Ready to Start
I’m a slow starter. This has been true of me for a long time. Several years ago, I reconnected with a middle school teacher on social media. She remembered my ambition to be a writer and asked if I’d kept at it. I lamented that I was almost forty and still trying to get my first book done. She said she wasn’t surprised; I’d always needed to do things in my own time. “You’ll do it when you’re ready,” she wrote.
A few years later, I was ready. I wrote that first book, a middle grade novel. It was good enough to attract the attention of an agent, not quite good enough to find a home with a publisher.
I tried to move on to the next project. I went in circles with several ideas for several years, making one false start after another, but by 2019, I felt ready again, and that summer I wrote the first draft of a second book, an attempt at a young adult hardboiled mystery. I’m still working on that book, and I hope someday to put it into the hands of readers.
This account on Medium has been another “slow start” for me. A couple of years ago, I made an abrupt decision to stop using Facebook out of concerns about its security. In the process, I broke my only virtual connection to dozens of friends and family members. Several people told me they were going to miss my perspectives on books, music, politics, and everything else. I had already posted a few things on this account and told people I would use Medium in place of Facebook to share what was going on in my head.
So much for good intentions. Before this, my most recent post, in October 2017, was a mini-essay on Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, which was an adaptation of something I’d previously posted on Facebook. Since then, I’ve let three of the most tumultuous and transformative years in American history pass by in silence. There are a few reasons for this — the demands of my day job, my attempts at fiction writing — but the core truth is that I wasn’t ready.
I didn’t know how to write about the slow-motion catastrophe of our nation’s unraveling in a way that wasn’t just blathering into the air and adding to the general hyper-partisan noise. I didn’t want to be another American cis white man throwing his voice around when there were so many other vital voices that needed to be heard. Anything I thought about writing immediately seemed dated, hackneyed, trivial, solipsistic, or self-important. I couldn’t imagine what I had to contribute that would be of value to anyone.
I wasn’t ready. Now, maybe, I am. What changed? I suspect it’s the most dated, hackneyed, trivial, solipsistic, self-important story in the book: I started to feel old.
This year, 2020, was my fiftieth, a half-century, which was reason enough for me to feel some cognitive dissonance with regard to the passage of time. On top of that, it has been the year of COVID. Many people have noted how strangely time has moved in 2020. The month of March felt like a decade’s worth of Marches, then in the blink of an eye it was June. A week would skitter past, yet the events of the previous weekend would feel impossibly long ago. There were days we dragged like boulders through quicksand, which in retrospect were weightless as sunbeams. The election in November seemed as if it would never happen, and when it happened, it seemed as if it would never end. It’s if some fundamental mechanism of the Universe has blown a gasket. The time is out of joint, and so is Time itself.
The strange flow of time has made me aware of how easily I could lose the finite amount I have left. Meanwhile, the conditions of living in the pandemic have made it nearly impossible to use the time well. The holes in my memory have grown larger as the discordance of the world has gotten louder. My ability to focus has degraded steadily. Like many people, I entered our weird semi-quarantined twilit era with lofty goals of Accomplishing Something. “Now, to write my King Lear!” Instead, I found myself on an endless chain of Zoom calls for my day job that left me exhausted and empty, unable to Accomplish Anything. I was far from alone in this experience. One person on my team said it best: “There’s so much to deal with, I feel cognitively impaired.”
Yet the opportunity to observe my own faulty brain at work has been illuminating. I’ve become more generous with myself. It’s not simply a matter of recognizing and lamenting what’s being lost; it’s also about appreciating my ever-emergent self who persistently grapples with the challenge of living right now.
Something similar is happening in the broader culture. We are losing so much as we struggle to live in the overwhelming world we’ve made. In the process we are becoming something new, something that is both thrilling and terrifying.
From this point on, part of how I intend to live right now will be to write about it. I have a head full of gauzy notions about change and transformation, befores and afters, holes in our history and our consciousness, places that only exist in our memories or imaginations, events that must have happened and then were forgotten, ways we break, ways we adapt and survive. I don’t have any grand theories or brilliant insights, no thesis, only a notion that there are some ideas and experiences worth exploring. I’m going to try to write my way to clarity, if only for my own benefit.
Part of how I survive is through music, which in my worst moments has an uncanny way of restoring my perspective and sense of well-being. So I expect that at least a third of my posts will be music-related. To that end, my first post after this one will be about a remarkable song released in 2020 that directly addresses some of the things I’ve been thinking about.
As for the rest, it will be some melange of cultural commentary, memoir-ish ruminations, history, speculation about the future, and imaginative play. My brain is a strange place, and I will trace some weird and obscure paths along the way. Sometimes it won’t be clear, even to myself, how the things I’m writing tie together. These posts will be essays in the original sense of the word: attempts.
The one thing I can promise is that I won’t publish anything here that isn’t interesting to me. If that is grounds enough for you to keep reading, I hope you will find it worth your time.