for free

I don’t want to write for money.  I want to write because I’ve got some great thing ping-ponging around in my guts and I can’t force myself to vomit it up any other way.  Everything I’ve written for money is tuft.  It’s all pocket lint and future hamster cage lining.  Even the stuff that I thought was half-decent was cold porridge when I really look at it.  Assignments that I force some passion into, only to see it pissed out through the porous underbelly of a broken advertising system.

I want to write things that make one person sneak away to read it.  I want them to draw a bath and I want the bottom edges of the paper to curl from wet hands while reading.  What I say in there is none of your business.  It’s not business at all.  It’s sarcasm smeared thick.  It’s flagrant flirtation and jokes that no one understands aside from the reader and myself. It’s mean and loving and chaotic, and it ends with some wild swinging salutation and my name scribbled sloppy and sideways.

There are people who spend their lives writing what other people tell them to write.  For a while, I thought I could do that, if only to make ends meet.  I always thought that term was “ends meat” — and that never made sense.  But now that I’ve been corrected by this typing box — and it might be the first time I’m satisfied by the correction, I understand. To make the ends meet.  And by that, it means to make enough cabbage before the first of the month to keep the landlord from throwing all your shit out on the lawn. 

But the ends always meet.  One way or another.  So why not enjoy that free-fall feeling between the ends?  I want to write for that jolt of adrenaline.  I want the risk of thunderous heights and understanding all too well that the end might be a fire pit and that same letter that brought butterflies will eventually attract a plague of kamikaze moths.  

If those letters end in shoe box stashes or they are at once chewed and swallowed and shat — it wouldn’t matter.  I would have written them anyway.  They weren’t for the world to dissect.  They weren’t a ballet performance, displaying my command of the English language.  The good ones were always a dry heave and a projectile puke.  A match between heart and hands and somehow even the wrong words create the right sentiment.  

Chalk them full of grammatical errors and draw lines through the fouls.  It could be a page of scratch and sniff hog-shit and one sentence in the middle somewhere that gives someone the feeling of flying or immortality or some kind of erogenous aneurysm.  I’ll take my chances.  I’ll gamble every penny I’d earn writing bullshit copy against a single note on a napkin I wrote while untangling confused and contradicting love signals.

They’re never perfect.  But the worst of them mean far more to me than any magazine article I could write.  I want to write faster than I can think, in a steamy font on the bathroom mirror for free.  I want to sneak a coded letter in a pocket like a prisoner of war, with only blind hope that it jostles itself loose somewhere out there in the world and she happens to pick it up.  I want her to read in an Asian cigarette-break squat with steam coming out of her ears, while the world dissolves around her.

If only I knew who the fuck she was.  Or who I am.  Or what any of this means.