I am a perfectionist. This I’m sure comes as a shock to many people who know me. My shoes are not shiny and my room is anything but neat and tidy. My room however, is not public; it’s private and purely functional. It’s my own private sanctuary where I get most of my work done. I don’t like shiny shoes because they fail to fulfill what to me is the basic function of a shoe. That is to take the abuse of the world so your feet don’t have to. If shiny shoes take much abuse they get scuffed and then I either have to buff them or look like a slob. I don’t consider myself a slob and don’t care for others considering me one either. Neither do I like polishing shoes all the time so for me, shiny shoes are imperfect.

If a stranger saw my room he would likely think I was a slob. There are piles of books and papers strewn about the place and perhaps half a dozen coffee mugs that haven’t quite made their way back to the kitchen. Stranger however, would be mistaken because he wouldn’t understand what he was looking at.

Part of the plot of the film "Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade" centers on a map with no names. The characters don’t understand the map because they don’t have the key. The stranger in my room would not understand what he was looking at because he would not have the key. He would see dozens of books in nearly as many genres.

I am a writer, or more specifically a thinker, a philosopher if you will. It is my vocation and I take it very seriously. I read a lot, fiction and non-fiction on a wide range of topics to keep my mind sharp. If I was a whaler I would sharpen my harpoons, but I am not a whaler, I am a thinker and so I sharpen my mind. All this reading and thinking by its self is, well selfish. So I write. Writing is the conduit that takes all that reading and philosophizing and sends it out into the world, hopefully to make the world a more beautiful place.

Stranger would wonder why all those books are off the shelf and I could tell him about each one because I have the key. He might wonder about the coffee mugs. Well I like coffee; coffee lubricates my work. I drink coffee when I read, I drink coffee when I write, and I drink coffee when I think. So if you see a lot of coffee mugs it likely means I’ve been getting a lot done and that’s a good thing. Stranger wouldn’t understand this without the key. That’s OK though, because my room is private and there are no strangers in it.

If there were a stranger in my room, I would feel compelled to explain everything or to clean everything up before he got there so that he might not ask as many questions. I could push the piles of books into the corner and through a sheet over them like whitewash. I don’t want the stranger to ask questions because I am a perfectionist and I know I’m not perfect. If I start explaining about the books and coffee mugs he might ask to see some of my writings.

My writings are far from perfect! Stranger might laugh; he might not understand my metaphors. Worst of all, I can visualize Stranger’s bushy eyebrows* scowling at me from behind my papers as he tells me to get off my keister and stop wasting time, to get a real job, or go back to school. It’s not that I don’t want people to read what I write, I honestly do, when it’s perfect.

I want to be C. S. Lewis and Earnest Hemmingway all wrapped up in one. When people talk about Hemming way they never say things like, “if only poor old Earnest had gotten off his keister and gone to med. school…” and no one ever regrets that Lewis wasn’t a bricklayer. The real reason I wish I was Lewis or Hemmingway is that they were comfortable in their own skin, or at least that’s what I tend to think about them. They were both revolutionaries in their own way and both somewhat controversial yet they went ahead and published their work. They had no guarantee people would like it, especially at first. I tend to think of them as literary demigods, untouchable. In reality I know they were much more like me. I doubt they were really all that comfortable with themselves, Hemmingway committed suicide after all.

*I don’t know why Stranger has bushy eyebrows, he just does.