I'm Never Going to Get There...

Finding myself in Big Bend National Park

I’m never going to arrive. Fuck.

This is what I’m thinking as I gaze up at the thousands of stars I can see from the lounge chair perched on the rocks outside our guesthouse room in Terlingua.

The town is a dusty smattering of buildings not too far from Big Bend National Park, where we’d spent the past several days camping and hiking and clearing our heads of mundane worries. Making room for bigger ones. Terlingua doesn’t have a bar with a television, but it has three little art museums that may or may not be open on any given day. It has a quasi-famous eatery/live music venue, the Starlight Café, where the host said in casual conversation to Jason and me, “Doesn’t matter to me. I can’t tell you who you are or what your gender is.” (You’ll have to trust me that it was in context and in no way performative.)There is more undyed, un-coiffed gray hair in Terlingua than in the whole Dallas metro area.

Link to a much wilder [pronounced idiotic] Big Bend story in my youth.

Maybe it was because I’d been basking in the silent remoteness of Big Bend for three days, or maybe it was the sense of home I felt in the dry-stacked rock buildings of that little ghost town. Maybe it was because I was sipping red wine out of a juice glass under the stars, but the realization that ships don’t actually come in, in the metaphorical sense, felt more like a relief than a disappointment. Perhaps that’s because I saw it coming. I seem to have that same realization over and over again, just in different colors.

We’d enjoyed the talent of a singer-songwriter named Dan Johnson that evening at the Starlight before walking back to our bungalow in the dark. He was a grand, bearded guy with a deep, sonorous voice and a generous smile. He switched back and forth between keyboard and guitar and kept it lively with familiar singalong tunes and his own original music. He seemed to enjoy himself, playing for tips, teasing people out of their chairs to dance.

Then, he told this story*:

“One day, I got a call. The voice on the other end said, ‘Is this Dan Johnson — the singer-songwriter Dan Johnson?’

‘Yes, yes it is,’ I thought, man, this is it. I’m finally gonna make it. This is THE CALL.

‘Dan, we think you’re an amazing writer and artist.’

‘Well thank you very much,’ I said, barely containing myself, I was so excited.

‘We've got this pretty college kid down here who’s a good singer, but he can’t write. Can you write him some songs?’”

At that, Dan deflated. Irritation and cynicism washed over him. And he said yes. Because work is work. He wrote that kid a bunch of songs, but the kid himself didn’t work out, and they never got recorded. The record company, however, owned what Dan had written, and they were, in Dan’s words, “all locked up, never to be heard.”

I’ve written articles that I thought were good, that I was paid to write, that never saw the light of day (or the light of the internet…whatever). I get it, Dan.

Dan has had top 40 hits on the radio. He’s been paid to write songs for famous people. And he’s still playing for tips on Saturday night at the Starlight. He did seem to love it, love his audience as much as we loved him. He didn’t seem bitter.

Maybe it’s because of this little detail:

On the way out to record the songs for that label, he found himself humming a ditty he couldn’t place until he realized, “My heart and my mind had conspired to write a song without me.”

This is too good, he thought. He kept that one for himself, and he played it for us that Saturday night at The Starlight.

“Art is the thing nobody asked you to do.” ~ Babak Ganjei

Dan’s story rolled around in my mind as lay under the stars in Terlingua that night, silently with Jason, both of us contemplating. It’s a thing I’ve been coming to for a long time, a place I’ve been before, only now I see more of the landscape. I felt it when I learned that Ann Lamott, at the time she wrote the beautiful and witty Bird by Bird in 1994, still taught school to keep her ever-present financial troubles at bay. She tells her students…

“the odds of their getting published and of it bringing them financial security, peace of mind, and even joy are probably not that great. It will not make them well. It will not give them the feeling that the world has validated their parking tickets, that they have, in fact, finally arrived.”

We went to Big Bend and Terlingua for a break, to reconnect with each other, to reconnect with ourselves. I was doubtful we could do that in three days, but we did. A place as remote and desolate as that accelerates self-discovery.

I admit it:

I want to be published because I crave the validation, the approval, for someone else to tell me, “What you’re doing is worthwhile,” and for them to do it, in the capitalist tradition in which we all fester, with money. And if I could get paid, really PAID, to write, imagine all the time I could spend doing it.

But there are other things.

There are kids to send to college, should they choose to go. Even if they don’t, 18-year-old high school graduates do not suddenly become financially independent. My kids are a priority of mine. I could spend more time writing, but I don’t because I want to hear how school went. I want to cook with them and watch TV with them and try to follow why a 4:5:4 is the best soccer lineup strategy. Try to get why certain Minecraft servers are better than others. They love it. And I love them.

There is my art, my other priorities and the fact that I live in a world requiring money to comfortably live in it.

There are choices. And there is this: Even if I get the validation of publication, well, then what? I’m not done. I won’t have arrived. I’ll still be hustlin’ for tips.

But if I work it right, if I keep my mind right and stay true to who I am, I’ll still be witty like Ann, smiling like Dan, playing for a raucous crowd at the Starlight for the rest of my life.

*Apologies to Dan Johnson, as I recounted his story from memory, and I’m sure I bent it to my own whim accidentally.