A Writer On Writing About Writing

By Reginald Whitaker Acresonson
Contributing Writer

Disclaimer: And now…this thing.

I am a writer. I was inspired to become a writer by my father. My father used to keep several pairs of old, worn steel toed boots. He did this to remind him of his own affluence and good fortune. One time, he saw a man wearing such boots, lowered his monocle and said, “Reginald! That man works very hard for a living to provide for what is no doubt a raging brood of tearful layabouts who will do nothing but toil in their father’s filthy footsteps. These people are essential, but their work is hard and it tends to make the skin of the hands rough and icky. Son, I hope some day for you to, instead, become a writer or something.” I found this statement strange because I was 32 years old at the time and I had been operating a very successful roofing business for the last 14 years. I actually won a Young Enterprise Award from Forbes magazine for excellence in emerging web marketing.

However, not one to disappoint my father, I decided then that I would become a writer. I promptly burned down my roofing business to collect on the insurance money (unfortunately making widows out of several women who were married to a few of my workers who ran a card game on Thursday nights, unbeknownst to their boss, me, who was in the process of burning the place down). I knew very little of writing, having only done it when required on invoices and the like. I had never actually communicated anything in writing besides orders and purchases and purchase orders and orders of purchase and work for purchased orders to be purchased once ordered.

I decided that the first thing I would write would be a note to my wife and children. It read simply, “I am leaving to become a writer. I thought you might not understand, so I just left instead.” I thought leaving them would be more difficult than it turned out to be. I was a real writer now. A desperate man on the fringe. Leaving my family felt right. It seemed right. It seemed like it felt like it seemed right. Writers leave their families; it is just what we do.

I checked in to a motel that allowed me the ability to exchange sexual favors to pay the rent. I would drive other tenants to appointments, I would take in the mail when they were out, changing light bulbs, etc…but I performed all of these favors in the most sexual of ways…while having sex for money. This type of life might shake the typical American to their very core, but for me, it’s all just part of being a writer. We exchange sexual favors for lodging, and we leave our families. This is as it has always been with writers.

While I was living by the hour in a flophouse, I read all of the great writers…Hemingway, Faulkner, Proust, Dickens, Dickinson, Eliot, Eliotson…the list goes on. Once I finished reading this list of great writers’ names, I felt like it was time for me to take a massive amount of illegal drugs and lay in a bathtub for two months. I can’t explain this lot that the universe has cast for me. But dammit, I’m a writer. Writing is my blood, in my bone marrow, coursing through my body that I trade for room and board and drugs. I’m a writer, and writers leave their families and prostitute themselves all the while taking lethal levels of drugs and drinking massive amounts of alcohol. I know that I hadn’t mentioned alcohol yet, but I employed a crafty writers’ trick and I “edited” out those paragraphs because I’m sure they are redundant. Everyone knows that writers are, at their core, a group of pathetic alcoholics who will spin you a sonnet for a fifth of blackberry schnapps while they abandon their children and traffic their body for drugs and a warm bathtub to “crash” in.

I suppose I had my next major enlightenment while I was spending my first two weeks in jail for a third strike on a public intoxication wrap; because writers do what we do in public. That’s just the way it is. Writhing in a drunken drug-addled stupor in private just doesn’t tell anyone that I am indeed a writer. Writing is about being as wasted on drugs and alcohol as possible and just waving your genitals at strangers. If a writer doesn’t have wave-able genitals, then they can just wave their hands near them; that typically directs the unsuspecting eyes of strangers to the appropriate areas.

It was in my cell that I had what, since my father suggested I become a writer, must have been my 26th or 27th epiphany; because aside from prostitution and alcohol and drug abuse, writers also receive epiphanies on a regular basis. This Epiphany was that I needed to share my intimate knowledge of the writer’s life with the world. It was then that I composed my second, and most important, piece of writing. It was a note myself, written on the flip side of a cover of Stephen King’s “The Stand” that I had removed from my cellmate’s copy of what I am told is a pretty good book. This note became the driving force that got me through those hard nights in jail. It was a list of things that I would do when I regained my freedom. It read as follows: WRITE BOOK ABOUT WRITING. ALSO, GET DRUGS.

[Editor’s Note: Adam Quesnell is a stand-up comedian and writer working out of Moorhead, MN. Send feedback to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), follow him on twitter at twitter.com/adamquesnell or visit ]http://www.adamquesnell.com]

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