Writers

It's a weird feeling when a kid sits at my bar and breaks out a manuscript he is working on. Standing on the opposite side...listening to his ideology and dreams, invoking that "passion". I stop short of saying "I'm a writer, I wrote some shit." I just let him talk. "It's a book for everyone" he says, "It's complicated, emotional, political, philosophical...intrigue..." 'My books were about trying to survive the path from bed to toilet to the job and back, I thought, smoking cigarettes and praying for the sun to go away. I wrote books for nobody, about myself, nobody. Romantic nobody. Another destitute person, maybe trying to survive but more about the process of self destruction. Loneliness. I am genre-less.'So I just said, "Eh, we should talk...not now but sometime, I wrote some shit; Emotional, political, philosophical, no real intrigue though..." His eyes lit up. "I'd love to hear about it, maybe you could help me," he said. I cashed him out and turned out the lights. It won't be long before you realize that you can write, be read, be reviewed and be ignored or be lost among everyone else that writes. Lost in a queue, or on a shelf.
At an early stage, when I told people that I was a writer, they told me the same thing, "live that dream" but dreams don't come with health benefits and this world is poison, and you can't afford poison control.
I turned a life of documenting drinking into just drinking and drinking.
I've sat at many a bar with a manuscript and just gotten wasted. I sat with a dream that swirls away with every shot and every bad song played on the juke.
I pull the manuscript out. I read it.. I put it away. Like so many others.
This time, I light it all on fire.