Another fan
At work a few days ago, J said “hey, I gave that link to N, I hope you don’t mind.
What link?, says I.
He was talking about this place. Here where I put all my stuff. The one place where I can create. The place where there are no such things as mistakes. No trick questions. If I wrote it, it must be true.
No problem, says I. I could always use another fan. Like it’s getting hot in here.
I’ve done a lot of stuff in this lifetime, I’m okay at many things. I love music but I never had the discipline to learn to play an instrument. So I whistle. I never had the desire to collect stuff. I’ve never been good at math; in fact if math skills were like walking, I walk with a really bad limp.
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The only thing I’ve ever wanted to be good at is writing. Being good at spelling and telling compelling stories. I’ve been writing for fun since high school. It’s about the only thing I am good at. Like that discipline I was talking about, I never kept at it. There was that time period from 1996 to 2003 where I was really prolific. I had a lot of free time for that.
Writing is like a muscle, you have to excercise it, practice every damn day. When I get an idea I toss it around in my head. I form the sentences in my mind and it gathers momentum like the fictional snowball rolling down the alleged hill. I get the computer out and try to get as much on “paper” as I can. That usually results in more ideas and before ya know it I have a whole paragraph.
It helps to have a subject to write about and so far the only story I have been consistently writing about is me. It’s what Iknow best.
I started a book, every chapter I wrote got copied into here. But I have more chapters to write.
Did I ever tell you about my first ex wife? Her name was Deborah, she had red hair and was a compulsive liar. Someone said “when people tell you who they are, believe them.” Deborah told me who she was shortly after we met. She said that her father always felt that if the story you’re telling isn’t interesting enough, make stuff up. She thought that was a pretty interesting thing to do. She also thought that 18 year old kid she met at a bar was pretty interesting too. Bobby. She brought him home to meet me one afternoon. I happened to be sharpening a kitchen knife at the time. I think that bothered him a little.
I didn’t make that up. Truth is stranger than fiction.
Bobby kinda let the air out of the tires of that marriage we had. Truth be told, the tires were leaking before he showed up. It didn’t last long.
