(Forging) My "Weird" License

“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
Hunter S. Thompson wrote that. Or mumbled it under his breath through a cigarette holder, I’m not sure.
For me it is a call to action. Not, as the author might see it, to booze and pills and guns and golf. (Though I must say that, for some reason, I respect the hell out of that.) Rather, a call to join the working week of the creative class, among people who try to induce change in the minds of some kind of audience, letting their tweaked inner life out in a droplet or a flood for the public’s fickle tasting.
I left teaching in part because I was looking for a creative outlet, for a part in the “means of production” of the culture I was introducing to teenagers with better things to do. I mean, I was always creative, so that wasn’t new. And I’ve always been a teacher; I have that way about me.
But the job, the day in and out, was for me an endless internship for a position I didn’t know how to seek, a perptual practicum in professional weirdness. I embraced the work–too hard, it seems. I burned out and I fell apart. I laid low for a while.
But I’m back, and I’m going pro.