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Some people have their biological clock ticking down to Parenthood.

Mine is winding down to Success.

I’m sure it seems arrogant, but I feel like I gotta do something awesome with my life. I know success isn’t something that can really be quantified, and that being successful doesn’t mean being rich and/or famous, but I wouldn’t mind if it did for me. Everywhere are people who fail and succeed, some more spectacularly than others. Our culture is obsessed with the lives of celebrities and criminals, whose comings and goings we know as well as our own. We’re already living their lives along with them through our computer screen, TV, and gossip rag, but there are some people who really idolize and mimic celebrity behavior– for better or worse. These copycats usually wind up self-destructing in a big, face in the gutter, shots of them in lewd situations fluttering in the winds of the Internet, used and abused and burnt out kind of way. But if I were to pilfer from someone’s lifestyle various aspects or achievements, it would be to some creative end.

The choices of who I could imitate are legion, but after careful daydreaming and deliberation, I’ve managed to pick a handful of potential candidates whose lives might be worth snatching up. Or at least Xeroxing.

At first I mused that it might be nice to live the fat life of a musician or actor. But I figured out that I have virtually no tendency toward practicing music of any kind, despite my ability to achieve moderate skill when I do practice regularly, and I just wind up bored, mired in instruments and sheet paper. Being an actor is something I’ve always enjoyed toying with, but aside from being randomly and miraculously discovered while I go about my daily life, I would have no chance of competing with the svelte and coiffed starlet wannabe clones that flock to LA like seagulls to the city dump.

Oh, and have you ever seen “Catch me if you can”? It’s about this kid who was a criminal superhero, basically. Frank Abegnale Jr was a crazy multi-millionare by the time he was 20 or something. Granted, he was an enormous career criminal by the time he was 19 who specialized in bank fraud, but he was a crafty motherfucker. And now he’s got a sweet gig working with law enforcement to catch the crooks that do what he used to. He’s not in a bad place at all.

But I think I’ve narrowed my list down to a single field of specialty: writing. There are so many dynamic and incredible authors whose books I’d like to take a page from. However, I’d found there’s a big difference between me wanting to temporarily live someone’s life and me wishing I could use someone’s life as a template for my own. For example, while I’d love to write an entire novel in a matter of weeks, I don’t have enough Bennies to last a cross-country road trip. And though there is a sort of sinister appeal in going on crazy drug binges and keeping my nose close to the campaign trails, I probably wouldn’t do it in my body since I don’t want to fry my brain and wreck my body before I get to have a mid-life crisis.

So I’ve shortened the list even more. Because the technology for life-borrowing hasn’t yet been invented, my remaining option is to emulate. And even though few people I admire did anything noteworthy before they were 30, I see no reason to procrastinate all over the place and panic when I’m turning 27 that I’m running out of time. But since I know that I probably would just put things off for nearly another decade, I picked someone who would light a fiery blaze of productivity ‘neath my arse. Someone who not only did something before she was 30, but made her big move at the tender age of 23: author Carson McCullers. For her 50 years of life, she was generally melancholy and poetic, with a fondness for the drink, whose moodiness and illness only lent strength to her mind and skill. Although we’re nowhere near a perfect match in a side-by-side comparison, there are definitely similarities that lead me to think “Hey, if she could do it…” with eager, yet complacent hopefulness. Carson wrote her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, when she was 23, and damnit if I won’t try to do the same. I oughta get crackin’.

Plus, the harder I work at something I actually want to do, the less I’ll have to work at crap I hate– like a real job. I’ll be a happy camper if I can hold off on getting another job for a handful of years more. With a spectral Quiznos sandwich mechanic playing my Ghost of Corporate Past, I’d be hard-pressed to run my Luck Ship aground that hard again. From foot-long subs piled with more than a pound of meat and slathered in lardsauce, things can only improve. And that’s one hell of a relief.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I must fix myself a drink and get back to brooding hunchedly over my laptop while I feverishly work on my manuscript.