There’s a prized book on my shelf that I can see just over the top of my laptop screen. It’s a first edition copy of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72 signed by Hunter S. Thompson. I imagined some star-struck college student strutting up to the hesitant Thompson at a campus tour table fifty years ago, feeling like he knew him from the “Vegas book.” 

The kid would have fawned, gushing on and on about his favorite lines, while the reclusive author smiled politely, dying one of a hundred small deaths that day. Then when the gauntlet was over, Thompson would go back to his hotel in Ann Arbor or Athens or Ithaca and fall onto his bed, his back aching from his unevenly lengthed legs, trying not to think about the notecards he’d have to answer from students tomorrow (he didn’t like to lecture, and instead would answer student questions from cards).

Thompson would have been about 36 when this was signed, which today was making me a bit upset. I’ve long had a habit of comparing my age to the ages of my creative heroes to gauge where I’m at in life. It started when I was 12 or so, when I was in a rock band called Deuce. I’d tell myself that Eddie Van Halen was 23 when Van Halen 1 came out, so I had plenty of time to write some hit songs and make my mark on the world. 

When Deuce fell apart (ironically because the founding brothers didn’t want me in the band anymore), I’d already moved on writing and filmmaking, and had a new idol: Wes Anderson. Yes, roll your eyes, but he was en vogue at the time, and only 27 when Bottle Rocket came out. At 19, that left me plenty of time to make a heady feature and fertilize the media landscape with my nitrogenated brilliance. 

This didn’t happen. Nevertheless, I was a writer, and had focused on another one of my heroes who can betray a certain lack of imagination and literary depth for anyone claiming to make a living with words: Hunter Thompson. When he wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, he was in financial straits, trying to support a family, with only a couple of moderate written successes keeping him afloat. That changed when the book came out. By then he was 35, a year before he signed my book. 

I’m 39 now, which as I said, was causing me to be a shoescowl today. I figured I’d have created more by now, written more. I imagined at this point in life professors would mention my work in college classes, study it, task their pupils with breaking down the allegorical significance of a character who wears snakeskin boots at a funeral while on hallucinogenic mushrooms. 

If it smells like I’m brewing a cup of Main Character Syndrome, your nose is sharp. But also, eat grass because you’re reading this right now. Still, I was questioning my entire life journey and career when I received a message on Instagram from a fan of ROOK.

I’m a hermit by nature. I also hate idol worship and authority figures. So I don’t do well with messages of praise or in-person interactions with people who follow my work. I say to myself, there’s no difference between you or me, why do you want to say ‘thank you’ or get a picture? It doesn’t make sense and causes extreme self-loathing (case in point). But this message was different.

It was from a man in the military, a tank driver, stationed in another country. He said ROOK had spoken to him in a number of ways, but in particular, helped him “get through being in a dusty field eating boil-in-bag meals while also shitting into bags.”

I sat in my dining room speechless, shaking my head. Not because of the man’s circumstances or prose or anything like that. It was because I realized that I’d never shit into a bag. 

I’ve pissed into plenty of Gatorade bottles and Buc-ees cups in my life, but I’ve never squatted over and dropped a Rob Schneider into any sort of plastic receptacle. Even when I go camping I don’t bring a shovel. Why would I? If a raccoon or bear has the chutzpah to fight me for the title, no buried excrement is going to make the difference. Even when the deep freeze happened in Texas in 2021 and I had no power or water for a week, I just went out into my yard, sometimes the front one, dropped trou and left my Aaron eggs right on top of the snow. 

Maybe I’m just lazy. Or maybe that’s the difference between a man who volunteers to serve his country in a tank and one that whimpers about his creative legacy to strangers on the Internet. Whatever it is, it broke me from my spell of heavy-headedness. 

But if it ends up wearing off, I still have Frank McCourt. He was 66 when Angela’s Ashes came out and they awarded him the Pulitzer.