I GOT A FIRE LIT IN ME

Dear K,

I've never been able to do small goals. I think that's why I've never been able to finish the things I start. I know I should be just going on one mile runs, but I want to run across the Sahara. When I ride my bicycle I hear a sports announcer in my ear, saying my last name like it's a prayer. "Is K*****n going to do it? Is he going to ride his bicycle faster and longer than any other human being alive?" I live for those stupid dreams. I ride my bicycle with the belief, or delusion, that in that moment, when I lose myself, when I lose this stupid world around me where I'm just a guy who works in a bank and sits in a cubicle and has no interaction with history and will die and be forgotten so quickly, it might as well be tomorrow, but when I ride my bicycle and hear that voice, hear that little voice saying "K*****n, K*****n, K*****n, K*****n, K*****N! K*****N! K*****N!" I my tires leave the ground, my body leaves the ground, my soul leaves this body, I am lifted and transported. I become something just for a moment. I touch that other universe, the one right next to ours where that is the reality. Where I am the man who is riding a bicycle faster than anyone has ever ridden a bicycle before I become my dreams, for one single shining moment when I am on the verge of collapsing from being out of breath. When I RUN, god damn! When I push that limit inside myself I open up a door to a land where nothing can't be done. The same thing happens when I write. Hell yes I want to be taught in High Schools. You bet your ass I want a Nobel Prize for literature.

That's ego talking though. You know what I really want? I want to be satisfied with something I write, and thank GOD that will never happen. I will write the rest of my life and I don't ever want to be satisfied. I want to keep getting better. I want to write through twenty different styles. I want to write so much that people look back and say: "this was K*****n? It's so different from his later stuff? I'm a fan of his early work, he was rougher around the edges. Have you read his recent stuff? He's really let himself go."

I've been covering these ambitions up my whole life and I think it is about damn time that I stopped. I have a fire lit inside of me and I mean to feed it one page of writing at a time until it is a towering inferno. I mean to sacrifice time and energy and thought and love to it. I mean to make myself into something. I mean to do great works in this world with nothing but some fingers and some buttons and some paper and some ink. I want to capture lightning and heat and breath in words. I know it can be done, and I want to do it.

In the meantime, I'm gonna finish this marathon. I'm going straight from running around the block to trying to run 26.2 miles. Right up to the Queen's Balcony. Right up to Buckingham Palace. I've got my sights set on the big things, but don't worry. I'm not giving up. I'm gonna put the blood and sweat in until I get there.

Yours,

K