I wanted to be so many things growing up, it's ridiculous.

I don’t know if the list is long or short compared to other people: cop, paramedic, lawyer, doctor, veterinarian, fire fighter, soldier, businessman, chef, producer, director, gym owner, restauranteur, fight trainer, and even a professional cyclist.  I'm sure there's more I may have forgotten, or more than likely, blocked out.

I guess I did a few of those things. Maybe could have done some of them well. But nothing ever took. Nothing grabbed me so hard that I that I couldn’t pull away when I got bored.  

I get bored a lot.  

What happens is, I start the process of becoming the thing that seems like the most romantic, beautiful execution of life there is, realize once I start that it’s not at all like I imagined, and then move on to the next thing after fifty or so conversations of why I decided to quit.  

So here I am, no money to speak of, no real future (because I never finish anything) and no real skills, other than I had managed to get a certificate as an apprentice instructor in Jeet Kune Do Concepts and Filipino Martial Arts. It was Bruce Lee’s martial art that he created, and it was just a bloody mess we won’t get into here. Notice how I never became a full instructor? I must have gotten bored. Or just tired of getting the shit kicked out of me.  

Anyhow, I was teaching Bruce Lee’s art to this guy who wrote screenplays, because, evidently, he liked getting the shit kicked out of himself as well, and I was good at teaching that. I, like most people, had some story ideas. He told me my ideas were really just scenes and not stories. It felt like he punched me in the gut. I thought my ideas were brilliant. Never been done. Let alone thought of. But I was intrigued.  

Long story short, I wrote a screenplay. 120 pages of pure crap.

Many mistakes. Mostly unreadable. But while I was writing it, I could feel my emotions surge up and down, happy, sad, courageous, cowardly, vengeful, and mostly pitiful.  

It was a gangster story about a white guy with a Vietnamese friend who needed a white face to sell guns for him. Actually, that doesn’t sound so bad. Maybe I’ll revisit it. It had gangsters, cops, women, guns, violence, even good Vietnamese food. I was checking all the boxes of all the stuff I wanted to be. Maybe not the cyclist or veterinarian boxes… come to think of it, if I rewrite it, I’ll throw in some of that in there. Oh, don't roll your eyes at me! It could work.  

The point is folks, you can be anything, and I mean anything when you write.

You get to live the lives of heroes, scumbags, scumbag heroes, different genders (a lot more to choose from now than when I started writing. You can be any sexual orientation, a cop, a robber, a transvestite robber cop, a politician, a hippie, homeless, millionaire, billionaire, spy, doctor, lawyer, pick a color, pick a race, pick a country, pick a friggin dimension if you so desire.  

Are you understanding me?  

When you write, my friends, you can be anyone, anything, anywhere in the universe, doing anything, at any time.  

Writing… is freedom.  

Shut up and write.