Hitting a Nerve
Sometimes people ask me why I feel compelled to write as much as I do. I am feeling that question well-up right now since my trip to Ithaca burned up my backlog of stories. I’m sure that regular readers have noticed that sometimes my daily stories are timely to the point of feeling like they are being published contemporaneously, and sometimes they feel several weeks old (hopefully not so stale as simply evidentially delayed in publication). That was not your imagination. At various times I stack up as many as ten stories that allow me to languish and rest up my writing fingers for a few days. It always surprises me to see myself lapse through that backlog since I think of myself as someone who simply must write every day. But I too need a break occasionally and my subconscious takes over and before I know it, that friendly old monkey is climbing back onto my back.
When I started this blog, the service I use provided for and actually expected me to index my stories by category. I established six categories that I thought adequately captured what I was likely to write about most often. Retirement and Politics were obvious subjects of ongoing interest. Business Advice and Memoir were also somewhat obvious choices since I cannot and do not wish to escape work altogether and because all writers are autobiographical when it all boils down to it. That leaves me with two aspirational categories that I think I should try to write about ever more, Fiction/Humor and Love. I do not have a regular rotation and I do not track category share (mostly due to a lack of mastery of my statistics functionality), so I just write what I write and then define it afterwards as I set the publishing schedule
Because I do not try to commercialize my blog, and I do not really promote it, per say, I never know who is reading what out there. I pretend that it does not matter to me, but the truth is that I have made a decision to write for my own mental health if at all possible, and try to just make it interesting to those who choose to read it. I am always reminded of Steve Martin saying to the annoyingly talkative Del Griffith (John Candy) in Planes, Trains & Automobiles that his anecdotes should have a point. While my stories have been known to meander and be hard to follow every once in while, I have never tried to do the Seinfeld thing and write about nothing. I recognize that I am known for being opinionated, but I am equally sensitive to becoming too preachy and obvious about it. I might seek to influence others through my pedagogy, but what I really prefer is to be thought provoking.
This weekend, the big winner of the Most Provocative topic was my story about staying relevant. It’s funny to me because It was something that just popped into my head for God knows what reason. It was also a topic I thought I had previously covered in several other blogs. If you knew how many times I have written a story title only to find that I have used it before, you would better understand my fear of writers Deja vu. But certain topics that I find interesting also seem to resonate loudly with others of my age who read my blog. I received an inordinate number of comments, texts, emails and even a call about the subject. My friend Steven called to say that the blog story even prompted a long conversation between him and his wife, Leslie, both loyal Old Lone Ranger readers, apparently. I suspect that they debated less about the specific examples or fine points of my story and more about the general topic, which seemed to hit a nerve for one reason or another. I doubt Steven and Leslie are so very different from most retired or soon-to-be-retired couples when it comes to this topic. When we are all busy and fully engaged in our life’s work, we don’t tend to mind if our partner is being kept busy or not. In fact, we tend to prefer it. Most of us do not want a spouse that doesn’t give a shit what we do with our time, but we probably equally do not want to be required to justify our personal time management choices day-by-day or, worse yet, hour-by-hour.
We no longer live in a world where there is one trajectory in a family’s life. There are more often at least two trajectories in a household and lingering failure-to-launch kids as well as repositioned older generation household members can add even more dimensions. We all want partnership and independence all at once and that can be a delicate balancing act. I like that Kim has her singing to keep her busy while I am writing, working on cases or digging in the dirt, but when she gets very busy with it, I know it begins to chafe ever so slightly. I have to force myself not to scratch that itch or before I know it I will be the not-so proud owner of a full-on case of diaper rash and will begin whining like a baby. It can be very easy to get judgmental about your partner’s time management choices, but we all know that goes nowhere good. Relevance is just a thin veneer issue to your partner for what lies beneath. That ugliness ranges from “why don’t you want to spend more time with me?” to “what is wrong with your emotional intelligence that you need so much to feel needed?”, or perhaps even the ever-popular, “Get a life!” Partner or spousal amateur psychoanalysis is a serious relationship wet blanket that may well be wet due to bed wetting. I’ll bet professional spousal psychoanalysis is even worse, since it is probably more reliable and yet more out-of-bounds.
Steven then went on to remind me that he had sent me a list of writing topic suggestions, which actually prompted me to write about making writing suggestions. His point was that he is all over the stories that key into his specific concerns or angsts like relevance. I reminded him about the importance of rotation and he reminded me that reading is an elective activity and some of the things I write about are less interesting to him, so he opts out. I have had that comment before from other friends and readers and I can only shrug to that thought and remember that you can’t please all of the people all of the time.
Another friend with the same name, Steve, a long-time Arizona riding buddy, tells me he wants news and information from my blog more than life lessons or navel-contemplating engagement. He likes to poke this bear by calling my blog a newsletter, which usually earns him a retort from me that it is decidedly NOT journalistic and that I always reserve the right to artistic interpretation or embellishment for the sake of the story. But as soon as I invoke artistic license and write pure fiction, something I actually find almost as hard as writing dialogue, I can hear the “keep it real, dude!” Ringing in my ears.
I reminded both Steven and Steve that some of my stories attack the topics head-on and others try to be more glancing, leaving the reader to work the invisible splinter out of their palm. My best work is when I tell a compelling story and as Steve Martin said (yep, I did the Steve thing again), it has a point. So, be prepared, I am forever working hard at hitting a nerve.