Reset, Redux

Going to try this again, once more, with feeling

It’s ridiculous how my internal dialogue sounds.

Fantasy.

Over the course of my life, I’ve done a lot of things; started a lot more things.

I’ve been a bouncer, a bartender, a bodyguard, a barista, a sales monkey, an advertising man, a campaign operative, a coffee buyer, a consultant, and, most recently a comic book salesman, as it were, and that’s just the first three letters of the alphabet.

Deep down inside, though, there’s a ME that doesn’t get out much, because survival takes too much time.

I have a four drawer filing cabinet stuffed full with my writing. Decades of unfinished or unpolished manuscripts, screenplays, stage plays, hell, even some poetry. Thousands of pages of words arranged on paper in what I’d like to think are creative and clever ways.

There’s some awful stuff in there, some mediocre stuff, and some stuff I’m quite proud of. I have written for good, and I have written for evil. Mostly, though, over the last 30+ years, I have written for other people.

Speeches, press releases, ghost writing, it’s all in the filing cabinet for the most part. There have been a few NDAs along the way, and that stuff doesn’t get stored away, it gets tossed, shredded, or just deleted.

In my head, I’m a writer, and I have been since junior high. It’s “what I want to be when I grow up.”

In my life I am anything but a writer, I am a dipshit that writes.

Oh, and I got fat somewhere along the way.

I was athletic as a kid, if a bit clumsy. I started out as a lot of American kids do: playing soccer. I was not very good at soccer. I went from soccer to baseball. I was actually pretty good at baseball. I was a catcher, and I could hit, and I even made the All-Star team for Babe Ruth Baseball a couple of times. I did not like baseball.

Baseball got dropped for competitive swimming. I loved swimming. I thought I had found my physical place in the world with swimming until I found out about water polo. Holy shit, I loved playing water polo. Swim team was just conditioning for Polo season.

I ran triathlons, too. I wasn’t very fast but I enjoyed it. My little brother was always better and faster at everything, more compact and athletic, and not a stretched, gangly lurp. He didn’t really play water polo, so that was just for me. Even though I haven’t been in a pool for more than 20 years, I still have my first water polo ball. It’s like a fetish, or a sacred artifact of a younger me.

Then we get back to that damned filing cabinet.

It’s been with me, either physically or mentally, since I was a kid. I wanted to write, I wanted to tell stories, pound words, write wiggles for making brain pictures. It’s my secret little prisoner, locked away behind wall of work, bill paying, parenting …

I carry a journal and a pen everywhere I go, but I never find the time to use them. I own at least 30 journals that have never been filled, just played at, teased, deceived.

Water Polo and swimming lasted from junior high through my first year of college, which isn’t as long as it sounds. I dropped out of high school to go to college in the middle of my junior year. I made it to the pool less and less as the academic and social rigors of higher education took over.

The summer in between semesters, I crashed at a Hell House filled with slightly older folks and maybe lost track of my sobriety many many times. The summer is a total blur but I came out the other side with a Yamaha classical six string and a rudimentary knowledge of how a guitar worked.

Flash forward a year and I’ve landed in Denver during the Christmas season playing open stages with my buddy, whether I was ready or not. That turned in to a band that never seemed to have a name. It was a lot of fun, and ate a surprising amount of time.

We played, in all, if recollection serves, 9 years with only a couple of breaks. Most of that time, I lugged around a giant, suitcase sized Compac portable computer and wrote when I could find the time. I pounded out a couple of novels, a wild screenplay with a friend. a lot of poetry and lyrics, and some sophomoric attempts at journaling experimentation with psychedelics.

It didn’t matter what I did, I was always there with one toe, at least, in writing. The filing cabinet went from a small box to a two drawer cabinet in a couple of those years.

One month I wrote a particularly shitty novel to try and impress a special girl away from her boyfriend, thinking that she’d be inescapabilty wooed to my side. That blew up into a situation that still makes me cringe. I was not on my best behavior, and I am ashamed about how I acted, still, after almost 30 years. I didn’t stop writing, though.

Some time passed and then I had kids, and everything changed. There are several situational excuses as to why writing was stuffed into the trunk of my survival game. I can point fingers, and make excuses, but it all comes down to one guy being responsible for burying his childhood dream, and that’s me. Those first few years of marriage, we were so broke all the time. Stress, contention, underpaid work turning into more underpaid work … bad decisions, poor planning, and just general bad luck slowed my writing to a trickle with few exceptions.

There was a year when I joined a writer’s group and wrote more than I had in years, but financially, I literally could not afford the gas to get to group, so I quit and got back to work.

Work is everything, as I’ve written before.

Something changed. Some switch flipped, and now everything was defined by how much work I did, and how much money I brought in. The off and on unemployment just made things worse. I worked harder and longer when I was unemployed than I did when I was working, always scrambling to try and make SOMETHING FUCKING WORK, and rarely did something actually work.

The filing cabinet got bigger, but filling it took a long time.

Writing came in fits and spurts. I’d outline, research, sketch out a few chapters, and then wander off to do work for other people. That’s the thing, though, I do good work 99% of the time (everyone fucks up from time to time). I made a lot of people a lot of money over the years, I elevated politicians in several states, I wrote speeches, proposals, other people’s memoirs, built their websites, designed their logos and branding, and slowly let my dream slip into a coma.

I had a pretty popular blog for a while, but that mostly caused trouble.

So, here I am, on the eve of turning 50, and I’m pretty disappointed with myself. We’ve got one shot on the spinning blue ball, and, for the most part, I’ve spent my professional adult years lifting other people up, and being not at all surprised when they left me behind to do it for other people. When you sign an NDA, you’re never invited along for the ride. You’re a used tissue. You’re a reminder that they needed help. You are shame on feet.

No one acts more shitty than someone feeling guilt.

No one runs away faster than someone who was vulnerable.

I digress.

So, here I am, on the eve of turning 50, and I’m pretty disappointed with myself. There are so many things going “right” at the moment that I’m starting to feel like I’m surfacing after being under water for a long, long time.

So, today, I’m going to reset.

I’m trying Noom again, to get rid of the weight, and that will, I think, spark my love of writing back into honest output.

20+ years ago, I started going to the gym on the regular. Every morning, 5am, I headed to work out before going to work. After a couple of weeks, I felt something in the back of my head fighting to get out. Words and stories. I wrote two novels in less than two months. I wrote several starter chapters for new ideas. It was a cornucopia of words.

Then the relationship I was in went sour, I moved back to Utah to redress and regroup, months passed, I got married, became a dad and life just kind of took me where I went, and now here we are.

ASIDE: There is nothing I like more than impressing my kids. Of all the things in my life, my three kids are the center of my universe, good or bad parenting not withstading. Anything written above that might make it seem like the kids got in my way is just poor writing on my part. Those guys make we want to work on myself everyday, and it is only my fault that I haven’t.

I digress.

So, here I am, on the eve of turning 50, and I’m pretty disappointed with myself. Today, though, I’m making the effort. Today, I hope, I’m pulling my head out of my ass and finally grabbing life by the top knot and pulling it into its place.

I don’t know if this is a false start, but it seems to feel different. I know I’m gambling that a bout of self improvement will have the same effect as it did in the late 90’s. I know I’m running out of time. I’m at the age where the funerals I go to are mostly for people my own age.

I’m back in school, I’m starting a routine, I’m trying to build new habits, AND I’m being public as hell about it, in an attempt to keep myself honest.

This time, I’m telling myself, I won’t digress.

I’m a writer, and it’s about time I started writing.