By Kurt McGinnis Brown

Late in his career a baseball player named Willie Davis stated his life’s goal was to die having spent all his money and owing no one a single dollar.  Zero balance.  Financial perfection.  Davis was speaking about money but I applied his goal to the junk that surrounded me after I was released from jail, age 21, with a felony record, junk that I promptly hauled to the dumpster behind my building. 

Post-purge I still had clothes on.  Also remaining were a chair, a mattress, and random mismatched silverware and plates.  A mug, I think.

Stuff.  That was easy for me to say goodbye to.  Now, the end of my life coming into clearer focus, I’m again purging.  Up from the basement came folding chairs needed when hosting large dinners we no longer host, suspect lamps that work but spark danger when I plug them in, board games that lack rulebooks or pieces, cans of crusted paint dried to the same nondescript color.  Down from the attic came furniture and clothes not seen in years. 

Donate, recycle, trash.

Ideally, before it’s too late, I’ll clear my head of all creative ideas, die with no plans for stories or plays or poems.  The nature of creation of course makes this impossible.  To hope for it would be a sign of insanity.  I’m not that crazy.  Yet.  But I can get rid of the pounds of paper around the house.

Stacked on the floor in the closet in my workroom is a lifetime of notebooks.  Opening any one of those notebooks causes explosions of emotion.  I handle them carefully.  In the basement, in what used to be the coal room, is a black filing cabinet crammed with manuscripts and typescripts of unfinished novels, stories and plays.  I avoid handling these altogether. 

Art requires elimination.  It’s the fundamental difference between life (this! and this! and this!) and art (this? or this?).  My most profound creative act might be destroying all notes and drafts and declaring my work at an end.  Art is what you finish.

During Covid half of our friends bought firepits.  Over the course of several weeks in cool fall weather some year soon I’ll invite myself to each house in turn and ceremoniously burn a foot or so of paper. 

Thanks in advance, friends.

There remain the computer files.  The conundrum for our time is not how many angels can dance on the head of a pin but why doesn’t a thumb drive holding thousands of pages of drafts and notes weigh more than a blank thumb drive?  After the bonfires, a finger on delete declares my lifetime obsession complete.  Only what was published or performed should remain.

Then, though, I have to die.  Otherwise I’ll continue dreaming up new stories and keep scribbling.  More paper, more files.

A timing problem.

Whenever my last moment occurs, it annoys me, a lifetime writer, that it will go forever unrecorded, no story ever made of it.  If someone is with me, she or he might describe my dying to others, but that’s from the outside, not an account from the person to whom it matters most, the one who trained himself to pay attention, to transform what he experiences into stories.

When young, full of the great novels I was devouring, I expected my life to be story that led through adventures to a meaningful climax.  Now, losing memory and heading aching and unsteady into old age, I accept that my life, while it will have that definitive ending, has no plot.  No rising action, no climax, no denouement.  Just this and this and this and….  And finally this.  Me.  Alone.  Love, end of love.  Obsession, end of obsession. 

© 2026 Kurt McGinnis Brown

Kurt’s plays have been performed across the country, and his fiction has appeared in national journals. He’s finishing a book tracing his transformation from criminal to creative writer. His work on land and poverty took him to countries he’d otherwise never have experienced. http://kurtmcginnisbrown.com/