Month: May 2024

A Shift of Wit

You’re a writer – you know how it goes. You push and pull and shove your story into a nice straight line, solving problems and ironing out the bumps. And then a character pops up, and the whole thing goes to heck!

So, if you’ve followed along in The Story of Me, you’ll recall that I finally published the book – Adventures of a Sawdust Man.

It was great fun to write, and rewrite, and rewrite, and, well, finally to finish rewriting.

Here’s something I have to admit to you. I’m a little embarrassed,  but maybe it will help you, too.

Back at the end of the 90s, my life was an absolute mess. A dreadful divorce, a voice-over career that was stuck in the garage, and a management career that fell straight into the dumpstah. I couldn’t make anything work.

And I mysteriously got the idea that I had somehow screwed up back when I got out of college 20 years earlier. That I should have  gone to Hollywood to make my career and fortune, and, that had I done so, my life would not have been the shambles it had become.

I was kind of kicking the can  backward down the road,  blaming my current failures on an imagined failure 20 years in the past.

That sounds crazy, I know, but it was pervasive – it shaped my every thought.

I bought a partnership in a dreadful little business that failed at every turn, reinforcing the idea that I’d run away from my opportunities when I was out of school now almost 30 years before, and was, in effect, a dud. Thank goodness, the Great Recession put that awful business out of business.

As my world solidified and got better, that imagined failure ceased to be imaginary, and became true to me.

Since then, lo these last fifteen or so years, I’ve been scrambling to make up for lost time, to pull off a creative miracle and prove that, even though I turned my back on the opportunity to be like Steve Martin amd Robin Williams, I am NOT a dud.

I crafted all these websites, all these posts, scratched out these novels – somehow, somehow I can fix it. I’ve learned so much, somehow the Universe will see that I’ve changed… digging in the Unknown mines of the Internet to find the jewel that would restore me to my rightful place as a successful talent, wealthy, famous, etc, etc…

And then, just three weeks ago, I had a sharp and stunning memory. In discovering it, I felt as dumb as a box of rocks.

When I got out of school, way back in the late 70’s, I DID consider a Hollywood career. I remembered that I looked at it long and hard and that I orbited the citadel that was Variety magazine, reading the casting calls and actually driving to their locations.

And I remembered that I made the conscious choice to stay OUT of acting. I knew in my heart of hearts that I was a good imitator,  but not a good actor. I could imitate good actors, but I could not act.  I decided then that an acting career was not for me.

Whether I could act or not, the notion that I’d later picked up, that I was a Delbert Dumbbutt who somehow managed to miss a golden opportunity, simply wasn’t true.

OMG, you cannot imagine the weight that has lifted off of me, and off of my work!

I got nothing to prove, man. Nothing.

So, now, in the re-rewrite of that book, there is no weight, no pressure to prove that at least I’m a good writer. Now I can just tell the story my characters want me to write. A new one has already popped,  completely  changing the course of the book!

And yet, and yet, I have started all these websites and all these projects, and I do earn my daily bread as a professional writer. So, all was not in vain.

The message to you, my writerly friend, is to look long and hard at your assumptions, for they may not be what you think!

Fingers of Treachery

So, like, 30 years ago my then-2.5-year-old daughter was a gentle, curious soul. She still is, but, on that Friday morning, the one after Thanksgiving, she was fascinated by the wild geese congregating on the golf course outside the San Diego restaurant in which we had just breakfasted.

Knowing geese to be nasty creatures, according to my mother, who knew about these things (“geese are mean” is a direct quote), I leapt up upon a small retaining wall to startle them so that they would fly away and not be mean to my toddler daughter who insisted on toddling towards them. Silly me, I slipped and crashed onto the ground, breaking my left elbow in 5 places. The geese were certainly startled, and also rather amused.

Well, many years went by, and I began to lose feelings in my little finger on that left hand. Oh, the sensation of touch went away, but never my feelings of anger at the geese. So, along came a surgery called a cubital release to restore feeling, along with the release of the carpal and guyot tunnels.  Be free, little finger!

To restore both feeling and movement to the finger, I just recently decided to take up playing the piano. In truth, I’ve returned to it, as it became impossible to play with the loss of feeling. Although my family will tell you I never played with any feeling at all.

So, in the garage do I have an Alesis keyboard given to me by my doting wife some twenty-five or so years ago. It’s a full-on synthesizer, and oy is it nice. Except the highest “A” key is broken and can’t be played, and it’s hugely heavy and requires either headphones or an amplifier to hear it. But it’s cool.

Alas, we already have a battered, out of tune upright piano in the house, so the lovely Alesis sits quietly in the garage.

But nowadays I play the upright so poorly that I dare not entertain the neighbors any more than I must, so I’ve set up the Alesis on the workbench in the garage.

It’s not that bad – I have two workbenches, and this one has carpet under it. Although my littlest dog has taken to using the carpet as the rainy-day restroom – solid matter, not liquid. Shovel the stuff out though we do, and shampoo as we oft have, it still retains just the slightest hint of puppy pooage. Still, a candle burning seems to chase it away.

You can’t stand and play the piano for very long unless you’re a rock star, so I dragged a tall stool over in front of it. Not tall enough, so I feel like a Muppet when I’m sitting there.

But, it plays, and I play, and we play together, and then my left hand gets sooooo tired, and the ring finger starts playing notes I’ve asked to not, and it gets kind of frustrating.

I thought maybe I would record my progress, and so hooked a Zoom recorder in between the keyboard and the headphones. Although my little Zoom had an SD card in it, for some reason it decided that it didn’t, and we argued about that for quite some time. Eventually I found the positively ancient Vivitar card reader that, surprisingly, had a bunch of those micro-SD card adapters, and one, just one, little tiny micro SD card.

Well. Between the dog poo smell and the muppet chair and fighting with the SD card, I began to lose a little steam. I mean, I do work for a living, and, well, this was supposed to be relaxing.

It’s funny how, when you’re just goofing around, you can play anything you want, but when you’re a little bit frustrated and perhaps a touch cranky and you’ve turned on a recorder, now you can’t play anything.

And now it’s late and the dogs want a walk and I still haven’t had dinner and my hand is really tired and, I mean, come on, you know?

Our job as writers is to write.

Well, I am here to tell you that, in order to save your sanity, just stick with it, and for heaven’s sake don’t take up the piano!