David Henson

October 2052

When I think back on it, it isn't nearly as impressive as all the history books have made it out to be. Then again, these days, with these new computerized books, everything looks pretty sensational. And when I say sensational, I don't mean it in a good way. Since they got rid of all books that used paper, every piece of writing has come out on a small, cheap computer, complete with flashing lights and text that reads out loud to you at the push of a button. These buttons have turned libraries into some of the noisiest buildings in town, and people into some of the laziest and dumbest in the universe. I'm sure you already knew that. But that isn't what this is about. This is about me. This is all about me me me and the things I have written on napkins and buildings, on books and in magazines, and even on human skin in the last 55 years. I have been called a rebel, a dreamer, a genius, a waste, a hack, a magician, a romantic, a realist, a liar, and a fool by anyone who cared to give their opinion in the last half century. As my life winds down and I look forward to nothing more than the peace and quiet of death, I have been asked to write a letter to you, the students of Mrs. Kay's kindergarten class, in order to help you understand just what it can mean to be a writer and why you should pray to any being you think will help you not become one.

I suppose the proper place to begin would be the beginning, or at least as close to the beginning as possible without getting too close and burning our wings. It starts, I'm sure, as many of your stories start. Anyone can write when they are young. Showing an ounce of intelligence gets you high marks and praises when writing in grade school. Any sign of real creativity practically gets you a teaching job, though you would think that these teachers would realize how easy it is to make up stories when you are young. Adults forget so easily. What came easily to me was writing short stories with quirky, grumpy characters and giving them ridiculous tasks in ridiculous worlds. As a child, I had no idea how close this came to reality. This may be why, later in life, people would come to relate to my writing so well.

As I got a little older and impressively graduated elementary school with exceptional marks, I found that my priorities in life started to change. My imagination faded a bit more and more every day, while my interest in girls and deodorant and not getting beaten up flourished at an alarming rate. Looking back on it now, I suppose this was only natural, if natural means my being shaped by everything I saw on TV and tired, bored teachers who were more concerned with my someday getting a desk job than someday finding any sort of peace.

My interest in writing was pushed to the back of my mind where it lay dormant for many years. Luckily, in high school, I stumbled upon rock n roll. This single factor propelled my artistic life to where it is today (Where is it today you ask? It's sleeping late in a dirty apartment and looking out the window to see if death is strolling up the street). This love of rock n roll and its profound effect on me is all clearly recorded in my third semi-autobiographical novel Water the Plants with Blood from our Ears . To sum it up, playing music became the most important thing in my life. I realized the power that songs had over me, assumed they had the same power over others, and applied what little skill I had to writing songs that would devastate listeners. I formed a band and made friends according to musical talent. At one point I realized this devastation had to come from more than just the music. Rock n Roll was half music and half lyrics. Where at first my lyrics had been silly and somewhat obscure, they soon became more obscure and a little less silly. Gradually they started to become somewhat coherent, but were still obtuse enough to mean something different to every person. I never explained these songs and actually became angry when someone would ask what they were about. I thought that they were strong enough by themselves and did not need to be justified or explained to be worthwhile and affecting. This is still a debate I have with others and myself today.

I went to a college and studied music but switched to philosophy and English after only a year and a half. I found out that I wasn't interested in the theory and rules of music because they only put limits onto something that I felt didn't need limits, it only needed passion and patience. Unfortunately, I quickly found out that I wasn't interested in philosophy or English either, or at least in the way they were presented to me in school. Even still, my plan was to stick it out and graduate in order to make my mom proud, and to justify the huge loans I had already taken out. The university had other plans for me. By my second semester of philosophy and English, I had given up trying to please my professors and instead made it my goal to infuriate them with odd views and untraditional writing styles. The semester before, I had received extremely high marks and very little criticism, and I figured that the only way to get my money out of this education was to slap the system in the face and become an obvious "problem." That way, professors would be forced to take notice. I didn't make it all the way through that semester. I was thrown out of school with some fabricated charges of plagiarism and disruptively inappropriate behavior. It may have also had something to do with the morning that a friend and I decided to lay mostly naked, covered in hand written phrases like "I should have spent my money on a life-threatening addiction" and "This university caused my intellectual death" in the middle of a sidewalk on campus. It probably didn't help that this was part of the tour path for potential students either. When all was said and done, it was probably for the best. College just wasn't the same as it was in the movies.

I had formed yet another band while at college. I was persuasive enough to convince them to all drop out at the end of the semester so we could finally take our music more seriously. We moved into a cheap two room house and all slept in bunk beds in one room and practiced in the other. When I wasn't working at the grocery store part time, I was either practicing with the band or reading and filling notebooks with every though that came too my head. My new theory on writing had become; write as much as possible, as fast as possible, and eventually you are bound to surprise yourself with something good. For a short while, this process worked for me and I wrote many things I could tolerate. When we played these songs in concert, people began to take the words and make them their own, even though many times I felt like an actor in a play, singing someone else's stories that held no real meaning in my own life. This feeling led to a depression that I tried to cure with excessive amounts of alcohol. Some days I would wake up on my floor surrounded by pages upon wine-stained pages of hastily scribbled sentences. I figured I was okay, because at least I was being productive. The band enjoyed marginal success and we strived for about three years to make it big, until I realized there was nothing about that kind of success that held any appeal to me. All along I had envisioned myself on the road, doing interviews, and being on TV and that somehow made the transformation of ourselves and our music into a product seem like something tolerable. One day, as though I had awoken from a trance, I realized that my life was passing me by and I had very little to show for it. My art was suffering and my soul was dying. I no longer had meaningful relationships with anyone or any experiences worth writing about or even living for that matter. Everything became selling myself in order to gain more exposure and a bigger audience. But the bigger the audience, the dumber they collectively were, and the dumber we had to make ourselves. Breaking up the band was hard, but we were able to realize that it was necessary in order to survive.

At this point, I should probably be honest and tell the last reason that the band broke up. I couldn't admit it at the time to the guys in the band because I felt a great deal of guilt about it. I felt that I had personally destroyed the band by not making us good enough. I thought that the reason we had to sell ourselves so much was that our music and especially our lyrics just weren't good enough. I had what many people might call writer's block. But in reality it was actually worse than writers block, because even when I struggled and struggled to finally write something, it simply meant nothing to me. I felt I had run into a brick wall but was still writing things down on paper, wadding it up and trying to throw it over to the other side, but every time I threw it high enough to go over, the wind would push it back onto my side. I had lost my desire to connect with anything. I no longer wanted people to hear what I had to say because I felt I had nothing to say. I thought everything had been said before, many times over. I thought that no one wanted to hear anything fantastic or romantic because they only wanted realism and pain. And, saddest of all, I started to become a person who though art had no true value in the real world.

It seemed to me that there was only one thing to do. I had to get away from everything and everyone I knew. I somehow ended up working in a small diner in the Appalachian country as a cook. I knew nothing about cooking, but I knew how to bullshit an owner who was understaffed and in need of someone else to help in the kitchen. I moved into a tiny, log cabin sort of house and only had a mattress, a stove, a table, and a chair. I filled my days with learning how to cook some surprisingly decent food and my nights with reading every book I could get my hands on. The nearest town had a surprisingly extensive library that seemed like it was placed there just for me. Are you thinking that this led to me to some sort of epiphany? Seems like the conditions were right, doesn't it? Unfortunately, it wasn't so easy. I enjoyed my time working at the diner, and learning a new trade that had nothing to do with writing or performing. The food I prepared nourished strangers' bodies and pleased their palates in exactly the way I had yearned to with my words. I met all sorts of characters, many who were just passing through. I found a kindred spirit in these travelers, because I had always felt that I too, was only passing through, but in my case there was no destination in mind. Some of the books I read I did find interesting, but few made any real connection with me. The lives of the characters did not seem real or like anything that I would ever experience during my lifetime. I longed for familiar characters that did extraordinarily positive or at least idealistic things. I at least needed to feel like they had tried.

And then to New York. The most sacred of cities that I could think of. I had seen pictures, I had seen enormous buildings in those pictures, and tiny black and yellow and purple and angry people standing next to them. Each of those people became a spark to reignite me. Each was the final glass of wine that would put me over the edge for the night and force me to start spewing my thoughts on the universe. Nightly intoxication was what I craved, by whatever means necessary. I bought a typewriter and one huge piece of paper (Jack Kerouac style) and wrote my first novel in a month, after having lived in New York for only three weeks. I took pride in the fact that it wasn't style for style's sake, and that it wasn't some The Sun also Rises bullshit chronicling some bland character's daily meals. But it was everything else. Everything relevant, but only to people my age and maybe people a few years younger (I was 29 at this point, on the verge of my lonely, lonely thirties). I worry, so I wrote about my worries. I dream, so I wrote about my dreams. I make up stories to make myself feel better, so I made up stories to make the world feel better. Of course it came across as self-indulgent, with the main character straying very little from myself, but I also created a world of light and shadows to compete with the one outside my window. My story was a fire escape and a parachute and a lifeboat and a hungry shark.

The events leading up to the publishing of my extended rant are out of the ordinary, but not worth committing to paper here. I can say that it only takes one special person to believe in your work in order to take it out of your hands and put it out for all to see. In general, publishers are as greedy and callous as any other professional businessmen. So there I was, living in New York, working as a bus-boy and already a published author. I wasn't even sure at that point that I wanted to be a writer, but it was too late to think about that. My book sold surprisingly well and a few critics found something in it refreshing and put it in a few of their top ten lists at the end of the year.

None of this satisfied me. Sure there were moments here and there in the course of writing that beast of a work that allowed me to transcend the ordinary into extreme literary madness. I got off on my inability to control the thoughts that came from my head, through my fingertips, and onto the paper. The unthinking creation was what I craved. The only other times I felt like that happened either with particular women or when I used to get high with my friends and listen to Miles Davis all night long. In my mind, there is a definite connection between nights filled with a flood of words onto paper, two open-mouthed lovers in a small bed, and actually being able to feel the breath that Miles blew through that otherworldly trumpet.

My second novel was completely different. With the money that I was making off of the first book, I was able to quit my job for a short time. I knew that in order to not have to work again, I would have to write another book. Let me be the first to point out that this is not a very noble bit of inspiration for a work of art, but I can guarantee that it was the inspiration for some of your favorite works. The first few days out of work, you could find me sitting in the dark in front of the typewriter, staring just over the page I had loaded into it at a picture of three teenagers smashing the windows of an old car in the middle of a cornfield at night. I had received the picture anonymously in the mail after the publishing of my first book. All three of the kids were beautiful, two boys and one girl. The girl was standing on the hood of the car with her foot crashing into the windshield, while the two boys (with the most terrifyingly beautiful looks of rage and passion on their faces) were both in mid-swing at the side windows, one with a crow bar, the other with a baseball bat. This was the only picture hanging on the wall of my new apartment because I had just moved in after I quit my bus boy job.   After a few days of staring at the picture, I realized I had to get out of there.

I'm not exactly sure how those few things led to my new obsession with spray paint graffiti, but within a week I had sprayed half of New York City. When I left the apartment, I walked up and down the streets until my legs ached. I ate in diners and stared out of windows. I knew there were words inside me, but for some reason I was unable to put them onto paper. Somehow, I realized I could put them other places. I wanted them to be big and sloppy and in plain sight for all to see. I started off very clumsily, inconspicuously purchasing a few cans of paint at a local hardware store, and eventually I had a special backpack filled with hand-made letter stencils (I found these much more efficient- the first few sentences I sprayed were barely legible). Suddenly I had plenty of things to write. I liked the danger and the immediacy of the big, colorful words on brick buildings and trains. I liked that most people would ignore it, and some would come to cherish its absurdity. Of course I got caught a few times, but the charges were usually dropped. This is how my second novel came to be not a novel at all, but a story made up of pictures of all of the buildings I had tagged. After a few months, I realized that all of the things that I thought I had randomly written were cohesive and coherent when put together. Unfortunately, the only place they were written was on those buildings. When I explained this to my furious publisher, he eventually set me up with a camera and an assistant. We traveled around the city and documented as many of my words as possible in the most interesting ways we knew how to take pictures. We were careful to disguise the buildings they were on, so as to avoid future trouble with the law (which didn't really work all that well; I mean, come on, I documented an extensive amount of my vandalism to be published in a book, of course there was trouble with the law). It was an exciting time to create. My book came in at well over three hundred full-color, photographed pages, but we managed to be creative with the manufacturing and keep costs low. This is when I was "established" as an actual force in the literary world. I always liked it when people called me a "force". Think about that!

Your teacher asked me to write to you about being a young writer, and I think I have done just that. These pages chronicle the first half of my life, when I was the most adventurous and stupid. I have no desire to bore you with tales of being an old man. I can only tell you these few things: It isn't as bad as you might think to get older. In fact, the majority of my work that is known and still read was published after all the events that I have told you about. But I told you about the events that led up to that point in my life because I felt that if I had any advice in me, it would be seen in those stories. I am an old man and I am still not sure where inspiration comes from, who deserves it, or how to attain it. I left out many important things about these events, like the two women that I loved, the death of my father, and the way the world was rapidly changing. There is no doubt that these things affected my work, because they affected my life and my work was so much of my life.

I was lucky. I was never especially smart or hard working. I just always knew deep down that this was the only thing I was capable of doing. I could never have been a doctor or even a businessman; it was all so far beyond me. I, ironically, have made a living on commenting on society from the point of view of a college drop out and an outsider. The intellectual and educational community has embraced me, though I rarely had a good word for them when they still affected me. Recently, my alma mater asked me to speak at graduation, even though I never graduated there myself. Obviously I turned them down. It means nothing to me to be used as a trophy. I would much rather spend my time writing for this kindergarten class than to write a thousand commencement speeches for Harvard or Yale.

I have very little concrete, anecdotal advice. I think all young people should listen to music very loudly and drive very quickly. And only buy secondhand clothing, unless you have to go to a funeral. And sometimes open your eyes when you are kissing someone. If you don't yet know what these things have to do with writing, someday I'm sure you will. I have never been good at proper endings, even with all of my practice. An ending is supposed to be profound and to make sense of everything that comes before it. My real skill lies in rambling through middles and accidentally saying something worthwhile on occasion. When it simply is too difficult to put everything about life into my own words, I find it easier to end with someone else's, and this is another of those occasions. Remember that I tried to help, children, and don't grow up to hate me if I die with a scowl on my face, it is only a playful gesture to God. And finally, instead of listening to me, you should just listen to E. E. Cummings when he wrote "...then laugh, leaning back in my arms, for life is not a paragraph, and death I think is no parenthesis."

david henson