So I was walking the beach at Coney Island and I figured out my perfect life.
I’m already two-thirds of the way there, believe it or not. I’m happy with where I am and who I’m with. I married the right person, and she seems to think she did too, and that counts for more than anything else. So call it halfway there just with that, with each of the other two things counting for a quarter. The next factor is “where I am”, so suffice it to say that our new apartment is better than we even dared to hope for when we decided to rent it. There’s space and air, storage space in the basement so we don’t have to stuff everything in closets or leave it stacked in corners, a peaceful neighborhood with lots of neat restaurants in it, and it’s all within easy reach of friends and family and parks and our favorite movie theatre and Coney Island. What more could anyone ask for in that regard?
All that’s missing for my perfect life is to be happy with what I do.
It’s not that I’m unhappy with my job, exactly. I’ve definitely had worse, and I’m well aware that on the grand scale, I’m one of the lucky ones. But that’s not the same as being happy.
So what would make me happy? It’s rather simple, really.
I would like to get up early. Not as early as I do now, but still a working-person’s time – 7 AM, perhaps? Sleeping in until 8 or 9 is for weekends. After a bite of breakfast, if the weather allowed it (which is to say, if there wasn’t some form of water falling from the sky; I can handle a bit of heat or cold), I would go to Coney Island to walk the boardwalk and the beach for my daily exercise. Unless water was falling from the sky, in which case I would just walk on my treadmill.
Then I would either go home or sit down in a pavilion with my laptop, and I would write. I would write the Stephen King-prescribed 2,000 words on my primary project, then I would turn to one of my side projects: I have one pseudonym that I would like to revive, another I would like to launch, and a tabletop RPG that I just want to exist out in the world. Better yet, I’d be able to take a bit of time each day to maintain this site properly and promote my work.
That’s it. That’s my perfect life. Walking and writing. I might switch up my walking time to keep it fresh – to the extent that I could, I’d probably try to time my walks so I arrived at my favorite tide pool at the West End at the very moment of high tide.
That’s all I want. I don’t think that’s greedy.
But here’s the catch: there are a lot of things I’d be willing to give up in order to have that life. Movies and shows and concerts and travel and dining out and a lot of other things that are ultimately expendable. I would miss them terribly and I would wish and hope to get them back some day – after all, you have to work hard just to live in New York City, and those things are what make it worth the trouble. Even so, I could give them up in pursuit of a life of walking and writing.
What I couldn’t face is the loss of that new home, or a return to the uncertainty and constant low-grade fear (with occasional spikes of terror) from before my stable job. I’m getting too old for that shit.
Does that make me a coward? Almost everyone who makes it big has that moment in their story when they just let go and leaped into the darkness, but then, they often have that part in their story when they’re cold and hungry and barely a step ahead of sleeping on the street.
Maybe I should have done it when I was younger. I have so much to lose now. But then, I was scared back then, too.
And let’s not forget that I’m also old enough to get scared when I see how many pages have fallen off the calendar and how few of the stories I want to tell have been told while I work jobs that take up most of my life and my energy. It gives you crazy ideas, like walking across America to raise money and awareness of the books I’m in the process of writing. More on that another time.
(Also, keep a lookout for the very real GoFundMe I’m planning to put up soon to help with business expenses. Things like cover art, promotional art, promotional campaigns, and book trailers cost hundreds of dollars apiece.)
So if you wonder why I play the lottery despite the ridiculous odds, now you know. I don’t expect it’ll ever pay off, of course; I’m well aware of how ridiculous the odds are. So I’m still looking for other ways I can live my perfect life. I haven’t given up yet.
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