Writing about Whining and Whining about Writing

Part I

Where have all the writers gone? Gone to Facebook, every one. I think they've given up on the social aspect, the groupthink. Remember the camaraderie we used to share? The wit? Gone. A writer hooking up into Facebook and all its games and article-sharing is like a mathematician on a daily dose of sloe gin. Was blogging not as bad? Was it a shot of caffeine, or just thin hot chocolate? It did provide a challenge. The challenge was to produce some quality every few days. Few ever met it. Most everyone seems to have given up.

A few still write. Away from the crowd, as perhaps it should be done. NaNo should be that way. I will go to coffee shop meetups because I need social interaction, to feel a part of things. But writing is essentially solitary.

I'm guessing the bloggers decided either they would ride the Facebook to nowhere or would just get their writing done and quit talking about it. I hope so. Writing is all I want to do when it comes to brain-work.

I want NaNoWriMo to start and the rest of the world to end.

Part II

Writing is all I want to do when it comes to brain-work. I falter at my job (or so it feels sometimes) because it requires studying technical stuff and collaboration with other people on technical stuff. But when I light the fires under my brain it doesn't lean that way. No, it wanders off in search of dreams to mold, and characters to build, and vibrant language. It's a daily chore to switch the train over onto the right track and chug it up to speed. Today, that didn't happen. All my train did was crawl out of the shed, take a slow turn around the yard, and idle at the back edge, leaking steam.

And it's no secret and I don't care who knows it. My old brain is just plain tired of trying to fit. That engine wants to get lifted out of the old iron frame that hauls freight around on rails and settle into something light and buoyant and start tracing words and music into the ripples of a trackless sea.

This is a bad attitude. I want my boys to get through college without any financial hitches and so crank away, crank away, crank away is what I need to do just like everyone else. Just like everyone else. It's funny: Part of me is still the youngest child who thinks he is special and unique and can get away with relative poverty because no one needs to depend on him. The major portion is of course a man engaged with the world in some productive way who knows we are all in the same boat together and thus holds the deliberately unproductive (this includes lazy and/or under-talented writers) in low esteem. This tension won't go away.

And yet, still I want NaNoWriMo to start and the rest of the world to end. Except for music. Music can stay. And food. Music and food and warm autumn sunsets. The rest of it, begone. Begone, I say! People with nice smiles can stay. Nice people, food, music, sunsets, and the sound of rain or of a distant train passing. All that can stay. But the rest of it: End! Begone. We gots writing to do, doesn't we?

South Southeast by Southwest, Part I

I have to vent over my quest to get a wireless internet connection in Anthem, Arizona. I thought Starbucks offered this service, so long as you buy something. I wanted a mocha anyway, so I found one at the corner of two of Anthem’s many identical boulevards (which are not laid out in a simple grid, by the way, but meander like coyote trails, no doubt to make the brand spanking new suburb seem a little less like a brand spanking new suburb). Stood in line awhile and then asked if they had a functioning wireless. Only if I had a Starbucks card, quoth the barista. I don’t buy memberships so, no, I had no card, and I left feeling very annoyed that the silly woman could at least have tried to sell me one, or clarify that I’d get access for free if I bought something, or otherwise been encouraging. But no! All she could do was suggest the library. Libraries generally don’t serve food and drink. So I went back to my cousin’s house to search again.

Right, my cousin has internet, but not wireless, and for reasons too obscure for me to grasp, when I connected the RJ45 on the back of her cable modem to the RJ45 on the side of my laptop, a network was detected but never connected, and I was simply never able to do what I needed to do. Which was mate my work machine to the net and get a VPN going and do some triage on a couple days’ worth of work email. Really wanted to spend a lot of time doing that.

“Wireless network anthem az” netted me a possibility in the form of a café at the local Safeway. All right, I could do work at a grocery store, why not. I meandered along the coyote trails at a crawling forty miles an hour really enjoying the fact that Maricopa County had decided to impose a thirty five mile an hour speed limit on roads that could easily support eighty, and eventually, after many long hours passing decoratively transplanted saguaro cacti, found the Safeway and the Starbucks within. I asked if the wireless worked, the guy said probably, so I tried and sure enough caught a signal. Fool optimist that I am, I bought a venti mocha and a piece of pumpkin cake and sat down to enjoy my breakfast while wrestling with warning pages and out of date certificates and all manner of general network dysfunction. Money well spent! The workers had no idea. But by now I had eaten something and decided the library was worth a try.

I had a vague idea it was down this way and indeed I found it, nestled within the grounds of the local high school. I didn’t feel like waiting in line at the information desk so I took one of the plush little reading chairs in back and found a network and enjoyed the familiar experience of warning pages and invalid certificates. I went back hopefully to the help desk line and at my turn was told that indeed their wireless worked fine, I just needed to have a library card. All out of quibble, I bought a thirty-day one for five bucks, was given some codes and instructions, and, nestled back in my corner, was finally able to plug in to the employer matrix.

As usual, about a dozen things had blown up since I left the office late Wednesday afternoon, and by the time I had addressed a few of them well over an hour had passed and my enthusiasm for doing work while on vacation was getting thin. So now it is noon, I am back at my cousin’s house, and everyone is either out getting their toenails done or lying around fast asleep. I guess that’s standard for mid-day in Arizona. Well, I’m on vacation, and the idea presumably is to relax. But my nerves are humming like harp strings. Only one thing to do: Get a beer, find a cool place, damage my eardrums with the very loud music stored on my netbook (I don’t own an MP3 player), and read the Raymond Chandler short stories I brought along. That’ll do me, for a little while.

Short Post in Celebration of Life

I'm pretty much hating on life these days -- all of it is entirely my own fault, and knowing that does wonders for my mood -- so I'm following the advice Roy gave awhile ago to just blog a little every day. Makes me feel better, somehow. Even just a little bit. Not that this will improve my writing. But surely it can't make it worse.

I want to know what the expected outcome is of being married a long time. Through both the internet and actual real conversations with actual real people, I've seen that there is a lot of ambivalence out there. People, both sexes, not really excited about who they're devoted to, but it's too god damn much trouble to make a change. Now, the dumb ones, who think they're clever, go and explore and have affairs and get caught and wind up in the shit, and if they're well-known and powerful they make the news and we all get a laugh. But the rest of us don't act up like that, we just sort of live the habits and accommodations and look up once in awhile to notice, wow, another year has gone by, fancy that.

I'm struggling because on the one hand, I'm sick of living a half-ass life, and though I married someone who never lives her life half-ass -- in fact, she pretty much kicks ass, every day -- I can't just flip a switch and start wanting to be full-ass specifically with her. No: Ambivalence; and a long history; and way too much shit boiling up from the state of our lives when we got together as well as from all the years before, dating right back to when I was a one year old. Seriously. All those long arcs of personal history are converging to this point, focused like sunlight through a lens, and that intense light beam is slowly but surely lighting the fuse.

Sort of a crisis that strikes at mid life. That's why they call it a, erm, you know. But what I'm wanting to know is, what do all the other poor saps (and sapettes) do? Right, some go off. Maybe I will too, at least something happens. Some (men particularly) push it deep inside where it twists around and they wind up being seriously outlived by their wives. Some manage to look (at least outwardly) quite happy. Typically those are men of faith. That fact bugs the shit out of me.

I understand faith. I understand it as a form of mental organization that human beings evolved as a means to survive. More accurately put (because too often, evolution is described backwards, as if changes are adaptations when in fact they are accidents that happened to turn out as advantages), the mutation that allows for faith and god and all that provided a psychological advantage that, in the unforgiving primal forest, led to more successful reproduction. So we all have it. I just don't choose to use it. Faith is like fire with all its risks and benefits, but now that we have central heating, why set part of your house on fire just to keep warm?

Yet there they are: Men of faith who have defined and narrowed (or maybe broadened, wtf do I know) their lives and found their bliss is in what they've spent the past couple three decades building. Well. BULLY FOR THEM.

I have to get back to work but my whole hating on life point is that this conundrum and a number of related side issues that I'm not going into here have me so distracted that my job performance sucks which only makes things worse and I'm supposed to feel better now that I've written it out and done so publicly. Yeah.

No Wonder

The internal home page here for Infamous Megamulti often includes an informal poll question submitted by an employee. Today's:

In your school days, what was your favorite subject?

• Mathematics
• Science
• Language
• Social Studies / History
• Music / Arts / Physical Education
• I had no favorite subject

After answering, I saw the results had Math and Science adding up to 63%. My choice, Music / PE, was at 11%. The other two, 6 and 10 resp.

I can't count the casual conversations that include tales of being a science geek in high school, of wanting to be an engineer since Day 0, of college life as an eighteen year old math whiz. My part was always the silent part. I hated that shit back then. I liked science, of course, but as a source of wonder, not as a set of tools. In high school it took two tries to get a passing D in geometry (I never, ever studied). Okay, that has more to do with parents than with me, but still. These conversations always leave me feeling like an outsider. So do conversations that are in any way about density of computational power or platform features or performance metrics because, chryst, I just haven't ever cared. It's a job. It is not a passion and you have to be some sort of alien if it is. Or a former high school math type. Just not me.

So, no wonder. On the plus side, I don't think anyone is ever really supposed to feel like they fit in at their job. That just wouldn't be natural. Would it?

The Times Can Suck My Ass

I almost stopped blogging, didn't I? But then the New York Times leads the pirate story with

The Indian Ocean standoff between an $800 million United States Navy destroyer and four pirates bobbing in a lifeboat showed the limits of the world’s most powerful military as it faces a booming pirate economy in a treacherous patch of international waters.

What the FUCK are they trying to say here? Only a hugely idiotic fucking idiot would try to draw some sort of ironic line between the high cost and power of an American destroyer and the fragile thread of human contact by which a single American life is hanging. As if to say, Oh, we have all these nukes, but were powerless against four guys with a knife to a man's throat, oh, we suck, oh, oh! God. Words fail me. I can't believe people still read that swill. Death to all newspapers.

Or Is It Freedom

Sometimes this deadly shyness hits me like a bomb. I know a fair amount of people now, but few of them well, and if it weren’t for the random associations of the workplace and of my kids’ rapidly disappearing family-related activities, I have the strong potential to know no one at all. I hate the shyness. I despise it. It is part of a broader sort of brokenness that stands between me and the rest of humanity, an Olduvai Gorge that has me more often than not watching the floor as I walk, watching potential acquaintances remain strangers, watching potential friends remain acquaintances, and watching friends evolve back into being strangers.

I fake it pretty well, though the fake-out is not sustainable. My 50th birthday party was a success, and certainly everyone got the impression I had a lot of friends. It was no doubt a surprise to all of them. I know it was to me. But I gather most folks have an instinct to remain in touch somehow, to manage all those relationships such that they remain alive and breathing, and it is that sort of social management that entirely escapes me. Not the mechanics of it – it’s child’s play to write down a list of things one should do. It’s the instinct that is missing, or that is too weak to overcome the fear.

What the fear is of, I can’t say, but if you are a shy person, you already know as well as me.

So anyway, the bomb hits when I realize that my instincts to focus on my own work and not make continual little investments in human relationships not only augurs a life that will never be a less lonely one, but is the number one reason why my career has never really taken off. Yes, I’ve raised a family, have a good house, got to travel the world a little on the company dollar, might even be able to put the boys through college. All of that is good stuff for which I am thankful. But that’s about the limit of it. In this competitive industry, staying on track and going fast enough to avoid being run over by the train still isn’t enough. Taking the long view, if further contractions and other workplace turmoil costs me my position, the ultimate cause clearly will not be from being less valuable through misbehavior, insufficient smarts, or lack of productivity. It’s a given that one should get mustered out for any of those. If I am vulnerable it is because, just as in the social context, I am not plugged in to the crowd. I don’t swim with the school. When in amongst the herd I either edge to the outskirts or keep my head down in the grasses. People don't always know what I really do, therefore, and that alone is recognized as a weakness. This lack of managing impressions allows for poor impressions where a whole lot of solid and valuable work may not be so visible.

The above is the sort of thing I write and then delete because it looks like a bunch of whining. This time I’ll post it instead because I’m brave like that, brave being another word for nothing left to lose.

Two Hundred

I have a lot to say about both Darwin and Lincoln. They were born the same day. Darwin was to humanity the more important man. Lincoln had his points, obviously. Yes indeed, lots to say. And no time! Time enough just to express my regrets that I haven't the time.

NaNoMoment 7279

At 7,279 I was about at about 40% through yesterday's pace when I fled for bed. Tonight is opening night for each of my sons, in different theaters in different towns. So we are going to one tonight and the other tomorrow. I expect to be significantly behind the pace by the time Saturday affords me the chance to catch up. Such is this crazy thing.

Plotwise I have the big picture but must fill it in with lots of little pictures. I am so out of practice and mentally distracted by work that I have a hard time picturing it. That makes it a struggle. My thought processes are visual. I'm not good at remembering intangibles or processes or flows of relationship from my life such that I can inform fiction. All I really have to work with is pictures. Probably my outlet should be music and video rather than writing, I don't know. Not an acceptable excuse this month.

Was all excited when a good subplot occurred to me with which I could move things forward. Shortly I realized this highlighted the fact I never studied literature, else I wouldn't have felt like I thought of it myself. Also I would have thought of it sooner and more often.

No time to read. I feel as though I should have read a LOT more books in my life. I don't even have a favorite author. The few I've read enough to form an opinion of all have some major flaw or other, and I don't remember the rest.

When you write, can you get lost in it, and then translate that alternate reality through your fingers, across the screen and into storage? When I was a child, writing gave me the opportunity to get lost in fantasy. For awhile I felt if I tried hard enough, my fantasy world would become more real than the world I wanted to escape. So I wrote and wrote and wrote. It didn't work: reality remained real. Eventually I had to make concessions to reality -- dropped in and out of college, had jobs, started getting acquainted with other human beings -- and over time lost that ability to get lost in the fantasy.

But good writers probably don't get lost in it either. It's a matter of marshaling mental resources and discipline and productivity -- like a job. But a job flexible and free, at least, for the luckier ones.

So this struggle with writing productively without being able to get lost in it is part of the growth needed to become a writer. I get that. I get that the inability to escape is inescapable.

But does that have to make it so hard? :-)

1717

I find it a total struggle: Writing is so often like pulling teeth. Even here on Day Number One, when a million people are streaming words by the thousand, far from their mid-month wall, I find myself stuck. Stopped. I wonder if it's the calcification of my imagination, which is neither so flexible nor so fearless as it used to be; or maybe I'm just distracted by aspects of life that can't yet be dealt with. Whatever: It's nothing a million other people don't deal with, even if we add the inevitable doubts, doubts inspired by the fact that the back of my mind continues to arrange Beatles songs for a capella quartet, that I'm annoyed at how ramshackle I've let the chicken coop become, that now could be a really good time to catch up on work. And not even those doubts about what I really should spend my time doing, what was I really put on this Earth to do, set me apart from any other writer. No indeed. Work ethic, focus, discipline, fundamental ability -- these may set me apart, but I know the doubts do not.

Hot and Poisonous

The sky has been replaced with a choking haze that turns the sun orange and makes anything more than two miles away disappear. Our thoughts should be with the firefighters and with the people whose homes are in danger or already destroyed, but I admit the surreal atmosphere outside gives me a nihilistic sort of thrill portending the end of the world. In a few moments I'll cut a way through the poisonous fumes, take down the top of my convertible, and ride home through the glowing gloom with scorched air forcing a smoker's lifetime of cancerous pollution into my shriveling lungs. With any luck, I'll be dead in twenty minutes.

Ah, but that's nothing: The citizenry of San Francisco was subject to so much heat yesterday that the NWS declared an "excessive heat watch". Poor dears: It was 80 degrees! While down in Sacramento, it was only 106, barely hot enough to notice. Perhaps the Venusian atmosphere provides an ameliorating effect I have failed to appreciate.

LA 2017

Six fifty in the morning and the air conditioner in the older part of the house was on. I went and checked the thermostat: 78. So I bumped it up to 80 and it turned off. I'd say it's a bad sign when the upstairs is almost eighty degrees shortly after the sun has come up.

I drove the convertible because the clutch in the Jeep is giving out and breakfasted on smoked oxygen. Fires still rage in the mountains all around and there is no wind to carry it away: A pinkish-gray pall has drifted on the high air and settled in the Valley. Sensitive types find their throat and eyes are always hurting. Cars are pulled over at odd angles, the occupants reduced to dried-out husks under their gas masks. Do you remember this show? I'll never forget it and it's coming true today.

But no worries! It's summertime!

For those of you who live in the 21st Century, 108°F is over 42°C

Beware the Under Toe!

Enough! I hate when my bloggery commentationalism turns political, because my rantings rapidly turn semi-incoherent however right my underlying instincts may be (no, really). All I know is Kennedy was right when he asserted (with proof) that tax cuts generally lead to higher tax revenues, and Bush proved it, and so did Clinton, so quit with the tax-cuts-are-only-for-the-rich Left Coaster-isms already. All I also know is it sucks that if my capital investments make gains, I owe income tax on all the difference, but if they make losses, I can only write off three grand of it. Three grand is not enough! I sold GE (at a loss) the other year to pay off some of the house, enough to keep those losses carrying over against taxable income at 3k per year for the next seven freaking years. How stupid is that? It means any more losses I incur (plenty of opportunity for it these days) can't be written off until, geez, Obama's third term! Choke! (So I shouldn't have sold? Hello? Stock market, or lower mortgage? Come on, quick now, easy question.)

So forget all that! Here's a picture of some toes near and dear to me.

Envy's Lidded Gaze

The Bee puts out a searchable database of state employee salaries. They say, hey, it’s public info. If I was a state employee, I’d be pissed. They didn’t have to make it so easy.

But that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is it bothers me and for the shallowest of reasons. I’ve spent a couple decades in private industry but, because I live in the region of the state capital, surrounded by state workers. The impression one gets is that state office workers have well-defined low-stress jobs and go home at five every day, that the jobs don’t pay so well, but that they wind up with a great retirement package. By contrast, I am always on the edge to figure out how to remain valuable lest I wind up unemployed, I come in about seven in the morning and feel like a shirker if I leave before seven at night, get paid about the average for my generic job description and have almost no retirement at all. Many of us have said over the years, yeah, well, we could work for the state and take it easy, but the state doesn’t pay very well.

Busted. I looked up some old colleagues who left industry to feed at the public trough. I don’t know what they’ve actually been doing since then, but they make more money than I do -– and still, I imagine, go home at five, coddled by state employee union rules, and will have medical benefits when they are old and really need them.

So now I’m just sort of pissed, even though, fuck, I’m lucky to be here.

Sale! Lingerie Half Off

You know how some people let on that in their non-blog lives, they really are reasonably successful, running this, managing that, doing all right? And then there are others who share their angst and complain a lot. I am inclined towards the latter group. We are treading water in lives that don’t entirely make sense to us, and sometimes we stop paddling long enough to wonder why the hell we even bother –- and then start paddling again as the water rises.

It’s nice that I’m involved with global producers of technology. It’s cool that now and then I get to visit various countries and my employer pays for it. That’s all pretty good. But does it really mean anything to me? Fuck no. Whatever it is I am really supposed to be doing in this life, it has little or nothing to do with being integrated into a vast manufactured society of goal-oriented technical professionals, whatever those are, or with giving a damn about technology and hoping people will buy the next new gizmo.

Well, enough angst for now. Somewhere out there on the interwebnet “we” were talking about how a blog persona is never much like the person behind it. How can it be? A blog is a pseudo-random collection of snapshots. But in using it to express ourselves, surely something approximating the real comes through. Maybe. Maybe not. Begs the point, what. Maybe I should drop this pennywhistle and learn to play guitar.

Well, the Batmobile needs a wax handjob so off I go.