A writer is a writer by any other name

So, it has come to this.

Having spent 10 months working for a cancer non-profit and touring Canada with a giant colon... yep, you read me right... here I am again, unemployed. It happens to the best of us, but at 52, I was hoping for better things. I thought I'd be living the American/Canadian dream: the big house, wife and three kids, nice salary, two vacations per year, summer house in the Hamptons/Laurentians... you know that one. We all have it and I know plenty of people here in Montreal who are living it. Not so many these days, but certainly some. I've been a writer my entire life, save for eight useless years in sales when I was young, naive and thought that a paycheck was all that mattered... and a decade in film as a unit publicist, likely the best job I ever had. The English film industry died a slow death here in Quebec starting in the early part of this millennium and I have been floundering career-wise ever since.

I thought I had it made with my recent job at the Colorectal Cancer Association of Canada, as National Director of Exhibits, touring the country with a 40-foot long, eight-foot high, pink, inflatable colon. The goal was to show people (using all the gruesome pathologies than can afflict this organ many of us are so embarassed about that we ignore it) why early screening for colorectal cancer is SO essential, at least from the age of 50 and above.

So, I took The Giant Colon to 11 cities, as far north as the Northwest Territories, from March till October, only to discover that this amazing work I was doing - truly lifesaving in nature - was merely a cover for a sales job. It requires a used-car salesman to do properly, not a writer/publicist. I was certainly pressured to book it like a salesman, at a cost of $12,500 for the first day, in any case. And I really learned a lot about myself in the process. I am a writer, plain and simple, as good as any writer on the planet. Okay, I also take pretty decent pics, but writing... ahhh, that is what most defines me, what I'd like etched on my gravestone. WRITER. Perhaps in Gothic script, satisfying the spirit of the horror buff in me.

I thought I'd give you a glimpse into the life of a career writer in trouble. It's tough out there today and, yeah, I'm scared shitless, not knowing whether I'll be able to find well-paying, meaningful work again, or whether I'll wind up living in a box on Ste. Catherine Street, ogling the strippers as they walk to-and-fro, from one downtown strip joint to the next. Stripping is one job where I'd make a great living... but, nah, it's a young person's pursuit and I don't have the body anymore. Mind you, I DID rejoin my old gym yesterday, so you never know.

I'll keep you posted.