life

I drive down Georgia Avenue towards DC nearly every day and meet one or more of these drivers each journey: 20 in a 35; Ride-a-Tail; Stops for No Discernible Reason; Slows for Turn But Does Not; Slows for Turn With No Signal; Swerves into Adjacent Lane Because a Bus/Pedestrian/Uber has Stopped in Theirs (Obviously); Crosses Three Lanes of Traffic to Get On Beltway; Turning Left from Lane Marked ‘No Left Turns;’ Still Reading Text 10 Seconds After Green.

These drivers make me angry. Furious. I gesture. I shout. I roll down my window to scream toothless threats into the wind until my face is wet with spit.

They’re doing this to me.

They are hurting me.

No, of course they’re not. Like me, they’re just trying to get through the day without falling through an open manhole or slipping on a banana peel. They’re thinking about work. Their sick Aunt. What to make for dinner.

I’m a person of greater than modest means. Still: Getting out of bed, making coffee, dressing myself & the kid, driving to school and then work, working, doing work that matters, reading a few pages on the can, trolling Twitter and FB for pictures of your beautiful tropical holiday between stories describing of our impending political/environmental doom, buying groceries, feeding myself, the family, bath time, 3 books and a song, paying bills and doing dishes, watching a little TV while locked into work email with a customer just starting her day in Asia, holding my tiny family close, clacking out 200 words… that’s all I can squeeze out most days. That’s success. I don’t owe the universe more than that.

Women who do it solo¹, likely with more children and far fewer resources than my family, are the only people who can every rightly claim to be “owning” this life. That they don’t collectively say “Fuck this” and seize the halls of power is a testament to how steep – and exhausting – are the barriers we demand women surmount before the day even begins.

Some of you, though, are ethereal beings – pixies, imps, demi-gods – who can push out a novel or a business or music in the spaces between the events that take up a normal day. Do you have a staff? Shadow henchmen? Office space that sits on the periphery of time-space? Maybe you don’t. Is there an accounting at the end of the day that is suppressed, omitted from the public record? I’d guess yes.

In work and life, I can over promise and under deliver. Sometimes I try to connect with people and I fail. I try again and fail again and that failure carriers a great weight. We’re all just trying to muddle through the day. I’m (mostly) succeeding at my core responsibilities and the core is fucking hard.

You know that.

Driving down Georgia, I know nothing about the souls of those drivers, if they are good or bad people. I can think: “She’s self-involved. He hates his family. Maybe that guy’s a Adolf Hitler and Hugh Hefner chimera wrapped up in a $5000 suit, a JD and an S-Class.” But I don’t know. I do know that I am deeply distrustful of any system that applies a value to a human being. I do know that humans make mistakes and and are exclusively focused on just getting through the day.

You don’t know, either. You think you know the specific quality in people creates conflict, but you don’t know.

I forget anniversaries. I miss conference calls. I say the “right” thing the wrong way. I drift over into your lane while singing along to the Beatles. I am human. I make mistakes and spend 99% of my brain cycles trying not to trip over my own mess.

You might call this privilege. Ok.

Expecting perfection and attributing anything short of it to a trait other than “human” is to set yourself up for unending misery.

Good luck in 2019.

Know it’s exclusively women. Take a good think on why you object, Men, when anyone makes that evident observation. ↩

Maybe you don’t know, but you should. My sense of humor is this: I got my Ford Focus to say “Keep Fucking That Chicken” every time I queued up that playlist on the car’s stereo system.

“Keep Fucking that Chicken” is a master playlist I “maintain,” a filter on the 25000+ audio files I have on my PC. That’s 120GB and roughly 30 days of audio. 65% of it is either Christmas Music or Horror sound effects records I – a-hem – found on the Internet in it’s wild west days.

It’s a work in progress. Variations have existed, on audio tape or binders full of CD-Rs, but never A to Z. That’s one entire iPod’s worth of storage, or 1000 CD-Rs

I don’t collect music with the same enthusiasm as some, but music is one of the things that makes being a sentient being worth the trouble. I buy one or two (mostly) physical discs and burn them to 320kbs MP3s monthly. High School would have been far more intolerable if I didn’t have INXS’s Kick, the Black Crowes Shake Your Money Maker, or my obsessive and quixotic search for the entire Queen catalogue, including the Flash Gordon Soundtrack.

My approach to most projects is top down: throw every word, every file, every thought at a piece of work and then whittle away the excess. A sculptor with marble is the cliche. It’s how my father taught me how to write and was supported by my more academic classes in school. Collect all of your thoughts and pare them down to the ones that stick. Absorb as much as you can, create a thesis, and then use notes, research, highlights, quotes from films to defend or disprove that thesis. Works really well when you’re limited to 1000-10000 words. Or you have the time.

I have tried over a long weekend, or a random free Sunday, plunked down a the computer, fire up MusicBee and my Audio Technica M50 monitors, plow through the Chicken list. It’s a fools job; an hour in and I’m bored or distracted. It’s a job for one of those kids in LCD Sound System’s Loosing My Edge, but definitely for the 40 year old with a mortgage and chronic lower back pain.

Now I just chip away at the big block, an album or artist a day. I don’t (or try not to) let in that little angry man in when I miss a day, or a week, or a month. I won’t let him tell me to give up the shit and watch “Midsommer Murders,” because it’s 14 seasons and it’s on Netflix and who really gives a shit, man.

I do. I just keep fucking that chicken.

***

In college, I wanted to make films. I learned to appreciate the classics with my Mom. I fell in love Hitchcock when my parents gave me a VHS copy of Rear Window, research for a school project. I’ve watched that movie nearly once a year since I was 16; I learn something new at every viewing and I’m a little overdue for another screening.

My first screenwriting class was run by a visiting instructor who had had some minor success in LA and NY making independents, long before serial predator Harvey Weinstein monetized small movies. I don’t remember his name or work. I do remember that he styled himself as a dollar store Jackson Brown: home bowl cut, redneck tan from his off-season, pick up work in home remodeling and construction. His writing process was top down: a few weeks heads down at the keyboard hammering out a screenplay rough draft, followed by weeks or months of rewrites. Nothing else. Fully blinkered.

A friend, he said, would take the opposite approach. She never took work on spec or script doctored. Instead, she would write just one page of original content every day. One Page = One Minute. After 6 months, she she’d have a full 180 minute draft. The next 6 months she would spend in revisions until she had a tight, salable screenplay. In the afternoons, she lived life or taught the craft.

***

I learned to write from my father. To rewrite and rewrite. His PhD was 20 years in the making and defended after I left high school.

Writing, creation, takes time. I remember coming home at the end of the school day and finding him in the same place I left him in the morning: in his recliner, Waterman pen in one hand and a yellow legal pad in another, marked up pages curled around the perforated top (another habit I’ve learned from him; can’t stand gum-topped writing pads), thinking critically and writing on how to improve community colleges and the students they served. He took his time. That was his job.

My job is to support the software that I work to create along with a large team of dedicated, hardworking people. One piece of the larger product I’m responsible for is User Documentation, including User Guides and training outlines. It takes time to explain, thoughtfully, how a person must complete a compliance document they must get right or suffer an steep penalty. I spend as much time on that as I can, not as much time as I want.

That’s what I’m paid for. I’d like to spend the same amount of time on creating my own work. Writing my own story. But there isn’t enough time for the 21st Century man or woman to sit in a comfortable chair, fountain pen in my hand, and plot a world where two people can overcome all obstacles and carry on in the face of adversity. And do it in 300+ pages.

***

You know that’s not true. I know that’s not true. There is enough time; it’s just in bits and pieces, covered up by one layer of real life, and a second, even thicker layer of social media sludge and Netflix binge. But that shit is sticky and after a 9 hours of work, even a brief commute in Maryland’s extremely stupid traffic, caring for the Wee Bairn, for SWMNBB, for myself, there’s almost nothing I’d rather do than drink a bottle of Rye, get angry at the injustice du jour, and watch the latest season of X Files. Only, I don’t drink any more.

Wanting to tell stories with words on paper is all I’ve ever wanted to do. Writing stories is the one thing that I’ve consistently avoided for most of my waking hours.

***

I got to keep fucking that chicken.