I am a writer. Writers attempt to become adept at wearing many different hats, to escape, you can say. To help us escape, as an audience. I am not a good writer who practices. What I am good at is the practice of wearing many different hats because Life. Like anyone who’s graduated with an English degree in the last decade and a half or so I’ve had to muster up all my creative thinking skills to pay the bills any way I can. Pizza man. Chicken wing guy. Film geek at a DVD store. Mobile computer technician. All the while I think about writing. So I am not a writer. A writer writes.

But I think, I… think, that I may be a storyteller. I hope I can be. Like my grandmother who used to sit us around her and make us salted rice balls and tell us ghost stories. Like my friend sitting across from me with a beer telling me about all the crazy girls in his life, how he feels he needs to travel, it’s not running he says, it’s searching. Like my friend who plays the guitar who admits the songs he writes are completely biographical and he doesn’t know how to stop because what will people think. Like my friend who’s a painter, but she’s not a storyteller, no, she is just trying to remember and maintain the past and the lessons she has learned, and she hopes she has learned. Like my father who hunts and fishes everyday of his life, who just bagged a wild boar and oh you should have seen him in that tree waiting hours and hours and this one wasn’t going to get away from him. Like my friend at work who’s in her fifties but she just learned to drive for the first time and she’s terrified of making left turns but she did, she did it, she made a left turn into the Walmart and then she sat in the parking lot fist pumping to Rihanna.

Storytellers are my favorite people, and everyone I know is a great storyteller. I hope you will join me on my journey toward becoming one and check in from time to time to let me know what you think. I write songs. I write poems. I write a lot of bullshit. Bear with me. I think I just need to write.

Charles Bukowski once said, in my favorite poem of his, “what makes?”, “It’s simple, it’s either you / get it down on paper or you jump off a / bridge.”

I think I’m done jumping off bridges. Writing seems less fatal, and coincidentally, fatalistic. This is my first left turn.

Thank you for reading. Thank you for visiting. Thank you.