[video voice-over]
It's that time in life. Those moments, that cliff's edge that we all stand at when we're young still and the thought that nothing in the future's definite and everything's possible isn't a bad thought or a sad one, but instead a hot-air balloon of a fucking thing that takes you up high and towards anything the wind's blowing to. It's a novel. Not in the Tolstoy sense of the term though. It's short. And it's sweet at times and bitter at times and definitely aloof and confusing because that's how the times are when adolescence dips slowly into reality.
It's taken the most out of me, this writing, but I don't think I'll ever stop. I don't think I can. It's not in my nature to quit things that give me such a tangible fulfillment. Like bacon. And sex. And surfing. And to be honest, I get little pleasure from actual writing. You know, the act of it. It's painstaking, and if you do it right, it strips you bare and exposes you to the core. It makes me pull my hair out at the root, strands at a time. But it's okay because after, to have written, that feeling from the final punctuation, the long exhale, the clarity of mind makes it all worth it when it sounds good. It's short-lived like a cocaine high though, so I'm always striving for it. It never sticks around long enough to savor properly.
But enough about writing. That's not my rut here. I wrote a book, or a memoir some would say. It's not long and grandiose. It's no East of Eden. I'm no Steinbeck. It's just two-hundred-seventy or so pages of drug-riddled, sex-starved romping through the Old World, and it's all held together (or pulled apart) by memories of those final months at university.
Not much, but it sure is something. I self-published it. And ah, therein lies my rut. It takes money to print more books and it takes money to buy gas for driving to bookstores to sell more books, and when you work at a surf shop like I do, money's never something you have a lot of, or even enough of.
My goal is to raise $7,000 to print a sizable first run (500+ books) and buy gas to peddle them up and down the Western coast, and, funding permitting, around the country. Just me, my beat up Ford Explorer, my surfboard, and a big box full of books. That's my dream. It's the nightshade over my eyes when I sleep, me blazing down the Interstate just a little over the speed limit because the chassis begins to shake if I go any faster. It's a dream now, but it's not so lofty, I think. I want to wake up and see it. I just need a little kick.
