



When I crack open that old musty book of self-mythology that I keep in my mind, I find a chapter titled something like: “Touched by the Muse: In Which the Author Receives Divine Inspiration While Sitting in His Dorm Room, and Thus Begins a Career in Writing*.” Surely this chapter describes a paradigm shift in the author’s life—a call to adventure on his Hero’s Journey™, if you will. But what is that asterisk next to the title? You glance down to the bottom of the page and find a block of text that reads:

“Please note that the events in this chapter, although not entirely fabricated, are somewhat exaggerated. Similar to how an alcoholic may wake up one morning to find himself on a kitchen table, drenched in his own urine, in his ex-wife’s house, on Christmas morning, thinking, Man, how did I become an alcoholic all of a sudden? , what is shown to us through revelation is nothing new, but rather the revealing of something that’s been with us all along, but we’ve neglected to notice. In fact, I’d been writing semi-obsessively for years, but until the epiphany detailed in this chapter, I never thought of it as writing .

“I thought of it, instead, as songwriting . Writing was for people who wrote down their words, but I kept track of my songs through voice memos and GarageBand demos, so even though ‘songwriter’ literally has the word ‘writer’ in it, I never considered myself to be of the same breed as those people who knew how to craft plots and characters and sentences .

“But I’m getting ahead of myself, before I even began writing songs, I wrote poetry. This is when I will have to subdue the embarrassment-glands in my brain that are currently yelling ‘retreat!’ because poetry is perhaps the most embarrassing of all art forms, and adolescent poetry is even worse. Nevertheless, I will carry on.

“Long before I knew who Wordsworth was, I wrote from ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,’ and what produces more powerful feelings in a 13-year-old boy than, you guessed it, girls. I, a lowly freshman, had a doomed crush on a senior girl who looked down on me from a pedestal that I expertly built just for her. Talking to her was (obviously) out of the question, so how else could I deal with the light-headed feeling that fell over me whenever I passed her in the hallway than by composing overly-dramatic poetry in the notes app of my iPhone 4? It was almost an unconscious impulse—I would black out in a hormonal haze, and come to with a heavy-handed sonnet staring back at me. Thus began a storied history of sublimating my sexual and romantic urges into art.

“But that sublimation is only part of what has driven my creativity. I am also driven by my wide-eyed wonder at the fact that we are alive and that the world exists. Creating art helps me explore this awe. I was always an imaginative and thoughtful kid, but this side of my personality was exacerbated by my discovery of a little drug called LSD.

“I feel a bit like a phony talking about how psychedelics have inspired me—like they produce artificial inspiration instead of ‘real’ inspiration—but my experimentation with them was almost inevitable. One of my earliest memories is of sitting on a rocking horse in my childhood home, listening to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” blast from the stereo while bombastically singing along. And in 7thgrade, when tasked with the assignment to write a research paper on the topic of my choosing, it didn’t take long for me to decide that I’d write about 1960s music. I remember briefly writing about psychedelic drugs’ impact on the culture in it, but I hardly knew what they were—I was mostly just rephrasing what I’d read in my research. All I knew was that Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ was a fantastic song. I just didn’t know why.

thgrade, for a ‘wax museum’ project during which my class had to research historical figures and dress up as them, giving short speeches to parents wandering around the room, I decided to dress up in a tweed suit with a fake beard on my face and a cigar in my hand—as, of course, Sigmund Freud. What made me so interested in him was not his psychology of sexuality—most of that flew over my 9-year-old head—but, rather, his theories on dreams and the unconscious. I was amazed that hidden world that lay beneath the surface of reality. I was eager to jump down every rabbit hole I came across. “Even back in 5grade, for a ‘wax museum’ project during which my class had to research historical figures and dress up as them, giving short speeches to parents wandering around the room, I decided to dress up in a tweed suit with a fake beard on my face and a cigar in my hand—as, of course, Sigmund Freud. What made me so interested in him was not his psychology of sexuality—most of that flew over my 9-year-old head—but, rather, his theories on dreams and the unconscious. I was amazed that hidden world that lay beneath the surface of reality. I was eager to jump down every rabbit hole I came across.

“So, during my sophomore year of high school when one of my friends said that he did LSD, I was naturally curious. I begged him to describe what it was like, but when he said that words could not capture what he experienced, I took to the internet. After a couple months of researching trip reports, reading Baba Ram Dass’sBe Here Now, and listening to Terence Mckenna mind-bending lectures on everything from psilocybin mushrooms to the I Ching to Finnegans Wake, I was convinced. I had to try it.

“I will, for the sake of brevity, refrain from describing every trip I took, and instead put forth a few anecdotes. On my second trip, during the summer before my junior year of high school, I distinctly remember lying in my friend’s basement with a third friend, all of us tripping, and putting on Allen Ginsberg reading ‘Howl’ through a Bluetooth speaker. One of my friends said, ‘turn that off, his voice is so annoying,’ but I was enraptured. I closed my eyes and felt as if I wasn’t listening to the poem, but living it. I had a similar experience during a separate trip while reading some of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Manand a few of E.E. Cumming’s poems. I liked reading before, but it was never as magical as this.

“The combination of this psychedelic awakening coupled with the muse-like inspiration brought on by various relationships (some long, some short, some one-sided) took me from sporadically dashing off poems on my phone to dedicating most of my free time to learning how to write and record songs. Once I got to college, I was trying to write a song every day, and on weekends, instead of going out, I’d spend 6+ hours in the music building’s practice rooms recording and writing. This period, which took up my entire freshman year, was also a period of a mounting obsession with Bob Dylan. I memorized dozens of his songs, taking them apart and putting them back together, trying to find out what hidden mechanics made them so enchanting. When I broke up with my high school girlfriend and (kind of) got back together over Thanksgiving break and again over Christmas break, before splitting for good, Blood on the Tracks was my shelter from the storm.

“But, approaching my sophomore year, the well from which I pulled my songs seemed to dry up. Once I got back to school, I had denounced songwriting for the sake of painting. I needed to express myself somehow, and since I couldn’t write songs, painting sufficed. I forgot to mention that while I’d been obsessed with songwriting, I also drew and painted in my free time.

That’s all what the asterisk says. The actual chapter would say something like:

It must’ve been my second week of sophomore year. I was settled in, but I wasn’t overtaken with homework yet. What better time to take a trip? I hadn’t taken LSD in several months, but I had a leftover tab wrapped in tinfoil, hidden in the pages of my copy of Ulysses. I wouldn’t have as much free time to indulge myself for the rest of the year, so I placed it on my tongue and waited.

The major event of this trip, and perhaps of my entire sophomore year of college, was at the tail end of my trip, after listening to Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blondeback to back to back, when I grabbed a pen and started writing. I didn’t think about what I was writing—I just wrote. And I wrote. And I wrote.

Hours passed. I moved to my laptop because my handwriting was sloppy. After about 40 pages, I was exhausted. My body needed rest and food—I’d forgotten about lunch and dinner because I was completely captivated by what I was writing. The closest thing I can compare it to is the childlike feeling of pure play. Looking back on what I wrote, there are a few good lines, but it’s far from being presentable. Regardless, it was a blast to write.

I’d found it. I’d found my new artistic medium.

So, for the first time ever, I began typing every day. I didn’t write anything in particular—I’d drift from poetry to journaling to nonsense to stories—it didn’t matter. All that mattered was my freedom to explore the creative capabilities of putting text on paper. Over the next year, I continued to write every day in a word document (currently at 570 pages, 230k words) with no intentions of showing anyone what I was writing—it was simply for my own enjoyment.

But now I’m coming to the point where I don’t want to keep these words to myself. Yes, I do have fear regarding whether what I’m writing is good or not, but I feel like I’m ready to start putting my work out into the world.

So I am posting this text on a blog. Yes, I know that blogging is so 2007, but I can’t think of any better way to share my work and connect with an audience. I don’t expect people to jump on board right away, but hopefully, over some time, I can connect with people. Because that’s what making art is about, isn’t it?

Writing with no intentions of showing anyone freed me to make bold mistakes, but it doesn’t make sense to keep doing this. In some ways, writing for oneself alone is just as useless as writing for one’s audience alone. A writer should neither be completely self-contained nor completely prestige-seeking. Instead, I’d like (in addition to untangling the mess of thoughts in my mind) to connect with you.