Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Who I Am

A writer friend suggested that I write a weekly column, to help my writing career.  I selected the title Notes of an Angry Man as a tribute to Charles Bukowski.  Buk had a weekly column in an underground Los Angeles newspaper that he called Notes of a Dirty Old Man. 

This is the inaugural installment of my weekly column.  I don't really have a plan for how the column will progress.  I don't really like planning.  I suppose my intention is to write about me a little bit, perhaps about what it's like to be a blue collar writer, an amateur poet, an uncompromising curmudgeon.  I hope you find it entertaining.  Mostly I hope that it helps my writing develop and gain a following. 

With that; Who I Am

I am an angry man.  It used to baffle me when people would randomly comment that I was angry.  It has taken me a lot of years to accept my anger, use it to some benefit and not try to hide it.  We live in a world that encourages us, teaches us, to not be angry.  The world we live in strives to teach us a lot of things, actually.  I find most of these teachings to be full of shit.  Anger is a normal emotion.  Everyone experiences it.  If they don't, it's because they are too simple to experience it, or on too many mood stabilizing medications. 

I have spent a lot of years, doing a lot of things, to attempt to be someone other than who I am.  I realized when I was a teenager that I did not believe in a traditional sense of God.  Yet I spent many years, visiting many churches, studying religion, in an effort to be a better human.  I tried to fit in with others for a long time.  I dressed like I was supposed to dress.  I got married.  I worked jobs.  I was social.  All of these things created more internal anger.  There is an old adage that says "To thine own self be true."  The problem with that adage, is that I didn't know the truth.  The truth, that it was better to be angry and authentic, than to be fake.  I almost called my weekly column Unapologetically Human, because that is what I've learned to be.  I'm human.  I'm unique from other humans and when I try to hide, or fix that uniqueness, it causes discontentment. 

Let me give it to you raw, hard and dirty.  Let's not sugar coat anything.  No fake smiles pasted on our faces.  Life often sucks.  It's hard.  Let's not hide from that fact.  There is no need to read self help books on how to deal with life.  We are all perfectly flawed.  Some of us are a little broken.  We are weird, magically weird.  Be weird.  Celebrate the things that make you different from everyone else.  Just be you.  I'll be over here, angrily writing, striving to find a niche in the writing world. 

Notes of an Angry Man.  I'm not always a peace lovin' Buddhist, and that is often what sets me apart.



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