About six years ago, I travelled to San Francisco for a job fair. While I was there, I met this guy selling his photos in Union Square. I found this something of a mystery. I had just graduated college and was still under the presumption that nobody could truly support themselves simply by being an artist, certainly not the nomadic sort that wandered from city to city selling their pictures on the street. Anybody pretending to do this with any degree of success was actually supporting themselves through some other means.

"What do you do to support this?" I asked.

The man did not smile. He was not sure where this was going and probably didn't want to know. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"Well, I mean . . . how do you support your . . . self?"

The guy looked at me with something like comtempt. (Funny that I was surprised by this reaction.) "I um . . . " he took a moment to find the right way to phrase what he wanted to say to me, then said, "I do exactly this." Tired. Exasperated.

Let me back up. At that time I was waiting tables and tending bar in a restaurant in Dallas in order so that I might write. Yes. A wonderful and poetic clich￩, I agree. Nevertheless, it's true and I'm willing to admit to the sheer gracelessness in which I ultimately failed in this endeavor.

This is what I know now:
I failed because I was not ready to write.
I was not ready to write because I still had not lived.
I had not lived because all I had done was strived for academic success so that one day I might . . . succeed.
I had not defined what it meant to me, this 'success.'
And there it was.

I had actually travelled to San Francisco for a teaching job fair, because all creative writing students faced with the terrible realization that they somehow needed to support themselves after college always turned first to the teaching profession.

After the short conversation I had with the guy selling art in Union Square, I felt I had exposed to him a gnawing truth, an aching reality: I was hiding from doing what I wanted to do by pursuing something that made more sense. At first, I was guilty about this. I suffered some minor shame. Then I promptly let it go and decided there was no need for it.

Here's the funny part:
The number of hours I actually spent at the job fair: maybe 2.
The number of hours I spent wandering San Francisco, reading in coffee houses, visiting museums, talking to strangers, and occassionally sleeping: about 94.

Looking back, I think that the San Francisco trip was a success of sorts. I realized that my idea that I would embark upon teaching students that were, at that time, barely younger than me was an absurdity and I would put an end to those thoughts presently. I realized I was actually enjoying the freedom bartending gave me and I should do more of it . . and enjoy it. I realized that somehow the guy selling his art in Union Square and living out of his van was a tremendous success in his own right and somehow I wasn't quite ready for that yet.

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