“Alcoholism is a disease, but it's the only disease you can get yelled at for having.”
- Mitch Hedberg
I saw a survey recently that found that 80% of people say they would like to write a book. But, of those, only fifteen percent ever get started on one. And, less than one percent ever actually write one. Like a lot of things, there's a big gap between the wanting and the doing.
If you were going to write one book, what would you write about? Seriously, what or who would be your subject?
I would write a bio-esque book about my friend, the late John Kilzer. I've talked about him here before. I've said that Dos Eques Beer should have used him in their commercials as “The World's Most Interesting Man.”
From Jackson, TN, he was Mr. Tennessee in basketball, played college ball at Memphis State University, got a master's degree in English, was a college English professor, became a successful songwriter and recording artist, became a raging alcoholic, cussed out Paul McCartney on the phone and got physically thrown out of the Louvre. He got beat up by a mime in Paris, was in and out of jail and rehab numerous times, got sober, got unsober, got sober, got unsober again, got sober, got a PhD, continued to release music, went to seminary, got ordained, started a recovery ministry called The Way which was like no other anywhere on earth, and heartbreakingly, lost his battle with the demons that haunted him.
John could, in the same conversation, quote Ernest T. Bass from the Andy Griffith Show and St. Thomas Aquinas' from his Summa Theologica. He could laugh about something Hazel Motes said in Flannery O'Connor's novel Wise Blood and then recite passages of T.S. Eliot's Wasteland. He did his doctoral thesis on the Irish poet William Butler Yeats.
A most interesting man. That's who I would write a book about.
Here's John with a little help from Bruce Hornsby on the piano.