One Million Words
I just read Kim my latest story about TeslaLand and it led to me reading my story titles from the past sixty days or so. That led me to look at my blog statistics, where I noticed that I am up to 784 stories posted since I began the blog in February, 2019. When I went up to Sonoma last year to visit some friends, we went to the Jack London homestead, which was actually quite interesting on several levels. It was an interesting historical glimpse at a literary time gone by. In the Jack London Museum, I was feeling my own personal call of the wild when I noticed a small inscription on a few pages of his handwritten notes. It said that London was a dedicated writer who wrote an average of 1,000 words a day, which they touted as an impressive achievement. I have noted this before, but my average post is just under 1,300 words with a range of 1,150 to 1,450 words. Over less than two years I have averaged 50% more words per day than Jack London. I just realized that I have recently passed the meaningful threshold of one million words written over the two years. Given the added seven books I have written since 2013 (one published professionally, four self-published and two that I ghost-wrote for friends who are supposedly in the process of publishing), that means that if you generally assume the average published book is 90,000 words, that means I have written the equivalent of nineteen books so far and write a new one every two months or so. That’s a lot of writing any way you look at it.
I have often said that at my core and despite my passions or career choices, I am a storyteller first and foremost. That is somewhat different from being a writer and I use the example that I am as likely to tell an anecdote while teaching a class or having a casual conversation as I am to sit and put together a story on paper with a beginning, a middle and an ending. It is the creativity of writing and the weaving involved in storytelling that I enjoy so much. Some will say that I have too much on my mind and like to share my thoughts with others to the point of their distraction. That may be so, but while I like feeling that people are reading and enjoying my stories, I do write and would write even if no one else was reading my blog. To me it is far less about being heard than it is about having the ability to express myself. I really do not care if people agree with what I write, but I do hope they find it somewhat interesting. I always remember that line from Planes, Trains and Automobiles when Steve Martin, in a fit of pique, tells off John Candy by saying, “…and by the way, you know, when you’re telling these little stories? Here’s a good idea: have a point. It makes it so much more interesting for the listener!” I relate to John Candy for many reasons, but in this case, Steve Martin is the guy who has a point, and its a good one. Writers and storytellers have an obligation to their readers, if they want to have readers, and that is to make their stories interesting to the listeners or readers.
Medieval poet John Lydgate said some important things about trying to please all of the people all of the time, and I am not talking about storytelling to that standard, but there is a line, as hard as it is to discern, that defines what is self-indulgent and what is mostly interesting. Of course, the first thing you should be thinking is that I am at best treading a narrow line with this conversation, risking going down the self-indulgent path by discussing the perils of self-indulgence. But here is the bottom line, I have always been a person who wants to please others. I guess I’m hoping that at some point my stories will mean something to someone and that I will be able to transcend the burdens of quiet desperation.
Tonight, my sister-in-law texted Kim to say that her brother Jeff was having a bad day and that he had a CT Scan that showed that his lungs were functioning at under 70% oxygen efficiency. For some reason, knowing that anything below 88% was unsafe, the hospital still let him go home. And now he was having difficulty breathing. Naturally, he didn’t want to go to the hospital, especially during the era of COVID, when an emergency room is the last place you want to be when you’re struggling to breathe. As soon as I heard this, I knew I had better suit up to go take Jeff to the hospital, specifically the UCSD Hospital in La Jolla, which is 33 miles away. Somehow I felt that waiting to drive 33 miles when someone is having trouble breathing, even if you have a Tesla X that flies like the wind, is not a good idea. In fact, there are no words to describe how uncomfortable it is watching someone next to you struggling to breathe and being unable to offer any help beyond putting the pedal to the metal.
After finding the hospital complex with its under-construction roadways, we finally stumbled on the Emergency Room. Remember when hospitals wanted you to be able to quickly identify the ER entry? Now the check-in occurs outside the entrance like curbside check-in at the airport. Airports used to be the places you went to fly away on exotic vacations and quick business trips, remember them? Luckily here in San Diego the weather is temperate enough to let ER patients unable to breathe sit outside in the chill evening air. So, Jeff sat down, but was called shortly to go through his check-in. I wondered if I should give him $5 to tip the orderly since he only had one bag. But mostly I wondered what I was supposed to do. I am not alone in this quandary during the pandemic since, again like the airport of old, visitors are simply not welcome at hospitals. So, I waved at Jeff and yelled, “Good luck!” From the driver’s seat with another car behind me waiting to check in their loved one the same way.
So I called Jeff’s wife and my wife for confirmation that all I could do was leave quietly. It seemed less wrong than helpless. But it was all there was to do, so I headed home on three sequential freeways. It was one of the longer Tesla drives I have taken and as is usually the case at night (it was after 9pm), the roads were wide open and the air was crisp and clear. It was a nice night to drive an X with its sweeping windshield that showed off the stars above. I was streaming Homeward Bound radio listening to Paul Simon and others reminding me of the beauty of our times and the warmth of the words of the lyrics penned by the troubadours of my generation. When a friend of similar age and upbringing is back at an ER cooling his heels while trying to catch his breathe, you hear every word of these deep songs and you see every star in the sky through your arching car windows. And then it hits you, the words are the stars and placing words in the firmament of the night sky may be the highest and best use of anyone’s life. So, tonight I feel that I am one million words down, a billion more to go.