A lot of random info about my life, not a list!

So I was asked to write a generic sort of article for this soon to be magazine called ________. I wrote too much rambling stuff so it didn't make the cut but I think it's interesting enough to read anyway. People that like my writing might get more insight into my life... whoopee.

An open forum magazine! I love the whole concept of it, people creating for the love of the art itself. The girl who asked me was very nice about the request and truth be told I was more than a little flattered. I tend to write all the time anyway, but most of it is just daily blather and oddness that seems to be interesting to only a few select people. For the most part, I tend to be rather private about my day-to-day activities and I've learned over the years that sitting down and putting my thoughts and observations on paper is a cheap form of therapy.
So for this article I thought I would just sit down with the express purpose of integrating some of my daily thoughts into some sort of life altering meaningful prose. Something to give you the reader a brief glimpse of insight into what it's like to stroll around in my world for each day. I figure that once you know a little more about my take on the world, once you know more about the thoughts and tics revolving in my head, the more lenient I can be about opening up and describing what's going on all around me.
Before I start, or maybe when I started, I should have noted that everything I say should be taken at face value. My political views might come off as a little extreme and some of my thoughts and beliefs are a little out there at times. The little bit of wisdom I claim to have only came to me through painful experiences and along the way I developed some cynicism and dark humor to protect myself from the harsh realities of our world. My point of view doesn't need to be your point of view. Often the world I see is one where the rich always get evilly richer, the poor get children, the weak die off, diseases come and go, dogs and cats are living together. Mass hysteria, pandemonium! I'm just saying, take it all with a grain of salt.
Now, if you have heard of me at all, it's likely been because of the novel that I've been promoting. It's my first book and I named it Why I Committed Suicide for a few different reasons that I won't go into here. Being an author is not glamorous. I think at some point if you write literature your whole life and gain a reasonable bit of success, random people might start to buy you drinks at a bar when you are about 80 years old. But really, anyone who lives to be 80 that can still hang with you in a bar deserves a free drink anyway, author or not.
My frantic late nights writing my first novel were fueled by sheer bullheaded determination and egotistical narcissism. Being an author means losing sleep and being haunted by mental rewrites day and night. Your passion becomes agonizing over a phrase or an intimate revelation that will take people less than two seconds to skim over when they read your prose. IF they read your prose. It takes a certain breed of person to spend their nights passionately making out with a keyboard and staring at a computer screen when they could be in bed snuggled up with a beautiful woman, reading wonderful books or just watching late-night reruns of Seinfeld.
Then after all of that sacrifice, if you are lucky, someone might read your book or short story or poem. And if you are even luckier they might say that it didn't completely suck ass. And not sucking becomes your badge of success.
As accomplished I feel to have a book out on the market, I am pretty much an ordinary jerk-off that still gets up and goes to work everyday. I pay my dues. I sit in traffic and go from my semi-comfortable dwelling to a semi-comfortable metal box that shuttles me to my desk. I sit there and peck away at this and that on my keyboard or talk with clients on the phone and do ordinary day to day mortal working man stuff. It's all champagne, hot models and glamour baby!
I do get a lot of great ideas for stories and articles on my way in to work though. I think it's mostly delirium from not being fully awake after a long night of writing that keeps the ideas flowing. Sometimes I worry that if actually got paid enough to write full-time where I could skip sitting in traffic I might run out of ideas. I teeter along in my generic fuel-efficient import car with my brain on autopilot and my thoughts stuck halfway between dreamland and not hitting the SUV in front of me.
Sadly, a lot of my fresh new ideas that will revolutionize the world, wake up the masses, entertain children of all ages etc. are lost because I have to concentrate on not getting fired so I can make enough money to keep the lights on. My altruistic artistic vision and obsession loses a lot of luster when you break it all down to the nuts and bolts like that. I daydream during lunch about sequestering myself away in a log cabin and just typing away until I crank out more books per month than Stephen King and Dean Koontz combined.
Taking a shower or bath is also a good time for thinking up new ideas. I read once that anytime John Lennon had writers block he would go sit in the bathtub and get his juices flowing again. It works pretty well, but the paper tends to get really soggy. One of my most creative periods came from riding the train and bus to work a few years ago. If you are an aspiring author and have a touch of the writers' block, just ride the bus around for a few days. I promise you will have more characters and stories than you could ever possibly put to paper.
One of my favorite memories from the bus was that there was this autistic man who rode my route. My bus route from the train included the stop for a mental hospital and all sorts of people who were well enough to take care of themselves but not functional enough to look after themselves all the time had to ride the bus to the hospital everyday where they were put to work sweeping floors and smoking cigarettes. This autistic man that I watched everyday knew the scores and statistics for any game that had ever been played in the history of the world. The public bus driver would throw out random dates and he would automatically go into his trance and talk about every player and how many tackles they had that day or how many passes they caught. If you didn't give him a date he would just pick something at random and start breaking down the statistics of it. And he would yell it all very loudly. If you didn't give him something to break down he would just pick something at random. One day he spouted out the fuel efficiency of a tank on a slope in a certain temperature. I think maybe his only other passion besides sports was reading vehicle manuals.
The sad part was that the autistic man also had a genuine passion for the ladies. He would mostly stand on the bus, even when there were places to sit, but when a woman would come onto the bus a lot of times he would sit with them and I could see his brain trying to talk and be smooth but all that would come out of his mouth were these unending loud statistics. I imagine it was very frustrating for him but it got to the point where any females who rode that route regularly would just go to the very back of the bus to get away from him. Eventually the bus would fill up in the back and people that would normally give each other space were practically in each other's lap. One day the routes changed and I never saw that guy again but I think about him all the time, riding the bus and seeing a hot chick, slowly sliding up to her and saying 'WALTER PEYTON RAN 5 TOUCHDOWNS IN'�.'�
Right now I live in Houston, Texas. My wife and I moved here a few months ago right before my son Benjamin was born. We were always pretty anti-children but he's changed our lives in some crazy ways. Having a kid is like having a combination of the coolest robot and the coolest puppy all rolled into one fun package. Sometimes puppies' bite and sometimes robots turn evil and chase their owners around the home with a carving knife - but generally you are ok for the first few months. We were going to move out to Albuquerque before Ben came into our lives, but along the way we found out one of his kidneys wouldn't work and apparently Houston has the best Urology department in the United States so we moved here. I know this is true because I wrote to some eggheads in Sweden who are supposed to be the shit when it comes to treating bad kidneys and they e-mailed me back and said they knew our doctor in Houston and that he's the shit. Long story short, Benjamin had his kidney taken out and is completely fine. And by fine I mean he's pulling the dog's tail, bumping into things, chewing on everything, standing and falling all over the place. Baby stuff
So there were good reasons for coming here and now we are here and it sucks! Houston is oil town USA. It was completely built on the back of the shipping and oil industries and the economy here depends on their money. So if people in those companies say that all men must wear ladies underwear, then the only decision to make is whether you want to wear a thong or some granny-panties. I sit in traffic behind a sea of 'W'� stickers twice per day. Most of the stickers are on Hummers and Suburban-type vehicles that spill over into multiple lanes driven by a new breed of idiotic people that think pro-wrestling might be real after all and that global warming is a liberal plot while chatting on a cell phone complaining about all the illegal aliens having the nerve to do construction on the roads they are driving on. My personal rant could go on and on, but there are websites and people more obsessed than I am about this stuff.
I did mention that my political views might pop up here and there, but you can really waste a lot of brainpower getting outraged about politics. I'm as pissed off as the next person about everything surrounding the election and the current regime that's in power. I often wish that my fellow members of the intelligent minority in this country who were silenced and out-foxed by the campaign blitz would all rise up and do something. We should have a call to arms and overthrow the despots 'we'� put into power. But we won't. For one thing, the more intelligent you are, the fewer firearms you probably have stashed in your Kevlar enforced concrete bunker. Oh, you don't have a bunker either? Well, maybe we can rent out the VFW and have a fundraiser instead. I'm just saying there's not much I can do about it.
I was recently reading some editorials and opinion pieces from the 1800's and some from around the First World War and what I learned is that the undercurrent of outrage in America is nothing new. Elections have been stolen before. Families have ruled in Washington for generations and gotten the United States involved in private wars before. The tides ebb and flow and at the end of the day I just have to trust that things will work themselves out. The dissenting voice of a convicted felon (that's me) won't even make a dent and the majority of people generally won't risk themselves individually for the greater good until things are ridiculously bad. Then someone in power will come along and concede, 'ok, I guess black people should be allowed to go to good schools'� or something along those lines and we are ok with this little bit of progress and we all tune in to see what shenanigans the Simpson's are up to. Progress is like exercise, you have to keep doing it, keep fighting for it, every day until you die I suppose. And when it comes down to it, we all like some time for peace and relaxation. And while we're relaxing another family with a political plan is establishing the roots of their regime.
So now you've read a little bit about me. I know that there's not a whole lot of structure to this piece but I'm ok with that. In the days to come I hope to delve into more independent and comical experiences as they happen in my life. I hope you will keep reading and wasting your time with my words.

Sam Paul
www.whyicommittedsuicide.com

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