Am I Interesting?

I never thought of myself as being an interesting person. Over the course of my life, I have done interesting things, I've read interesting books and I've been both delighted and disquieted from interesting thoughts. I often think about dinner. When it comes to dinner, there are just so many ways you can cook something: you can fry it or broil it or boil it or bake it. The real trick to dinner, plainly speaking, is to search out those raw ingredients which delight the finished project.

My background is writing. I made the decision to become a writer on a sunny day in November. I was with my penpal, before we became penpals. She asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn't know. When I asked her, she said she wanted to become a writer. “Me too,” I said. “I also want to become a writer.” Perhaps I only became a writer to impress a girl.

Being a writer, for me, was a great way to experience and express myself in the world. If I met an interesting person who worked an interesting job, I would always ask questions. I've met flour millers, radio personalities, air traffic controls and once a sex worker turned tarot card reader who had so much to say that I'm still thinking about the conversation.

Being a writer took me to Goddard College in Vermont to pursue my MFA. Although an MFA may not seem like much, it meant a lot to me. I became a college instructor, and then the co-founder and editor in chief of Umbrella Factory Magazine. My work with UFM led me to Rockethouse Pictures where I wrote screenplays for animated shorts and later directed music videos and short films. My connections at RHP took me to Ring of Fire Publishing. Ring of Fire published my novels Dysphoric Notions and Undertakers of Rain in 2012 and 2013 receptively.

For years I wrote or worked on my writing for eight to ten hours a day. In order to do this, I worked in the evenings in restaurants. Working in restaurants does not make someone an interesting person, but it does expose one to so many interesting people that there is no end to the possibilities. One night you may be drinking beer with a future world leader, and the next night it's the world's next notorious criminal. The service industry has no shortage of people who are living marginally or marginally living.

Meanwhile, back at home I decided to think about my life's work. I had set out to write a novel. Somewhere along the way, I had written several. To further that, I was unable to really focus on any given completed manuscript because I had more material, newer novels, to write. And there seemed to be no end in sight.

I was knee deep in a story about a young woman whose husband had been killed overseas. As I was writing one day, I saw the end of this particular story and I saw the end of all the stories. All the stories I would write, anyway. And despite the trail of novels and short stories and screenplays behind me, all the hours it took and the break down of years, I knew I was at the end of line.

When I began writing my last novel, I did it with joy and exuberance. Was this the best novel I had written? No. What it was, really, was the last ghost within me that need to be exorcised. And that was that. I was free. Grand total: 25 years as a writer. There are some stats too, but they aren't very interesting.

Meanwhile, it started to make less and less sense for me to continue working in the restaurant. I was busy forming my plan when the universe made one for me. I went to my Sunday morning job as the brunch bartender at the Greenbrair Inn. I was sent home at ten o'clock because of a lack of business. It was March 13, 2020. Within 48 hours of being sent home, COVID-19 wanted me to become someone else.

I decided to pursue art. I had been taking photographs for years. I had been dabbling in web design and magazine layout with my magazine for years too. Meanwhile, my wife had begun working at Front Range Community College. We had a short conversation and off I went, back to school. I began my degree for Multimedia Graphic Design in 2020. I completed the program in 2022.

If I consider my life like dinner, it's easy to say that there are only some many ways you can cook it. There are just so many ways one can live a life. Most of us, it's one day at a time. Some people plan. But it's the raw ingredients of a person that make the life. When I consider the fortune I've had when it comes to education, yeah, these are raw ingredients. Then there are the jobs I took out of necessity, these were never my favorites. These jobs were my time in the US Army, or the six years I worked for the Boy Scouts of America. Then there were the jobs I took because I wanted to have a specific experience. I became a bartender and a college instructor because I wanted the experience.

Then there were jobs I took because I thought they would make me a more interesting person. These jobs were often mundane. These were jobs that would not enhance my resume or add to my CV. No, these were jobs that were the making of a good barroom story. These jobs were, file clerk in the collections department of a massive insurance company, ballot extractor for my local elections office and tortilla salesman at a farmer's market.

I never thought of myself as an interesting person. I've just always wanted to think and do, experience and see interesting things.