Writing is goddamned absurd!

The labor is a constant, bald fight against meaninglessness itself! One is guaranteed full exposure to the enemy's firing power! What could possibly be more ludicrous? What could be more estranged from nature? While I had crossed snowy peaks and blinding deserts, been threatened and ransomed and nearly starved, I cannot say I was equal to this particular challenge, but my chosen course left little choice. Suffice it to say that Lear's blasted heath could only have been imagined by a writer.

And if that weren't bad enough, there was no money in it! Not a damn cent! I failed to find someone who would present me with the imaginary contract for my imaginary guide, so I toiled away uncertain as to its ultimate fate. While I knew the book, a ware, most certainly had potential to make me a profit, but the labor was a foul-tempered bitch of a mistress who paid slave's wages, which was to say no wages.

In this, writing was most unlike lawyering!

I had been reduced to becoming my very own bureaucracy, a pitiful functionary with a staff of one: himself. I had been reduced to taking a post beneath the dignity of the most incompetent, depraved clerk I had encountered at the mouth of the Mississippi.

I resisted even the daily structure of a schedule and opted instead for simple, manic velocity; I threw myself into a frenzy about the thing simply to feel alive, simply to create some sense of urgency about these dead, dead words, these wicked, curling ciphers that had been such staunch allies in my lawyering and were now such wicked foes in my authoring!

The task of creation before me was two-fold and, ergo, doubly absurd: not only did I need to create a meaningful sense of urgency about my need to commit words to a page, but those words needed to elucidate a state of urgency about California. That urgency palpably existed for me—mired in Ohio at the desk at which I'd learned Latin as a child and studied for the bar examination—but it was not one so palpably extant for the likes of you, Dear Reader. My reading audience, as it were, perhaps thrived on the sort of illusion of stability and the stale stand-in for living that a steady occupation supplies—put another way: exactly what I was trying to avoid myself.

In other words, my intended reading audience was exactly what I strove not to be, but exactly what California required to grow my intended reading audience. Do you understand my plight, Dear Readers? Empathy, while a problem, could be surmounted; absurdity was another matter, indeed. Adventures into the Absurd lead to absurd dilemmas—as I was soon to learn in spades.

Earlier I warned you—you emigrants, you readers, you pie-oh-neeeers—that God's country would not be kind, and it would deal with fools and amateurs most harshly. Now, I had the following task before me: how could I get precisely those kinds of people—amateurs and fools [he winks]—I kid!— over those 2,000 miles?