In 1995 or so I was at a writers' party in Boulder––avant-garde in flavor, redolent with anti-establishment rhetoric and the titillation of kinky sexuality in the way that writers' parties so often are––when I ran into a guy a few years older than me. I recall that he was tall, and whenever I'm at a party I try to hang out with tall people because it's so difficult to communicate with short ones with random sounds muddying the air.

We talked about what we were up to and I found out that he was a dad. I asked him how that went and of course told him (as I told everyone in those days) that I was afraid of being a father for too many reasons. Specifically the writing thing: I needed my precious time to write, and kids would get in the way, blah blah blah. But this guy, Bayard Johnson, put the lie to my excuses because he had a book out (which I didn't yet) and was also a screenwriter. He said that

being a father was the best thing ever for his writing because his kids gave him something to write for other than himself 

and that perspective completely floored me. Maybe I was wrong about the time thing. Maybe there's something alchemical about fatherhood that can–– unless you screw it up royally, which of course was always a danger for me––clarify your identity and purpose on earth in a way that nothing else can. Maybe I was hiding behind the idea that children would steal time from my writing, and real reluctance to become a father actually had nothing to do with writing at all.

This idea hit me at a great time––I wouldn't have been able to receive it if I wan't as old as my father had been when I was born. This was my own version of the biological clock going off. A psychic clock, if you will. When that clock started ticking, several realizations began to free me:

• I wasn't my father

• If I had a curse in my future, it wasn't exactly the same as his

• I did not have to accept the certainty of passing on my "bad blood"

• I could live for something else other than myself

That last one in particular really grabbed me. How long had I been living only for myself? Trying to get, get, get? And how was that going for me? Not to well–– I wasn't getting much, and what I got I didn't necessarily want to keep.

What if there was, as Bayard Johnson intimated, something else to live for? Something else to write for? Eventually, I'd find the answer. But I had to run through lots of gauntlets before I could hear it.