Tag Archives: writing

What does the trick…

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This is the first night in a long time I’ve sat down at the blinking cursor and really didn’t feel like writing. Not here. Not any any of the other ongoing projects. Not in a comments section. Not anywhere. Whatever spark drives that compulsion of mine to cover a blank space with small black symbols is well out this evening… so if anything you read hear feels at all forced, it absolutely is, so you’ve got a good sense of things.

There are no particularly tragic circumstances behind the scenes. The office is settling in to its newest flavor of ridiculous. The air conditioner isn’t broken and the summer routine is in full swing. It seems possible that good things are happening on one or two other fronts as well, so it’s far from the worst of times.

Despite that, I’m just a certain kind of deep down bone tired tonight. If the beginning half of the week is any indication it’s not the kind of tired I can solve by allowing for more than my usual five or six solid hours of sleep. It’s the type I feel when I need to just turn my brain off for a while. Even though the sure fire cure is a few days laid up somewhere with palm trees and a rum economy, summer is slipping away without a vacation plan in sight, so I’ll just have to do my best to treat the ailment as best I can with small doses.

I know from experience that in a few days this too shall pass and in the meantime the only thing for it is to slug through to the other side. It’s not the elegant solution I usually like to find, but it does the trick.

It staves off the madness…

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Spend enough days in a row sitting through meetings where nothing is ever decided, writing emails that no one ever reads, and dreaming up good ideas that will never see the light of day and one might be forgiven for tending to adopt a healthy cynicism about their profession. In a bureaucracy where every cog has its own agenda and can through even the best laid plans off the rails, frankly I’m surprised when anything gets done at all. It’s practically a cause for celebration.

I suspect that’s why I spend so much of my “off” time doing things that can demonstrate a tangible result. Reading and writing are easy. Finish the book, draft a new chapter, and either way at the end point you have something to show for the effort. It’s measurable. I suspect it’s also why I throughly enjoy mowing the grass, running string trimmer, and cutting back another few feet of encroaching saplings. Adding two hours of physical work after eight hours of repeatedly banging your head against you desk probably isn’t everyone’s idea of good times… but it makes me unreasonably happy, even as it leads to increasing exhaustion.

In that one small way, I’ve carved a bit of order away from chaos. It’s not making the world safe for democracy, or curing polio, but it helps stave off the madness and that contribution shouldn’t be undervalued.

Single white male…

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I’m always looking for new opportunities, which is why I’m contemplating posting a Craigslist ad to see what’s lurking around the area. In my mind it would read something like this:

Single white male, minimal baggage, and minor commitment issues seeks career opportunity in the exciting field of sitting on the back porch and reading. Willing to work days, evenings, weekends, holidays, and overtime as required. Will provide own reading material principally from historical fiction, fantasy, military and political history, and some philosophy and sociology. Health insurance required. Salary negotiable. A dog friendly workplace is not negotiable. Will also consider positions requiring significant written requirements.

An on site or video demonstration of my capabilities is available upon request. All reasonable offers will be considered. Thank you for your time, attention, and consideration. I look forward to working with you in the near future.

On the importance of knowing yourself…

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Here’s a secret… at least half the time I sit down to write I have no idea what’s going to come pouring out onto the screen. Sometimes I have a vague idea or a general topic in mind. Other time’s a have a pretty decent outline, but for the most part when it comes to blogging I have no idea what I’m actually doing.

The daily stats WordPress tracks will back me up on that. Posts and topics I think should draw views like files to honey lay quietly while something more mundane climbs up the “most viewed” posts list. I don’t know if I’ll ever crack the code on how all that is supposed to work. I’m not sure it really matters.

I read other blogs – like The Angry Staff Officer and Southern Georgia Bunny – who have a theme and run with it. I’m a little jealous of that kind of consistency. You can count on one hand the number of things I’m interested in three days in a row let alone month after month or year after year. The only thing consistent around here is that I keep showing up – and while that’s decidedly a big part of the battle, I somehow doubt that by itself will ever vault me into the ranks of “elite bloggers.”

Sure, I could change it up and specialize down into one field of focus, but I don’t think that’s something I’m interested in doing even if it would drive a bump in the numbers. As much as I want to think I’m sitting here doing this for validation or applause, I think the platform is more about being able to vent my spleen to the universe before whatever ideas are rattling around my head have the opportunity to make me complete crazy. In fairness, of course, some would argue that ship has most likely sailed.

In a world that seems bent on turning itself into an ever bigger shitshow, I’m afraid tonight’s post doesn’t do much in the way of looking at the big issues. Then again, sometimes not everything has to be about the big stuff. Now and then the small issues, the trying to put some intellectual rigor behind why we do what we do is just as important as the events of the day. If the world really is determined to descend into madness, then maybe knowing your own mind is the most important work any of us can do.

The real celebration…

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First and foremost I’ll take this opportunity to thank the many people who reached out to me through Facebook, or text, or email, phone today. Your birthday wishes are, by me, appreciated.

In other news, while I was digging around the site today in hopes of coming up with a suitable message for the day that I haven’t tread too heavily on the previous anniversaries of my birth, I was struck by something remarkable. As it turns out, June 1st isn’t just my birthday. I know. I’m as shocked as you are to learn that anything else of importance might have happened previously on this date. I’m still a little perplexed and amazed by this particular discovery.

Today also marks ten years since publishing my very first blog post. It’s bad. I mean really bad. It’s badly written. It’s badly thought out. It’s just bad in almost every conceivable way. If you don’t believe me, you can dig it up in the archives but scrolling down to June 2006 and hitting the link, but I’m not going to link it directly because it really is just that bad. I even contemplated making the post private rather than remarking on it, but that really defeats the purpose of what I’ve been trying to do here.

Those first posts really are awful. I’m struggling to find a voice and it readily shows. Looking back across those ten years, though, what I also see is upward trajectory of improvement – tighter writing, better reasoning, and the development of ability to tell a bit of a story in just a few hundred words. Still, I like the idea that if someone were so inclined they could map the constellation of things that have rattled through my head from then to now as the posts rattled around the internet from their original home on MySpace (seriously), to Blogger, and finally here to my own site powered by WordPress.

Ten years doesn’t seem like a lot of time until I start thinking about what’s changed from then to now. Looking back on some of the things 28 year old me thought were important enough to take up blog space, 38 year old me would love to sit him down for a nice long talk. There are lots of posts I wish I hadn’t made and some others I wish I’d have had the guts not just to publish, but to nail right to the mast. I like to think I’ve learned a lot about the world around me and even more about myself over the last 2,176 posts.

So unlike many of products that reach their tenth anniversary, there won’t be a lot of changes. I’m not going to go all New Coke or tinker around with the Colonel’s secret recipe. Whatever improvements happen will be organic and develop naturally in the fullness of time. I can only hope the writing is as much improved over the second decade of blogging as it was in the first.

We’ll all have to come back in June 2026 to find out.

A picture and a paragraph…

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More and more often I’m running into links on “news” sites that dump you off at a video rather than at an article. For me at least, if I’m interested enough to click on a link, I’m interested enough to learn more than whatever can be offered up in a 13 second video clip. Call me a curmudgeon but I like my news stories to have a little bit of depth, maybe some background, and even a touch of analysis if the editors are feeling a little froggy. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of digital media, but there’s a big part of me that still likes getting my news in the written word format. I’m not advocating for an immediate return to running newspapers in a morning and evening edition, but I don’t think it’s too big an ask to expect generally reputable news sources to include a little more meat on the bone. Then again, maybe that’s just another art form dying in the modern age.

With that said, a few weeks ago a friend turned me on to a site that specializes in collecting a sort of “best of” series of long form articles from across the web. Longform.org tends to be a bit eclectic in its offerings. It’s certainly not all the news that’s fit to print. What it lacks in width on a day to day basis, it almost always makes up for in depth. Right now on the main page articles range from campus activism to nursing to Swiss banking. I check in a few times a week when I’m feeling myself fall into the normal routine of things being a thousand feet wide but only three inches deep. It’s a helpful reminder if nothing else that somewhere, someone is practicing some deep thinking skills – even when I reject their premise or conclusions.

Sometimes a picture and a paragraph just aren’t enough. Mercifully there is at least a small group of people on the internet who agree.

Fundraiser…

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I was reading an article today. The subject of the article isn’t particularly important unless you have a particular interest in Antarctic tourism. It was well written, articulate, and humorous. This blogger was ticked off all the appropriate boxes for what make a post enjoyable reading.

As the author regales us with tails of expedition ships and Russian sailors, and researchers who seem ever so slightly “off,” there was a thought lurking in the back of my mind. I wondered who the hell has the time or money to take off on 38-day cruise to the bottom of the world just to have something to write about. The blog itself was a fairly run of the mill affair without many bells or whistles – the kind of think you build when you’re more interested in writing than working in web design.

The answer to most of my questions came when at the end of the post, when the author thanked all of his supporters for donating to his Kickstarter campaign. Kickstarter. Sonofabitch. This guy was crowdsourcing his writing and travel habits by taking online donations. I didn’t know that was even a thing people did, but it is… and it’s apparently far more lucrative that selling short stories $.99 a copy on Amazon.

With trepidation in my heart I sought out the Kickstarter campaign for the blogger in question. I wish I would have let it go, because I can’t unsee what I saw. I’m never going to be able to forget that 900+ people donated a total of almost $38,000 to this heroic blogger to go out and play advanced tourist. I’m amazed and jealous and sunned all at the same time.

It’s given me more than a moment’s pause as I wonder how I can coax 900 people out of $42 a piece – or more importantly can I coax 3000 to donate that much. Is it possible that someone is out there now using Kickstarter as their primary source of income? If there is, can that person please give me a bit of “how to” coaching?

There’s a quiet little corner of beach on St. Thomas I think would make a great spot for writing. Send me there and I’ll tell you all about it.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Reading badly written books. One of the small manifestations of my particular flavor of alleged OCD is found in the fact that even when I find something I’m supposed to be reading for pleasure and the sheer joy of the English language tedious, I can’t seem to stop. It’s the feeling of having a personal obligation to keep on with a book I’ve started no matter how badly it sucks. It’s infuriating. I hate to imagine how many books I’ve plowed through over the years long after I’d lost interest just because finishing what you start is the right thing to do. I’m getting better at ignoring that little voice in my head the older I get (and the correspondingly less I care about the “right thing to do”). Life is too short to read badly written drivel. Except when it’s something posted here, of course. Then you should definitely read it.

2. The Fight for Fifteen people. I wonder if these people realize that the minimum wage is exactly that. It’s the minimum wage set by the government. It’s not as if the government is telling business that they can only pay someone $7.25 an hour. It’s the absolutely minimum threshold for pay (as long as you’re not working a tipped position). Businesses are free to pay employees as far above that minimum basic wage as they are willing and able to pay – or more reasonably at any amount higher than the minimum than the prevailing market rates call for. It’s why you make more flipping a McBurger in Times Square than you do in Pig Knuckle, Arkansas. Wanting to make more money is fine – noble even – but you do that by making yourself a more valuable commodity and developing skills that are more marketable in the workplace. Expecting anyone to willingly hand over more money just because you show up with a sign still just doesn’t make any bleeding sense to me at all. It seems to me that if you have time to stand around on the sidewalk holding a sign, you might just be better served by doing something income generating with that time. I know I keep coming back to this well, but every time I forget about it and then see it pop up again, the annoyance mounts afresh. It can’t be helped.

3. People who put tartar sauce on a fresh made, Maryland lump crab cake. I can probably allow it if you’re feasting on fish sticks or if you lower yourself to buy flash frozen imitation crab cakes, but when you slather it on to the culinary gem of the Chesapeake, well, you’re just a monster.

And then on other days…

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Some days, like yesterday, the words flow out like water from a geyser – pressurized and seemingly inexhaustible. Then there are the other days, when nothing at all fits; the words aren’t there. Not even the topics are there. It doesn’t matter how much backup material you’re sitting on when you can’t manage to string the narrative together. If I felt like being honest, I’d admit that those are usual the evenings when I pull out a canned post – one that’s not time sensitive – that I have pre-written and occasionally use for filler when life intervenes in the writing process. As it is, though, the cupboard on those is currently bare so in the absence of good options, this is what you get.

Sometimes writing is an art. Other times it’s more like a fist fight. The fact that tonight is the latter doesn’t mean that it’s bad, just that it’s harder than it would be otherwise. That can make for good writing or it can make everything feel more than a little forced. That’s mostly the luck of the draw on any given night.

I’d like to tell you I had a better formula for how this is supposed to work, but writing, even these simple small posts, is a lot more like breathing than I want to admit even to myself. It’s just something that happens naturally without too much intervention. Sometimes it’s easy and other times it’s labored, but mostly it’s outside your direct control.

Even with the world on fire and a hundred possible things to write about, occasionally you get nothing. Since I’m not on a deadline and I’m not doing this for the money, the occasional bout of getting nothing isn’t really so bad… and since no one is asking you to pay for it, you’re mostly stuck reading it until I find something more interesting to say.

In the meantime, if you find yourself sitting in a cubicle and feel like chuckling at the fact workplaces everywhere are quite possibly filled with asshats of every conceivable form and style, click over and read a few posts at http://www.askamanager.org. They’re not all funny, but most of them are damned entertaining.

Hitting pause…

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In the interest of not committing myself to deliver something I may not feel like doing, I’m going to go ahead and state for the record that my intention over the next few days is to declare an operational pause, take a knee, and not do much writing over the next few days. I really think I could benefit from just turning my brain off and letting the system reset, so that’s the barest sketch of what I’m planning for between now and next week.

As usual, of course, I reserve the right to change my mind at any time and resume posting like a madman. It feel like even odds on whether that will happen or not. It’s hard to imagine four days passing by without something seeming noteworthy.

With that, I’ll wish you all the very best for a merry Christmas and get on about the too-long list of things that need to get don around here before sun up tomorrow.