You Never See A Fat Lion: The Leigh Cowart Dispatches

I never set out to be a writer. A ballerina, yes. A field researcher, yes. A technician in a biofilm research lab, sure. And I did all of that. But journalism somehow never came up on my radar, and certainly writing for a living never crossed my mind once I left the third grade. Who even wants to be a writer?

 

Being a writer is lonely, unglamorous, and pretty dumb most of the time. It involves, at least for me, a lot of bad decisions made with regard to my bedtime, an embarrassing amount of time spent “thinking” (blankly staring at a wall, lying in a blanket fort with my eyes closed, drinking cold tea at a bar while starting at a notebook), and legendary internet k-holes in the name of research. However, it also involves things like watching a stranger skin a steaming, dead deer, spending a week with a porn star, and getting blasted in the face with terrible rock covers at amateur MMA fights. I get a special joy whenever I do an interview with a mainstream media outlet in my underwear, but the rest of the time is usually spend wallowing in filth and stacks of impossible notes. (I don’t really bathe near deadlines.)

 

There is often occasion for me to look up, assess my situation, and wonder how the fuck I got here.

 

The gateway drug to becoming - shudder - a writer was, as it so often is, one of my favorite things: boobies. Though a series of fortuitous events, I landed a chance to do some science writing for a new magazine that billed itself as “The Economist meets the Daily Show.” Headed by the brilliant and notorious Twitter pugilist Paul Carr, the premise of NSFWCORP was just too weird to turn down. 

 

This is how I learned that, apparently, when faced with the terrifying abyss of wide-open pitching options, I dive straight for the soft warmth and security of the maternal familiar: boobs. Thus, my first-ever pitch became my first-ever piece of paid writing, “New Study Finds Breast Size Linked to Bounciness”. 

 

I did not realize that I was already doomed. Carr paid promtly - an unholy anomaly in this business - and I was mostly just tickled that I was able to use the euphemism “daddy’s special milk bar” with impunity. No, I would not realize how truly fucked I was until later.

 

Fast-forward a couple of weeks. Picture me sitting on my bed, notebooks and snacks spread out before me in a prototypic version of what would become my “bed desk”, hunched awkwardly over a sleeping newborn baby and a gruesome emergency c-section incision, scowling down at the glowing aura of a tiny cell phone. Looking for all the world like some kind of raptorial bird of prey, I pecked at my screen with a grimace, my sweaty fingers clumsy on the greasy swipe-enabled keyboard. I was writing.

 

Working like this meant that a wholly innocuous sentence (“Ted drove Marv to the bar”) was always one lapse in vigilance away from cataclysmic nonsense. (“Red groped married titties Lamar). Shit like this happened a lot, but I was undeterred. Swearing under my breath, I was slowly writing a gruesome piece about the Ebola outbreak in Uganda, and nothing could stand in my way. Not a weeping incision that kept me from comfortably sitting with my laptop on its namesake, not a beautiful chubby infant in need of hourly feedings, not a brain so addled by physical trauma and blood loss that I was not allowed to drive yet, nothing. 

 

Someone was willing to pay me to write science in a way I’d always wanted to read it myself, and I would be damned to hell if I was going to let the corporeal limitations of my durable little body stand in my way. So I wrote. On that little phone, bleeding from my crotch like an exsanguinating hog, I wrote like a fucking demon. Inches away from a degree in molecular biology, a now five-person family to feed, I started writing and proceeded to refuse to do go back to the real world of work. I fell in stupid, dumb love with writing. I realized that I could get paid to indulge my (probably) pathological curiosity and do things like pick the brains of experts. For cash. There was literally no going back. I’d tasted freedom and all of the angst permeating PhD applications and MCATS, the daunting prospect of the dreaded specialization, suddenly none of it mattered. It was the ultimate loophole. And from the start, I was so down to exploit the shit out of it.

 

It’s an insane thing to do. Writing for money means trading stability for the kind of wild, feral freedom of which most people can only dream.

 

Which brings me to you, dear reader. The precious alchemy of turning words into rent would be nothing if not for the people who are willing to back their assessment of my work’s worth with their cash. I’m sure you’re not still reading this - don’t worry, no one ever does - but on the off chance that you are, I want you to know that I dedicate this book to you. Yes, you. Without which I’d be just another miserable grad student, slogging away at the bench, writing profanity in my lab notebook, and spitting the venom of a curiosity caged. The only reason I get to do what I do is because readers like you have decided that I am worthy.

 

I don’t know what the fuck is wrong with you people, but I am ever grateful. This compilation is for you, you fucking weirdos.