THIS TIME, the question on Quora was “Why do you not want to be famous?” and I read it at four in the morning. That’s before I’d had the first sip of my Café Bustelo (a good coffee to wake up with). So I put on Miles Davis’s WALKIN’ (a good album to wake up with), took a gulp from my mug and responded with this:
If I was famous, there’d be all these interesting young men with extraordinarily exotic mind-altering drugs that I’ve never even heard of who would want to hang out with me and be my friend and have fascinating conversations about reality just because I was famous.
And there’d be all these gorgeous, slinky young women who would want to sleep with me and do things I’ve never even heard of—all of which I could do while on those extraordinarily exotic mind-altering drugs—just because I was famous.
Alas, at this point in time I’m just too damn old to take advantage of all those wonderful opportunities, so why tempt myself?
I’ll just have to remain anonymous . . .
FEATURED IMAGE: The lovely image at the top of this page I found on Pinterest titled “Psychedelic Landscape” (the term I had typed into Google). Looking for the artist, I traced the image back to a website called electreelife.com, which showed me a dead-end Disallowed Host page. This was a first: after years of making tens of thousands of searches on the worldwide web, I’d never come across a Disallowed Host page before. And I left the slinky young women in my imagination, where they belong.
Mystically liberal Virgo enjoys long walks alone in the city at night in the rain with an umbrella and a flask of 10-year-old Laphroaig who strives to live by the maxim, “It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know that just ain’t so.
I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a college dropout (twice!). Occupationally, I have been a bartender, jewelry engraver, bouncer, landscape artist, and FEMA crew chief following the Great Flood of ’72 (and that was a job that I should never, ever have left).
I am also the final author of the original O’Sullivan Woodside price guides for record collectors and the original author of the Goldmine price guides for record collectors. As such, I was often referred to as the Price Guide Guru, and—as everyone should know—it behooves one to heed the words of a guru. (Unless, of course, you’re the Beatles.)