Rise and Shine
For some strange reason, I have always liked post-apocalyptic movies. That surprises me since I consider myself such an optimistic person. I am also, quite decidedly, an early morning person, which implies that the morning after should be my best moments and not filled with dread. But an apocalypse and any inevitability associated with it cannot be considered anything other than a pessimistic outlook. I suppose you could argue that surviving an apocalypse is an optimistic outlook, but that feels like a stretch and an attempt to turn a big bucket of excrement into lemonade.
As most anyone who knows me knows by now, I spend a portion of each day writing. It has gone from a casual activity to more of a driven primary activity over the past four years. I credit my son Tom with making writing a daily event for me because he is the creative member of the family who urged me to start, or should I say restart, a daily blog. Not to sound too much like Meryl Streep in Out of Africa, but I had a blog once where the lions and wildebeests roamed free and the Kikuyu sang haunting songs of reverence. Those were carefree days on the veldt in the early part of the Millennium when seeing a movie was my greatest pleasure and I wrote a blog that was 95% about movie reviews. I had a decent following and a number of people were quite addicted to my brand of Rotten Tomatoes. But then the New York Times interceded with an article in the business section where I got lampooned for writing a movie blog during a financial meltdown in my business caused by the subprime crisis. That was 2007 and that meltdown is what I refer to as owning the first bungalow on the beach to be hit by the tsunami of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 (which really began in early 2007). I had made a comment on my blog, which was around the time of Gerard Butler’s portrayal of King Leonidas in 300, about the Spartan defense of the Pass at Thermopylae. I said that I was not seeing so many movies right then because I was busy defending the pass against the “Persian hordes of Wall Street”, which was a literary analogy of the fight we had underway with the two High Grade hedge funds that were too fully invested in CDOs which were chock-a-block with subprime mortgages.
That blog, which I called Whim of Iron, was the centerpiece of that Times article which spoke about Rich Marin fiddling while Rome burned. I pulled down the blog immediately after the reporter asked me about it and well before the piece got published the next morning, but the damage was done and the cache from that blog, along with a review of a particularly silly Steve Carrell movie called Evan Almighty, lived on in infamy. I just shake my head at the WSJ Deal Blog comments like “Doesn’t this idiot Marin know that King Leonidas dies in the end of the movie 300?” I guess Wall Street people are less attuned to the subtleties of sarcasm than I was since the whole idea of my comment was that I was fighting an unwinable battle. That nonsense ended my blogging career, but not before Wikipedia posted my bio with the comment that I was the highest paid person to ever be “Deuced”, which was then a term used to refer to someone who lost their job for blogging inappropriately. The Wikipedia poster and fact-checkers failed to recognize that I lost my job (technically I resigned and was not fired) because of the financial debacle and NOT because of the blog or the article that mentioned it. In fact, they furthermore showed their ignorance of life in the big leagues by failing to understand that big corporations often use PR distractions like the article about my blog to cause people to take their eye off the real underlying issue like that Bear Stearns was one of the biggest arrangers of CDOs imbedded with subprime mortgages, an activity that I technically had zero to do with.
Wikipedia’s listing of me has been cleansed of that stupidity at this point (I never touched it nor have I ever tried to cleanse or manipulate my online reputation…it just goes where it goes for better or worse…its a source of pride of openness to me). But it took me thirteen years to start another blog, which I have now had going with at least daily posts for four years. It is this blog, which son Tom set up for me on the WordPress blog service, that I have used faithfully to publish and store my stories, including blasting out daily emails to my subscribers with my latest story.
A funny thing happened today. My blog glitched on a story I wrote last night and tried to post for this morning. What I did was what I normally do, I pushed back a story I had written for today so it would publish the day after tomorrow and then slotted in my newest story for publication today. I do that when a topic strikes me as timely and I have a few stories stockpiled in the queue just in case I get tangled in something that keeps me from writing for a day or two. The glitch has now sent out blast emails with each of the two stories this morning though the website of the blog seems to show only the one new story and not the one I pushed back a few days. It’s funny that this should happen today because today is the day that my latest book writing effort is coming to market.
Starting about six years ago, I ghost-wrote a book for my friend Frank O’Connell. It has been a long six years with three complete rewrites and a great deal of toing and froing between literary agents, publishers, publicists and, a professionally organized and managed blog effort announcing the launch of the book. Today is the day that is the official release date and I was sent a Kindle notification just before midnight last night that my Kindle had my pre-ordered copy in its coffers. It’s not quite the same as holding a hard copy version in your hot little hands, but it comes close. I glanced through the book, reading the forward I wrote and the acknowledgements at the end (which reference my efforts). It feels funny to see the fruits of your labors, your very words and turns of phrase, in print under another person’s name and fame. It’s probably no more strange than reading about your life exploits set to words by someone other than you, right Frank? My name and even my face are on this book that is out there in the world and in bookstores as of today. My shining face is in the back amongst an array of family and career photos and I am credited with being the co-author, which is an unnecessary appellation since I was always prepared to be the ghost-writer. My name appears on the cover in sort of a green disappearing ink fashion (part of the underlining of Frank’s name) and is the agreed upon “with” rather than “by”, which is an accurate reflection of my mechanical arts rather than my content creation role in the book.
That book, titled Jump First, Think Fast: An Unconventional Approach to High Performance is a good book with great stories and I am proud to have my name on it. If it makes it big, I might even score a few bucks, but I am not counting on it and didn’t do it for that reason. I have another book, titled At Ease: How I Avoided the War While Still Getting the Uniform, which I also ghost-wrote with another friend over the last three years and will get noted as another “with Rich Marin” for a byline. That one may or may not ever get released, but I’m sure my friend Andy will publish it one way or another. And lastly, for yet another buddy (actually for his daughter), I ghost-wrote (this time I doubt I will get any byline) Journeying to the Dark: One Day at a Time-Finding New Life and Hope about a ten-year drug habit that ended well through recovery. Along the way, I also published my own motorcycling saga titled The Ride is All, which is 100% my own byline, making it my fifth book under my own steam.
It is now still early morning here on my hilltop and early enough to call it a new day, but late enough for me have already written this story as I rise and shine to be the best version of myself through my writing.