Manure

Yesterday I had a good idea for a prose poem. I grabbed the computer and typed it as best I could. It came together quickly and I followed the thread through to the ending.

At which time I realized it was complete crap.

Creative people too often complain their stuff is terrible when they no better. I find such people tiring and tune them out, which is why I want to be careful in saying the draft I wrote, about a guy I knew in college who sang aloud, despite being born from a good idea, is absolute manure. I've written good stuff and bad. I know the difference. That and I'm not looking for anyone to build me up about this. I'm not stopped by the failure. I'm not even slowed down. Why should I mind manure?

Manure can be useful. Spread it just so and things grow, so I'm told. Sure it stinks, but we get over that. If we can make use of it, then manure might just smell sweet.

(Manure, by the way, turns out to be a fun topic about which to read, if done right. Donald Hall, whose essays are done right, wrote often and delightfully about his grandfather's manure pit. See Life Work and Essays After Eighty. Check that shit out.)

In creative work, failures far outnumber successes, so there has to be some benefit to the creator that goes beyond failure and success. In other words, creative people have to appreciate the turds as much as the roses.

That last sentence certainly felt like a turd.

More than just accepting when things go awry, I have to enjoy having written these things and then use them as fodder of some kind. I'm not saying that I smile and dance every time something falls apart. More often than not I pound the desk and swear a lot. Still, there has to be something more to creating than being successful or else things just ain't gonna work out.

Some failures can be rewritten, if the idea is that good. More often, the idea lies fallow and comes up in some other piece, some other context. But most of the time, the idea fades away. Another one comes along.

When I was a writing teacher I would write a page, share it with students, then shred it in front of them. "I can always write more," I'd tell them. Getting too attached to something I've created, well, that's a big old mistake.

Just to make sure of the crappiness, I've just re-read the draft prose poem. Yep, it's bad. This is the best section and even it disappoints me:

His face was always shadowed. His smile a white surprise. His eyes ready to break into song. I'd hear him in the showers. His terrible voice echoing off the tile walls.

Like a bad car wreck, I've totaled that poem, declared it a loss. It wasn't insured, but I'll still get something for it. I've already gotten this piece and probably more.

By now I'm well adjusted to the sweet smell of all this manure I'm creating. There's no telling what might grow from it, but something always does.

"It's A Free Concert..."

Saw a headline that read, "What I’ve learned in the first year of running a subscription newsletter business" and shook my head. If there's money to be made on this blog and my newsletter, I haven't found it. Mostly because I'm not looking and because I have steadfastly refused to follow any of the rules of a money-making blog. I don't publish regularly. I don't stick to one subject. I don't build an audience. I don't link on social media. I'm not even on social media. I haven't turned the pieces here into a book. And, while I wouldn't mind extra income, I'd dislike having to make money writing this.

I haven't quit my day job.

In my old day job, I was supposed to be teaching but under almost impossible conditions. Writing was an escape from that depressing and destructive job. I wrote throughout the day with students as that's the best way to teach the craft. Still, the overall effect of that job was too much even for writing to balance.

In my new day job, I write grants, notes, and plans. I love it and spend hours a day writing in the organization's voice. It's a great organization doing great work. I don't need any counterbalance for that good of a job, but I still come home and write for myself. I mean, why not?

A day-job can be a luxury. Even the terrible old day job provided phenomenal healthcare, excellent pay, and retirement benefits all for the low, low price of crushing my soul. The new day-job provides passable healthcare, good enough pay, the option of a 401k, but does it all while also providing me with almost nothing but good feeling about what I'm doing. My boss called me a freak Monday when I was giggling and bubbly about coming back to work. She's not wrong. But then neither am I.

The luxury of a day-job that pays the bills is worth appreciating. The ability to publish a blog and newsletter for no other reason than I want to and enjoy sharing things with the small band of people who subscribe and the smaller band who click on links, well that's just excellent. I'd charge a subscription for the newsletter and blog, but I can't afford it and I'm the one who ought to be paying for the privilege. Since I can't afford it and can't imagine anyone wanting to pay for it, let's keep this free.

And now all I can hear is that Red Hot Chili Peppers song:

Give it away give it away give it away now Give it away give it away give it away now Give it away give it away give it away now I can't tell if I'm a kingpin or a pauper Greedy little people in a sea of distress Keep your more to receive your less Unimpressed by material excess Love is free love me say hell yes

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The title of this post, by the by, is a play on the quote from Woodstock when John Morris announced, "It's a free concert from now on. That doesn't mean that anything goes. What that measns is we're going to put the music up here for free. What it means is that the people who are backing this thing, who are putting up the money for it are going to take a bit of a bath, a big bath. That's no hype that's truth. They're going to get hurt. But what it means is that these people have it in their heads that your welfare is a hell of a lot more important, and the music is, than a dollar."

This Is Insane

Alan Jacobs, in a post saying he's done with blogging quotes the following from Buzzfeed:

This is why algorithmic time is so disorienting and why it bends your mind. Everything good, bad, and complicated flows through our phones, and for those not living some hippie Walden trip, we operate inside a technological experience that moves forward and back, and pulls you with it. Using a phone is tied up with the relentless, perpendicular feeling of living through the Trump presidency: the algorithms that are never quite with you in the moment, the imperishable supply of new Instagram stories, the scrolling through what you said six hours ago, the four new texts, the absence of texts, that text from three days ago that has warmed up your entire life, the four versions of the same news alert. You can find yourself wondering why you’re seeing this now — or knowing too well why it is so. You can feel amazing and awful — exult in and be repelled by life — in the space of seconds. The thing you must say, the thing you’ve been waiting for — it’s always there, pulling you back under again and again and again. Who can remember anything anymore?

I'm sad that Jacobs is leaving blogging. His blog is weird and wonderful, frustrating and confusing, challenging in the best sense. I want good challenges to read, to overcome, and with which to be in conversation. (I've challenged myself to stop ending sentences with prepositions in order to understand why such a rule ever existed. I get it now and agree. Challenges are good.)

Much sadder is the Buzzfeed writer's abdication of her responsibility to choose a lifestyle. She labels anyone opposed to that lifestyle as "living some hippie Walden trip." She uses "you" to mean me and loses her argument because I'm not that "you" and ain't ever going to be.

Like Alan Jacobs, I disconnected from Twitter "and the thought of going back...prompts nightmares." I walked away from Facebook wishing I could have burned it down on my way out. These are my choices as to how to live.

The Buzzfeed writer isn't "using a phone," she is choosing to be used by a phone while complaining about it. Narcissus didn't complain while being turned to a flower. Her phone is a well engineered navel but she chooses to relentlessly, hopelessly, and pitifully gaze into it, as if doing otherwise would mark her as a freak.

I say, choose to be a freak.

Screw the mainstream, the social norm, the wisdom of the crowd. Keep a paper planner, play vinyl records, walk instead of driving, leave your phone home on purpose, ignore the news out of Washington, and so on. If the culture dishes out sewage, why choose to eat it?

Instead of that question, she asks, "Who can remember anything anymore?"

I can. I remember a girl smiling at me in fifth grade because I wrote it down in solitude thirty years later. I remembered a tiny shard of that memory and the rest came back over the course of an hour of writing. I freakishly reflected on life. This was twenty-one years ago, before I had a smartphone, back when that Buzzfeed paragraph would have seemed ridiculously dystopian, impossible to believe.

The life she describes is worse than ridiculous. It's insane. It sounds horrible to this Walden hippie, to this freak. I'd rather be either of those things than the "you" she thinks we all must inevitably be.

And damn it, Alan Jacobs. Keep writing your blog.

End Of The Year

The finished book sits on the shelf beside me and will soon go back to the library. Stag's Leap a collection of Sharon Olds' sad poetry, the story of her marriage's dissolution. Why do I read such things? Why does anyone? I know the answer, but saying it doesn't do the question justice, so I raise one shoulder slightly and incline my head toward it. A half shrug. Whatever.

My reading slowed this last month and a half just as my writing did. I was distracted. A bit lost. As I get from time to time. No real damage done. Just a slow down. Fewer books read. Still, I think about what happened and why. Have I been depressed? Here comes that half shrug again. Here comes whatever.

I read a guy's thoughts that January 1 doesn't begin anything. The year begins when he decides it.

My wife, before we married, categorically denied the new day until she had slept and awakened to it. I liked that. Not the sun, but her movement set the calendar. She declared it as though there could be no denying.

Me, I stick to January 1 and to midnight. Stag's Leap is the last book I'll finish this year. I've created a new blank list for the coming year. I've copied anniversaries, birthdays, and notes to a new planner and retired 2019's planner. I like the notion of beginnings even as I'm stuck on the endings inherent in the turning to a new year. Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?

The finished book will soon return to the library where it may sit untouched for years. The new planner, mostly blank, sits on the desk, open to possibility. The old planner, its time done, the world having moved on, stands on a shelf in my office. And I type, feeling gears tumble as springs uncoil, and hands turn. I see the sun descending, the afternoon light begin to fade. I can't help but feel the year drawing to a close.

That and the steady rhythm of my heart doing whatever hearts do at a pace and according to a rhythm none of us know quite how to control.