Steering Clear of BOOM

I have been pretty busy. That's good. Being busy means I am engaged in a bunch of things. I'm not overly busy. That's the state of trying to do too much and failing to engage any of it well enough to feel good. I'm coming up on that though, and need to be careful, but for now I'm just pretty busy.

Still, being this busy has kept me away from writing and that sets off a warning. Reminds me of Apollo 13 when the Saturn V loses an engine on ascent. The astronauts wonder what's up. CAPCOM wonders what's up. The flight director wonders what's up. Then one engineer says, no problem, we'll burn the other four a longer and all will be well. My warning light is blinking and mission control is checking my systems. I'm okay to burn longer, achieve orbit, head for the moon.

The thing to avoid is when Apollo 13 went BOOM after leaving Earth orbit for the moon. BOOM is bad. BOOM is life-threatening. BOOM ends things fast. I don't want BOOM. I've been there before.

That's some comfort too, familiarity with such things. I've unintentionally blown up my life several times. In each case I was dead in space, but I did what Gene Kranz directed after Apollo 13 went BOOM: I worked the problem. Those engineers and directors made let Apollo 13 go on to the moon, knowing gravity would return it to Earth. There was no shortage of hardship and danger along the way, but the astronauts arrived back on Earth. Boom wasn't the end of the story.

Even so, I don't want to go BOOM. I'll avoid being too busy to write, stealing twenty minutes at the kitchen table typing this. I'll write a little and remind myself a lot. Then I'll close the computer and decide what to do next, where to engage, what to let go, how to be busy but not overly so. After all, I'm going all the way to the moon.

And back.

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.