Sometimes, we all wish to go back in time and relive certain moments. I yearn to experience the rush and thrill of my younger days, even though they weren’t necessarily the best days of my life. I’m not interested in returning to that time because it has been difficult, but instead, revisiting how I saw the world then, the places I frequented, the people I used to know, and all the things I did or didn’t do. I want to understand how I managed to get through that difficult period in my life while searching for who I am. I want to experience those sparks of hope that ignited me back when I struggled mentally and professionally. I long to regain my beginner’s mindset in my mid-late twenties and see the world with fresh eyes once again.

I discovered something new about myself back then in 2016. 2017 continued in the spirit of an inspired writer who didn’t write much, but there was so much inspiration in me that I didn’t know what to do with it. I was overwhelmed by it, in a way. I loved being overwhelmed with all those new experiences and thoughts that occupied my mind. I was an inspired young writer then; I wrote a little at the time, mostly poetry. I wrote it on my phone often, as it came to me while smoking a cigarette in the parking lot. I felt great, cool, and one of a kind, seeing myself as a poet. Nothing of this sort had ever happened to me before. The list of poems grew over time. My reading list grew over time. I wanted to be like Charles Bukowski, my writing hero. That depraved old man inspired my young confused mind so much that after reading just a few of his poems, I knew that this was what I wanted to do. I looked around at things, people, and events around me, and poetry lines were composed inside my head. Some of them I captured, and many of them were lost somewhere deep inside my mind and down the history lane. What I got then was something I couldn’t even imagine doing before. I, a nobody, a confused dumb kid, could become a writer and a poet. That felt really novel and fucking great. That was a pivotal point in my life, one of the few that laid the ground for my writing for years. 

I remember how and when I wrote my first poetry. I was on my bed in my mom’s house, in my room, with my MacBook Pro laptop. It was a lame and pretentious poem, but it was the first one, and many more followed shortly after. You can’t be judging that shit too hard. It gave me something to work with and to work for and eventually launched me as a writer. Everything great once started as nothing, many times as a mistake, and many times as an accident. This was one of the most remarkable accidents that ever happened to me. Still, I haven’t recovered. I like it this way. I want to write. Writing helped me over the years while dealing with life and its pitfalls. Jobs failed me, and I failed jobs; relationships failed me, and I failed relationships; people, in general, failed me and failed many people in my life, but I’ve learned my lessons, and I continued to write throughout all that time. Writing became my own very effective therapy. I woke up early in the morning, pulled out my laptop, and started to write. I often did not know what I would write about, but somehow ideas came, words formed, words turned into sentences, and sentences turned into pages of written material. Somehow I ended up with over two hundred poems and a handful of prose material, and I had to do something about it. And I did. 

I revisited all the poems I ever wrote and collected them into my first poetry collection, “My Poems My Soul.” I came up with the name based on a poem with the same title. It sounded very poetic to me. It sounded like something Bukowski would have written or named one of his poems. I wasn’t trying to imitate Bukowski or copy his style, but so much of his influence poured out of me and into my writing that I couldn’t help it. I heard Bukowski’s voice in my head as I was writing my poems. It felt unusual. I felt like Bukowski a lot of times. I was reading his poetry and listening to his novels and short stories on Audible, fueling my creative mind and soul. Little did I know then that all that fascination would result in me publishing my own books years later. I self-published “My Poems My Soul” in 2020 during the pandemic. My second collection of mostly short stories and some new poems, called “Nicetown,” came out in late 2022. Today I am a real writer, not just some wannabe romantic with a temporary inspiration, but an actual published writer with a good amount of my work in the literary world. I also created a blog where my original writing experiments were posted. That blog helped me stay in shape and continue my regular writing routine. I knew I did that primarily for myself, and if other people find that interesting, that would be even better. But it all was done for a selfish me to keep me at work, keep me writing, writing, and posting regularly. This is why I stayed more productive over the last three-four years. This is how “Nicetown” book came up to be. This was a collection of all that blog writing, primarily short stories and some better poems I published since I created my blog in late October 2019. 

Getting one thing started randomly on my bed with my laptop eventually launched me to become who I am today. I am not famous but rather very much infamous. Fame is great, but I the lack of it doesn’t bother me much. I haven’t achieved any accomplishments or recognition, my books don’t sell, and nobody but a handful of people in my circle know that I write. But that is ok. I have patience. I still think that the best is yet to come. I have yet to publish something that would eventually resonate with the general public and get my name out there. I am not an attention whore, but let’s face it, all writers are and want to be one and are continuously searching for and hoping for all the attention they can get. Most writers are egoistic, self-centered, and self-indulging assholes; all that writing is not there for no reason. We all want to be famous, great, and beloved, and we all want people to admire us, praise our books, recite our words, make movies based on our books, give us prizes, kiss our assess, and make us invincible and untouchable and superior in that fashion. 

I don’t know what I want to do next in my life, hanging here, staying on the edge of the cliff, at the crossroads, or whatever the fuck I am today. I know one thing for sure, I will continue to write, even if that is just for myself, even if nobody in the world will ever see or read anything I wrote. I remember how excited and obsessed I was with the Californication show, watching it for the first time back in 2016. Based on the image of my beloved Charles Bukowski, the main character, Hank Moody, was a great visual of a modern writer with some complicated behavior and dealing with his struggles, but mainly inspiring me even more to write. I saw a writer who wasn’t a fucking bore. Hank Moody was a real man, a great writer, and he hated all that fame shit and the consequences of it, which continued to follow him throughout the show. That show was so great, funny, witty, and personal to me that even today, in 2023, I am still watching it on repeat, getting entertained, getting a good laugh, and learning something new each time. It is still, in many ways, a highly relatable show in both the writing and social world we live in today. 

I discovered that show when I was going through the worse times in my life, mentally and professionally. I found my great escape in that show. It was not just entertaining but also a great escape from the brutal reality I was living in. It felt like the stars aligned for me back then in 2016, and everything I got my hands on, watched, listened to, or read let me into this new life, a life of a writer, the unlimited, crazy world of literature with all its complications and struggles. I can’t remember another time when all the puzzle pieces fell together for me and showed me a new life, a new perspective, and a world I hadn’t seen before. I am grateful to destiny, whoever it is, and a stupid random accident or sequence of events that got me writing. I am happy where I am and looking forward to a better future. The longer I stayed in this writing world, the more great things happened for me, the more I could do and create and write, and this new universe kept building up and around me. I am happy in this place. The real writing will stay. Real writing will live forever.