When I was in college, and professors said, “Hey, you should think about graduate school. You’ve got a way with words.”
I thought, “Super. I’ve got a way with words. I’m gonna be a writer. I’ll be rich and famous.”
So then I bought a lot of black turtlenecks and started looking sophisticated and world-weary, and I spent the next ten years that way, until I realized that I wasn’t going to be a writer unless I wrote something.
So, I didn’t actually start until I was almost 30. But I decided that I wanted to do it in my twenties. Sad story. Wasted youth…
I worked at Disney World. I worked at Circus World. I worked at a campground. I worked in a greenhouse. And the whole time, I said, “I’m gonna be a writer” — but I wasn’t writing.
At the time, I was certainly a lost soul, but all of those jobs at the margin of society were a profound influence on me and became a way of looking at the world. I became an outsider, because the rest of my friends were moving along a very prescribed path, and I had fallen off the track. So it was actually a good thing. I didn’t know that at the time, though. Nor did I believe it. It’s like, “Man, I’m a loser. What a loser. I’m a loser.” And then I would say, “Look down and watch your step,” which was my job at Disney.