Ben Bonkoske

It goes against my intuition to write tonight.

I’ve lived the past…whatever, you get it, since I moved back to Chicago…

four years believing that if you don’t force things, and go easy on yourself, good things will just happen.

Life has been easy as hell. Time flies when you’re taking everything, oh so seriously.

It’s as if I don’t even deserve the hard days, because everything is so pathetically easy. And the worst part is, I’m chasing some carrot, when I don’t even like careers.

I’ve tried for a long time to be what Daddikins wants, but I’d like to be who I want to be. Do what I want to do, as if I believed in myself the way my college doctor did. Never underestimate the importance of other people’s belief in you.

I see so many young people and think, damn, you are going to be so successful, but I just hope and prey they figure out how to do it. And part of that is for some smart kid to think for himself.

I’d like to actually go after what I want. Do what I think is best for me. Because, funny enough, no matter how zen you are, if you don’t go after what you love, you’ll die of a broken heart.

Another funny story, if you never get out from under your parent’s wing, you’ll never go anywhere. I read that in a book.

And I know…I’m supposed to motorcycle to South America.

But ya know what’ll happen after that? I’d end up right back here, because that whole story is just about running away…from my dad. Read like, Chapter 2 of Spoon in the Road. (Ok, Chapter 4)

And we all know how my bike trip ended…you’re reading about it right now.

I’ve learned that human behavior is predictable. You can easily detect how people will react to certain things. People care a lot more about certain things than other things.

People care a lot more about some grandiose story about running away, so much that they’d watch a good man die just for a good story; That’s maybe why we’ve got some suicides in literature – the world would kill for an excuse to read.

But I don’t want to write for some superficial reason. I don’t want to be some “Fauteur.” Sadly, I think that story is still waiting for me, haunting me like a ghost.

But really, I am trying to write about what I care about – and here is the bad news, I don’t think that the world is going to care a whole lot about a sincere story that some nobody wants to write from his heart. People just don’t work like that.

And sad to say, neither does literature. It’s been a killer to realize that Literary Fiction is very different than stories written from the heart. And everyone knows, any artist who does it for Love, is no more than a fool.

But foolish, and unsexy as it sounds, I want to write from my gut. I want to follow what I think is going to work for me, not what I’m supposed to do because other people care more about those things.

To write from my soul, not from the group consciousness of some dying vain legacy.

Even my best friend said, “Oh, Ben Bon? Yeah, he fell off.” He was joking in that honest way, that says what people truly think.

And ya know something, forget them. I can’t remember anything about them besides their name and what they look like, so why should I care who they think I am?

I’ve got to know who I am.

So, this summer, I’m watching a cat for 7 weeks, in my hometown, on a modest paycheck, and will spend it writing what I love. That is how I wrote Spoon in the Road – which is the real story of that novel: A young writer, writing. Doing what I believe is best for nobody important.