life. turns out that, through all the other jobs, almost as far back as i can remember, i was scribbling. stories, poems, plays, songs, even the occasional limerick. if the syllogism is that writers write then i was almost certainly born a writer. but Life, as it will do, bent and shifted and enticed me away from that thing that seems, in retrospect, always to have defined me. you get drawn to the edges, around the corners, up the secret back stairs. you get caught up in the swim of it all. sometimes, if you're unlucky like me, sometimes you get lost. you wander. you drift. even if it seems like you're on the so-called "right track," inside you're drifting. or maybe that was just me. it certainly was me. a long time at sea, right? it took a long time to get here. it took time and a lot of bizarre and often unpleasant stretches where money was tight and friends were scarce to get to this place where, it seems, i should have been the whole time. somebody once wrote that there are no second chapters in American lives. i humbly, very humbly, beg to differ. i'm on chapter three of a story that, while not always pleasant, has been fairly interesting (to me, if nobody else) for nearly four decades now. it was often interesting the way the Chinese mean it rather than the Vulcans but both kinds have value. which i guess is the point. throughout all that, down the valleys and up the peaks, alone or in company, loved or ignored i wrote. i did it even when i wasn't thinking about it. i did it when i should have been maybe learning how to understand what's under the hood of my car or the precise nature of the lies my politicians tell me. should have. didn't. i was a writer before anybody paid me. before anybody read me. before anybody knew me. so, if you're like me, and I have to believe at least some of you are, if you're in a valley and things are shitty, it may be time to take a look and figure out who and what you actually are. it doesn't have to be a writer; that's me. but it's something. it's something that sits at the core of you and pushes and prods and whines and screams and does whatever it can to get you to remember it. So, remember. sit still. listen. be sure. be very sure and, when you are, do whatever that voice tells you. write that next chapter.