"Seven months? That's a long time to spend on a quiet little beach half way around the planet from the Rocky Mountains of Colorado."
"I'm getting used to it. Cha, cha…slowly, slowly."
"You on a sabbatical or something?"
"No, I came here to be a writer."
"Ah, well. What are you writing? Poetry, plays, the Great American Novel?"
"So far, I haven't written much of anything. That is, I mean, nothing much on paper, yet."
"Nothing on paper? What are you writing on, bathroom walls? You're a graffiti artist?"
"That's an idea. Maybe I should give it a try. I started to work on a screenplay but it just wasn't going anywhere. I spent seventeen years working in Aspen. Waiter, bartender, ski instructor. The usual assortment of "dead end jobs," as my father called them. It was good money though, and eventually I bought into a bar with a couple of other guys. Always dreamed of being a writer. After five years I sold my share of the bar. I've enough money socked aside to live pretty comfortably in a place like this. Got here seven months ago, like I said, full of ambition. Then I found out that this writing business is a lot of damn hard work. It seemed so romantic before I actually started to do it."
"Yeah. I suppose it's work. It's a job. Nothing particularly romantic about it."
"Ah, but there is. Being a writer, an artist... it's the ultimate mission. I love to read the biographies of writers. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Henry Miller. What great characters. There was such magnificent texture to their lives. So robust and colorful. That's what fascinated me, what charmed me to want to live the life of a writer. But I'll tell you something, after I started to write I realized that I enjoyed a good deal more satisfaction from imagining myself as a writer than I have from actually being a writer."
"I know exactly what you mean. My girlfriend used to dream about being a mother but the thought of being pregnant made her sick. So, she married a widower with four kids. She's happy. Why don't you just hire somebody to do the writing for you."
"No. That would be a farce. Still, many of my friends have said I look like a writer; sound like a writer. No one was shocked when I cashed in my chips and left Aspen to be a writer. Everyone was very encouraging. My girlfriend is more in love with me now than she ever was. She writes to me every week. Hell, she writes more than I do. Of course, she doesn't know that. I tell her I'm still working on that stinking screenplay, but I'm not."
"So what are you doing?"
"Well, I smoke ganja most of the day and at night I drink whiskey and soda. I read a lot of poetry; love good poetry. Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Browning and Frost. Lord, how they make the language sing. Otherwise, I listen to show music - Porter, Gershwin, Kern, Rodgers and Hart and Hammerstein. Those wonderful melody makers and lyricists."
"What a romantic!"
"No doubt. I'm not the least bit ashamed about it either. You see, writing, being a writer, for me, was always a romance. It was magic. Then I realized it wasn't magical. It was just more hard work. Like a job as you said. Well, I don't want another job. I'm tired of working. Hell, I'm tired of thinking. "Oh, for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!" So said Keats. I'm with him. Besides, when you think about it, most of the great stuff has already been written. Read Shelley's To A Skylark. I know I could not possibly write anything to approach the brilliance of that poem. In fact, if I tried I think I'd probably get so damn frustrated and depressed I'd end up shooting myself. Why bother? I'm happy enough to read it. Again and again. You want a life of sensations? Nestle into the gentle charms of this secluded beach. Read Keats on ganja and Shelley with a whiskey and soda. Listen to Ella sing Cole Porter songs."
"You're a happy man?"
"I'm a happy soul; very happy. Wouldn't change a thing. I imagine myself as a writer even though I know I'm not. I've got a good imagination and I'm having a great time playing with it. I've nothing to prove. I live simply; beneath my means. I possess very little and very little possesses me. I like it that way."
"When are you going back home?"
"I'm home now. No plans to leave here."
"What about your girlfriend? Don't you miss her?"
"I miss her, yeah. But the funny thing is I rather enjoy missing her. I'm not pining away for her. I'm not even sure I'd want her here. It's just that there's a sort of sweet sensation I experience when I find myself missing her, and for the time being, I'd rather have access to that than to her physical presence. You know what I mean?"
"I'll have to think about it for a while. What about the matter of sex? Little tough having sex with her when she isn't around."
"That's true . However, I've come to believe that the matter of sex and its accompanying pleasures are greatly exaggerated."
"You mean if you've done it once you've done it a million times?"
"No. Not that exaggerated. But, say, after a thousand times. After a thousand times you know exactly what to expect, exactly what you're going to do and exactly how it's going to feel doing it. You just plug in, flip a switch and the light goes on. Maybe I'm a bit odd because I basically don't miss it much. Then again, maybe I'm lucky."
"Plus you've got a good imagination, right?"
"Ha. Yeah, it comes in handy."
"Suppose someone in your family died?"
"I suppose another one of them will."
"Then you'd go back?"
"Probably not. I've been to my share of funerals. I don't see much point in spending the time and money traveling 12,000 miles just to go to another one."
"Some people might consider that a little insensitive."
"And some people can kiss my ass, too. Everybody's got an opinion. I came here to be left alone. The writing business, as I now understand it, was simply an excuse, a ruse. I used it to justify my abandonment of all the goals, ambitions, rewards, etc. of the society in which I'd been reared. None of it interests me anymore."
"None of it? You miss nothing?"
"Well, alright... every so often, I miss sitting in my black leather chair with my bare feet up on the black leather ottoman near the log burning fireplace in my fancy house with its ten rooms and oak wood floors. Outside the birch trees are tottering in the wind, there's a two-foot blanket of fresh snow on the ground. The flakes are still falling asparkle in the silky scintilla of moonbeams and inside I'm drinking bottled beer, eating a steamy hot pepperoni pizza, sitting in front of my twenty-five inch German TV that’s hooked up to quadraphonic Japanese speakers and I'm watching Notre Dame play football for the National Championship. That's something I miss... every so often."
"The silky what of moonbeams?"
"Uh?"
"You said the snowflakes were falling asparkle in the silky something or another of moonbeams."
"The silky scintilla?"
"Yeah, that's it, but what's that?"
"It means the glow, the light, that sort of thing."
"Damn it, you do sound like a writer at times."
"I know. I know. Pretty good, uh?"
"Don't you do any writing at all?"
"Oh, I do some scribbling once in a while."
"Scribbling what?"
"Dialogues."
"Dialogues?"
"Inner dialogues. The kind you have with yourself."
"Talking to yourself?"
"Yeah."
"It's fun? It's interesting?"
"Sometimes. And sometimes I get tired of all the questions."
"Then what?"
"Then I say, 'Enough, damn it!'"
"Enough, damn it!"
