I was heartened recently by this headline on a front-page story in USA Today: “Gay Candidates Gain Acceptance.” I’d stopped by a 7-Eleven for coffee on my way to work and was amusing myself, as I sometimes do, by contrasting the top headlines of the Washington Post against those of the right-wing Moonie rag Washington Times, which typically spins such neutral Post headlines as “Jobless Rate Slows Economic Recovery” and “Afghanistan Blast Kills 3 US Soldiers” as “Ha! Some Stimulus!” and “Defeatist Obama Strategy Kills 3 More Servicemen.”
Anyway, it isn’t often I see a front-page headline that actually cheers me, so I moved in for a closer look at USA Today. The subhead on the gay-candidates story read, “Poll: In Big Shift, Support Among Voters Increasing.” The caption under the accompanying photo of a youngish, bespectacled blonde woman read, “Sinema: The Phoenix Democrat says Arizona ‘doesn’t really care” about her sexuality.” The article’s first two paragraphs explained that Kyrsten Sinema is a state senator considering a bid for Congress who is openly bisexual.
Very cool, I thought, pondering with juvenile glee Sinema’s potential campaign slogans: “Reaching Out to Both Sides of the Aisle.” “You CAN Have It Both Ways.” “Strong Enough for a Man (But Made for a Woman).” Obviously there’d be trademark issues to work out with that last one. Anyway, I then picked up the newspaper to read more, and grinned at the encouraging thought that America at long last is recognizing the irrelevance in the workplace of individuals’ sexual orientation.
But then paragraph three wiped the smile off my face.
“Arizona doesn’t really care,” the 35-year-old lawyer says, dismissing the issue as irrelevant. “They just want to have low property taxes and no gun control.” The implication being that the candidate, who had seduced me with her hipster glasses and sexual liberalism, is just as much of a selfish libertarian nutcase about guns as are the majority of her fellow Arizonans.
A couple of days later an opinion piece in the New York Times caught my eye. Headlined “Lawmakers, Armed and Dangerous,” it highlighted a recent controversy over whether or not one of Kyrsten Sinema’s colleagues in the Arizona state senate, Lori Klein, had deliberately pointed her loaded pistol at a newspaper reporter. The essay went on from there to decry the easy availability and proud—nay, defiant—brandishing of firearms all across the country, the toothlessness of so-called “gun control” laws, the unwillingness of the Obama administration to address an issue that to my mind has got to be Webster’s definition of “political suicide,” and the appalling moral laziness of all-guns-all-the-time attitudes in Arizona—the very state in which crazed gunman Jared Loughner in January killed six people and wounded 13 others, using a firearm with a high-capacity clip that once had been illegal in this country but was reinstated for potential mass murder when Congress allowed the federal assault weapons ban to expire in 2004.
Of course, the most famous victim of the Tucson massacre, Democratic Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, herself is a big gun supporter—as anyone hoping to get elected to anything in Arizona had damn well better be. The huge irony there is that, should Giffords ever recover sufficiently from her brain injuries to reclaim her seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, every speck of voter goodwill toward her would vanish the second she started campaigning for reelection on a slogan of “On Second Thought, Private Citizens Need Guns Like They Need a Hole in the Head.”
The New York Times piece, by Frank Bruni, further noted, “You’d think Arizona would be cracking down on guns after the January bloodletting. You’d be wrong. Since then, not only did [state senate president Russell] Pierce make clear that Klein and her colleagues could pack heat as they pleased, but state lawmakers voted expressly to allow guns on college campuses.” (The Republican governor vetoed that bill, but on a technicality, not its merits).
Citing the news reporting of his own newspaper, Bruni added that over the past three years, 20 states have passed measures enabling people who have been denied firearms because of mental illness to petition to have their rights to own guns restored.
You know, there’s this great, happy Marshall Crenshaw song I always think of in the summer, when I’m crawling across the Key Bridge into Georgetown on my way home from work and women in cool summer dresses are strolling past me on the sidewalks left and right. It’s called Girls, Girls, Girls, and one of its lines is, “I fall in love from my head to my feet when I’m watchin’ all the girls walkin’ down the street.” Lately this summer, however, the depressing title that’s replaced it in my mind is my own disgusted parody, Guns, Guns, Guns. (The tweaked lyric there might be, “I’m filled with lead from my head to my feet if I cross some stupid hothead packin’ heat.”)
When that crazy Christian avenger against Islam killed 77 people in Norway last week in a bombing and shooting rampage that shocked the home nation of the Nobel Peace Prize, I at once was struck by both the singularity of the event and the certain reaction of the National Rifle Association and its millions of diehard members in this country—though the NRA issued no statement that I know of. Its stance, I’m positive, based on past comments by NRA president Wayne LaPierre, would be that the Norwegian death toll could’ve been sharply reduced, if not prevented entirely, if only civilians owned guns and could have shot that motherfucker. Which is so ass-backward that it drives me insane. (But still keeps me in line for a legal handgun!)
It never would occur to America’s countless devotees of the Second Amendment (written way back in the 18th century to protect us from the Indians whose land we stole and maybe the Brits whose tea-taxing butts we’d recently booted) that strict laws against private ownership of guns are precisely the reason the Norway killings were such a huge international story. Meanwhile, multiple people wasted by a gunman in Texas, or Florida, or Michigan? If I’m editor of the London Times, I’m relegating that story to the international briefs on page 26A, under the headline, “In US, Another Day, Another Slaughter.”
I wasn’t thinking of guns after my run this morning, but then I started reading a column in the Washington Post about how conservative Christian female politicians in this country no longer are running from the word “feminist,” but instead are re-branding it to fit their worldview. Minnesota congresswoman and Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann and her historical role model Sarah Palin, columnist Lisa Miller noted, enjoy kicking liberals' butts and encouraging female fellow-thinkers to similarly empower themselves. Palin, in fact, has favorably contrasted herself with the old-school brand of feminist who sits around gasbagging about liberal nonsense “in the faculty lounge at some East Coast women’s college.” She casts herself, Miller noted, as a feminist for these sadly directionless and amoral times—what the columnist summed up as “a gun-toting, self-reliant, pro-life Christian who credits her gender as the source of her power.”
Then, maybe 20 minutes later I read a letter to the editor in which the writer took the Post to task for failing to ask and answer the question, in a recent news story out of Fairfax County, of where a patient who had fatally shot her psychiatrist and herself had obtained the gun. The letter concluded with the lines, “This is not necessarily an item lying around everyone’s house, like a knife, a fork, or an ice-cream scoop. It is a gun.”
Ah, but that’s just the point, I sat there thinking. In the United States, in far, far too many households, a gun is just an item lying around, waiting to be fired at whatever time, for whatever reason. And not just an ordinary item, but an item that’s worshipped by everyone from lawmakers to loons (not that the two categories don’t often overlap.) An item that’s prized by men, by women, by women who fancy themselves feminists, and by women like state Sen. Sinema who love both men and women in a hands-on kind of way.
You know how songs you absolutely loathe nevertheless sometimes worm their way into your cranium and refuse to leave, no matter how hard you try to divert your thoughts? They’re often tunes that are beloved by millions of people, but that leave you longing for lobotomy. Well, for me this summer, Guns, Guns, Guns has become that song.
Saturday, July 30, 2011
Saturday, July 16, 2011
Greek to Me
Everybody tells me I need to check out Pandora. Well, not everybody. My parents, for instance, I’m sure associate Pandora solely with a perilous object from Greek mythology. They feel, in fact, that for them ever to purchase a computer would unwisely “open Pandora’s box” to all manner of expenses and aggravations they’d just as soon shuffle off this mortal coil without ever having had to experience. They’re quite content to get their entertainment and edification from reruns of the Lawrence Welk Show and the pages of their ever-thinning print magazines. (Which they get at killer subscription rates because my dad successfully has maintained for 35 years now that I’m still a college student living in their home—one who presumably is far too distracted by the profundity and wit of Reader’s Digest ever to have graduated.)
Anyway, Pandora, as I suppose you know, is an Internet site that Wikipedia succinctly describes as an “automated music recommendation service.” I don’t know exactly how it works, because I’ve literally never gone there. But the idea is, Pandora somehow suggests musical artists you might like, based on what you tell it about your tastes and who’s already on your iPod or PC or CD player. In that, it strikes me as being sort of like Match.com without all the lying and the abject terror upon being presented with what you thought you’d asked for.
People tell me I should use Pandora because I dig indie rock. I’ve become a fan in the past five to 10 years of bands like The Decemberists, The New Pornographers, Wye Oak, The Strokes, Wilco and Vampire Weekend, having discovered them by such old-school means as newspaper reviews, NPR radio segments and the recommendations of friends (who may have found these bands on Pandora for all I know). But I know there are many, many acts—quirky, talented, intriguing, but slightly off the mainstream map—that I’m missing. Pandora, friends tell me, could be my invaluable muse and arbiter.
I imagine it could be. But the thing is, as much as I like a lot of artists who weren’t recording or perhaps weren’t yet born when I first started listening to my transistor radio back in the 1960s, as determined as I am not to musically calcify, and as thrilled as I am when my Gen X friend Meghan likes some current band to which Eric the Geezer Hipster has introduced her, there only are so many hours in the day. And there’s so much “old” music I still love to hear, or that I’ve rediscovered, or that’s been intriguingly re-imagined, or that isn’t old at all but is being recorded by artists of my youth who still are going strong.
This morning was a perfect example of this. I was sitting in a lounge area outside the Starbucks on New Mexico Avenue NW, near American University, sipping iced coffee and reading the Washington Post after a run. The sound system started playing a succession of songs from Rave On Buddy Holly, a recently released tribute compilation. As I listened to Fiona Apple’s touchingly sweet and faithful rendition of "Everyday," then Florence and The Machine’s hard-edged version of "Not Fade Away," I was filled with renewed respect and nostalgia for the west Texas musical genius who died with Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper in an Iowa plane crash in February 1959, when I was about six months old. As I walked to my car I sang part of "True Love Ways" to myself. I own and like the new tribute CD and would have played it in the car, except that I lent it to Meghan last week in hopes of turning on someone born in the 1980s to the music of a forever-22-year-old rocker from the Eisenhower era.
Once in the car, I popped into the CD player The Zombies’ phenomenal 1968 LP Odessey [sic] & Oracle. The Zombies were one of those short-lived British bands of the mid-to-late 1960s that had a couple of huge singles, then rancorously disbanded over egos, contracts, bad weed, bad vibes, acting gigs in experimental Andy Warhol films, all-summer parties at Roman Polanski’s house, whatever. The Zombies, in fact, no longer were together when Odessey & Oracle came out. (Perhaps if they had been, one of the guys might’ve caught that spelling error, made by a member of their promotional team.) Still, the LP yielded the monster hit "Time of the Season," which would join "Tell Her No" as ever-after staples of classic rock radio.
Few people even my age know a single Zombies deep cut, but for some reason I’d bought Odessey & Oracle in the 1970s and quickly came to love it. It was simply a great British pop-rock disc of the era—well-written, -performed and -produced. Unlike many recordings of its time, the songs were neither treacly nor overblown, with the slight exception of one about carnage during World War I that the band apparently had fancied would be a big anti-war hit. (The problem there was that as far as the protest movement was concerned, Vietnam and Verdun shared little more than the letter “V.”)
Somewhere along the way, I shelved Odessey & Oracle in favor of other bands, other sounds. (The LP, in fact, may or may not have survived several moves only to be moldering in a cardboard box in the crawl space underneath our basement steps. I’ve frankly been afraid to look.) But then, rather weirdly and wonderfully, a few months ago I was driving through the North Carolina mountains, listening to a fiercely idiosyncratic radio station out of the town of Spindale, when I gradually came to identify a bouncy tune I was certain I recognized from somewhere. I listened closely to the unlikely storyline—a man’s joy that his girlfriend or wife is about to be released from prison. “Kiss and make up, and it will be so nice,” the happy singer swooned. (Had she been sent up the river for assaulting him with a pickax, then? Unclear. But the guy certainly isn’t judging, just pining.)
Suddenly I realized, “That’s from Odessey & Oracle! Something about … cell number … something.” The too-cool-for-commercial radio DJ soon confirmed in a matter-of-fact tone—as if who wouldn’t know that—that the track he’d just played was The Zombies’ "Care of Cell 44." Well, long story short, a few days later I ordered the CD from Amazon, and by the following weekend it was a mainstay of my automotive tuneage.
Obviously, my Subaru Legacy sedan holds only so many CDs in its door and center-panel spaces, But to keep any more music that than on hand in the car, perhaps stored in the trunk, strikes me as untidy, and perhaps too stressfully much of a good thing. So I frequently rotate CDs between home and vehicle. For whatever reason I tend not to listen to music while in the house, other than on the radio when I’m getting dressed or am in the shower. This means that my in-car music has to be personal best of the best—the stuff that most satisfies, energizes and/or moves me when I’m motoring.
(I’ll pause here to acknowledge that, yes, I realize there are portable devices one can plug into an automobile’s electrical system that can hold, like, a million songs and could keep one in tunes from here to China should anyone ever gets around to building that trans-Pacific bridge. To which my reply is this: I’m old, I pretty much drained my adaptability reservoir during that 8-track-to-cassette-to CD transition, and, well, furthermore, I'd really appreciate it if you'd just shut up.)
So, you may be interested to know which CDs are sitting in my car right now. (You may not, but it’s my blog and I’m going to tell you anyway.) In addition to the Zombies CD, and two by the aforementioned Strokes, there are one or more recordings by all the artists I mentioned in paragraph three, as well as by such blasts from the past as The Who, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Rod Stewart (early stuff) and The Band. There’s also 70-year-old Paul Simon’s outstanding new CD, So Beautiful or So What, illustrative of my earlier point that some icons of the 1960s still are recording great music. In fact, two of my favorite CDs of recent years—past and future car fare—are by the former Band drummer Levon Helm, who’s older than Simon and is a throat cancer survivor.
The point I’m trying to make, getting back to Pandora, is that musically, I already feel like I’m a very wealthy man. To use Pandora to seek additional bounty strikes me as needless, if not greedy. What my well-meaning friends see as simply a trade-name means to an entertaining end seems to me to have more in common with the mythological box. Opening it might prove overwhelming. For the foreseeable future at least, I’d just as soon keep it shut.
Anyway, Pandora, as I suppose you know, is an Internet site that Wikipedia succinctly describes as an “automated music recommendation service.” I don’t know exactly how it works, because I’ve literally never gone there. But the idea is, Pandora somehow suggests musical artists you might like, based on what you tell it about your tastes and who’s already on your iPod or PC or CD player. In that, it strikes me as being sort of like Match.com without all the lying and the abject terror upon being presented with what you thought you’d asked for.
People tell me I should use Pandora because I dig indie rock. I’ve become a fan in the past five to 10 years of bands like The Decemberists, The New Pornographers, Wye Oak, The Strokes, Wilco and Vampire Weekend, having discovered them by such old-school means as newspaper reviews, NPR radio segments and the recommendations of friends (who may have found these bands on Pandora for all I know). But I know there are many, many acts—quirky, talented, intriguing, but slightly off the mainstream map—that I’m missing. Pandora, friends tell me, could be my invaluable muse and arbiter.
I imagine it could be. But the thing is, as much as I like a lot of artists who weren’t recording or perhaps weren’t yet born when I first started listening to my transistor radio back in the 1960s, as determined as I am not to musically calcify, and as thrilled as I am when my Gen X friend Meghan likes some current band to which Eric the Geezer Hipster has introduced her, there only are so many hours in the day. And there’s so much “old” music I still love to hear, or that I’ve rediscovered, or that’s been intriguingly re-imagined, or that isn’t old at all but is being recorded by artists of my youth who still are going strong.
This morning was a perfect example of this. I was sitting in a lounge area outside the Starbucks on New Mexico Avenue NW, near American University, sipping iced coffee and reading the Washington Post after a run. The sound system started playing a succession of songs from Rave On Buddy Holly, a recently released tribute compilation. As I listened to Fiona Apple’s touchingly sweet and faithful rendition of "Everyday," then Florence and The Machine’s hard-edged version of "Not Fade Away," I was filled with renewed respect and nostalgia for the west Texas musical genius who died with Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper in an Iowa plane crash in February 1959, when I was about six months old. As I walked to my car I sang part of "True Love Ways" to myself. I own and like the new tribute CD and would have played it in the car, except that I lent it to Meghan last week in hopes of turning on someone born in the 1980s to the music of a forever-22-year-old rocker from the Eisenhower era.
Once in the car, I popped into the CD player The Zombies’ phenomenal 1968 LP Odessey [sic] & Oracle. The Zombies were one of those short-lived British bands of the mid-to-late 1960s that had a couple of huge singles, then rancorously disbanded over egos, contracts, bad weed, bad vibes, acting gigs in experimental Andy Warhol films, all-summer parties at Roman Polanski’s house, whatever. The Zombies, in fact, no longer were together when Odessey & Oracle came out. (Perhaps if they had been, one of the guys might’ve caught that spelling error, made by a member of their promotional team.) Still, the LP yielded the monster hit "Time of the Season," which would join "Tell Her No" as ever-after staples of classic rock radio.
Few people even my age know a single Zombies deep cut, but for some reason I’d bought Odessey & Oracle in the 1970s and quickly came to love it. It was simply a great British pop-rock disc of the era—well-written, -performed and -produced. Unlike many recordings of its time, the songs were neither treacly nor overblown, with the slight exception of one about carnage during World War I that the band apparently had fancied would be a big anti-war hit. (The problem there was that as far as the protest movement was concerned, Vietnam and Verdun shared little more than the letter “V.”)
Somewhere along the way, I shelved Odessey & Oracle in favor of other bands, other sounds. (The LP, in fact, may or may not have survived several moves only to be moldering in a cardboard box in the crawl space underneath our basement steps. I’ve frankly been afraid to look.) But then, rather weirdly and wonderfully, a few months ago I was driving through the North Carolina mountains, listening to a fiercely idiosyncratic radio station out of the town of Spindale, when I gradually came to identify a bouncy tune I was certain I recognized from somewhere. I listened closely to the unlikely storyline—a man’s joy that his girlfriend or wife is about to be released from prison. “Kiss and make up, and it will be so nice,” the happy singer swooned. (Had she been sent up the river for assaulting him with a pickax, then? Unclear. But the guy certainly isn’t judging, just pining.)
Suddenly I realized, “That’s from Odessey & Oracle! Something about … cell number … something.” The too-cool-for-commercial radio DJ soon confirmed in a matter-of-fact tone—as if who wouldn’t know that—that the track he’d just played was The Zombies’ "Care of Cell 44." Well, long story short, a few days later I ordered the CD from Amazon, and by the following weekend it was a mainstay of my automotive tuneage.
Obviously, my Subaru Legacy sedan holds only so many CDs in its door and center-panel spaces, But to keep any more music that than on hand in the car, perhaps stored in the trunk, strikes me as untidy, and perhaps too stressfully much of a good thing. So I frequently rotate CDs between home and vehicle. For whatever reason I tend not to listen to music while in the house, other than on the radio when I’m getting dressed or am in the shower. This means that my in-car music has to be personal best of the best—the stuff that most satisfies, energizes and/or moves me when I’m motoring.
(I’ll pause here to acknowledge that, yes, I realize there are portable devices one can plug into an automobile’s electrical system that can hold, like, a million songs and could keep one in tunes from here to China should anyone ever gets around to building that trans-Pacific bridge. To which my reply is this: I’m old, I pretty much drained my adaptability reservoir during that 8-track-to-cassette-to CD transition, and, well, furthermore, I'd really appreciate it if you'd just shut up.)
So, you may be interested to know which CDs are sitting in my car right now. (You may not, but it’s my blog and I’m going to tell you anyway.) In addition to the Zombies CD, and two by the aforementioned Strokes, there are one or more recordings by all the artists I mentioned in paragraph three, as well as by such blasts from the past as The Who, Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Rod Stewart (early stuff) and The Band. There’s also 70-year-old Paul Simon’s outstanding new CD, So Beautiful or So What, illustrative of my earlier point that some icons of the 1960s still are recording great music. In fact, two of my favorite CDs of recent years—past and future car fare—are by the former Band drummer Levon Helm, who’s older than Simon and is a throat cancer survivor.
The point I’m trying to make, getting back to Pandora, is that musically, I already feel like I’m a very wealthy man. To use Pandora to seek additional bounty strikes me as needless, if not greedy. What my well-meaning friends see as simply a trade-name means to an entertaining end seems to me to have more in common with the mythological box. Opening it might prove overwhelming. For the foreseeable future at least, I’d just as soon keep it shut.
Friday, July 8, 2011
Four Seasons of Lassitude
About three hours ago, just back from a run and poised to hunker down at the computer for some blogging, I spotted our cat, Tess, curled up in deep sleep on our bed.
Then, just a few minutes ago, I saw her in the exact same position and state of consciousness, only this time on the couch downstairs.
I was struck by the fact that at least she’d changed venue. In the meantime, I’d dicked around at the computer for fully one-eighth of the day, accomplishing precisely nothing.
An apt note, it seems to me, on which to mark the one-year anniversary of Lassitude Come Home, this aptly named showcase of my, um, “talents.”
Technically, this blog debuted on July 15, 2010, which means it won’t turn 1 until a week from today. But the facts are these: I haven’t posted in nearly three weeks ago, I’ve got time to write today (albeit three hours less of it at this point), “blog anniversary” is my only idea for today’s entry, and history tells me it’s now or perhaps weeks from now.
Actually, today’s procrastination was somewhat instructive, in that I spent most of it rereading all my preceding posts. There have been 45 of them, not including today’s. Divide that number by 12, and even a scantly developed right brain like mine can figure out I’ve posted less than once a week. This year, there’s been only one month in which I’ve posted as many as four times.
But the point isn’t quantity—it’s quality, right? That’s what I like to tell myself. At any rate, to best figure out what I want to say now about the 45 posts I have managed to write, it seemed instructive to revisit my very first post, which I’d inauspiciously given the unimaginative headline, “So It Begins.” (Why not something more provocative, like “Hell Yes, I’m Talkin’ to You!”)
That initial post, while brief, effectively laid out my mixed emotions and motivations. I’d written that I felt I needed a creative outlet but wasn’t sufficiently disciplined or creative to tackle long- or even short-form fiction. I’d expressed concern that, in a world in which every self-important idiot seems to have a blog, I merely was jumping on a fatuous bandwagon. I’d conceded that, while my main desire was to entertain the few friends with whom I’d shared the URL, my ego was big enough to want “a larger audience than one-on-one e-mail could afford.” Finally, I’d worried that my lassitude indeed would come home—that I’d be “too lazy to keep this thing going.”
So, first the good news, as I see it. Today’s post is proof that I’ve indeed kept at this. Having revisited my previous posts, I’m gratified and more than a little surprised to find that most of them, to my eyes, Don’t Suck. While this might not sound like much, it’s high praise within the self-critical edifice that is my psyche. I came into this venture aiming to be entertaining and/or interesting, and at very least not to bore. I think I’ve mostly succeeded at that. Not every time, but more often than not.
Now, for the bad news. In my first post I’d suggested brevity would be my friend. “Blog posts needn’t be long,” I’d written. And my posts wouldn’t be, I’d implied. The benefit to readers being that I’d shut up before anyone started begging me to please wrap it up. The benefit to me being that I’d approach posting less as work and more as play, which presumably would encourage me to get off my ass and write more often.
The numbers pretty well tell the story there. I posted most often—seven times—in the blog’s very first month. And all of those posts were relatively short. Like a good newspaper story (but tellingly unlike many of my efforts during my unheralded career as a print journalist), those early pieces said what they needed to say and then stopped. By contrast, I’ve posted only two times in two different months this year, and three times in three other months. Many if not most of my posts in 2011 have been 1,500 words or longer. There’s a direct correlation between length and frequency, as I expected last July there would be.
Does that mean I always need to write shorter, or that there’s never merit in writing at greater length? No. Hopefully I’m not kidding myself, but I genuinely thought, in rereading my posts, that some of the longer pieces were among my better efforts to date. (Others struck me as far too long.) Still, size does matter. And performance, I think, can improve with frequency. (The preceding messages brought to you by the SSSAAA (Sexually Suggestive Spam Advertisers Association of America.)
Finally, here’s the news that isn’t classifiable as good or bad, but that constitutes my third reaction to that initial post nearly a year ago. I‘d written then that I hoped to amuse, entertain, edify, or at very least not bore my friends with these writings. Several of you have e-mailed me, and/or posted comments on the blog itself, to let me know that a particular post or posts have connected with you in some positive way. I’ve been very grateful for that. Thanks for reading, and for making me feel good about what I’m doing.
But, that expressed, I’d frankly like to have a larger audience. (It’s not you, it’s me.) As far as that goes, I admit that I probably need to be less like Phil Hartman’s Prehistoric Caveman Lawyer character from the old Saturday Night Live skits, protesting that I “don’t understand your strange 21st-century ‘page views’ and ‘enhance-your-Web-traffic’ ways,” and should make myself learn how to market this blog in a way that increases its visibility while somehow keeping it at the periphery of the big, scary, potentially menacing grid, where mean people and loudmouths can and too often do join the fray. But, again, there’s a reason I call this thing Lassitude Come Home and not Welcome to My Brand. I’m no go-getter. And to be frank, I want cool, vetted readers, not just any old set of eyes. So, what I’m asking is, if you read me, please consider sharing me with friends and family members you think might like me (really like me! not to be too Sally Field about it).
Oh, please consider, too, targeting anyone you might know at The Onion or other fabulous Web or print entities that are looking to hire fresh (53-year-old!) talent to write satirical or personal essay-type material full-time, at a great salary, ideally at home in his pajamas, saving him having to commute fully clothed every weekday to his perfectly fine but unexciting job at a local nonprofit association. I’m just sayin’.
When I started this blog a year ago, my fondest hope was that doing so would push me to take various thoughts, reactions, riffs and rants that might otherwise comprise a few lines or paragraphs in an e-mail message to a friend, and expand them into readable essays. Pieces that would stretch and polish my writing skills and prompt me to take a more expansive look at some of the things going on around me—in my personal life, the country, even the world. Earlier today, as I paged through material that ran the gamut from religion and mortality to baseball and the funny papers, from terrorism and foreign policy to technophobia and masturbation, I felt a modicum of pride that, if nothing else, I got that goal off to a pretty good start.
One last thing: Have I mentioned—in passing, perhaps—that I’m a little lazy? So, if there’s a subject you’d like me to write about, please let me know. I’m not guaranteeing I will. In fact, it’s more likely I won’t, whether because I don’t feel qualified to do so, or because the topic doesn’t sufficiently interest me, or because it’s time-sensitive and I’m too slack to address it before it becomes old news, or whatever. The point is, though, if I use your idea rather than having to come up with my own, that saves me precious brain power. (Believe me, there’s little in there to spare.) And even if I don’t use your idea, you may be setting me up for a future post in which I explain why I axed it. Why, I may even mention you by name! How awesome would that be? (Don't answer that.)
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I really need to go. It occurs to me that Tess in some ways is a great role model.
Then, just a few minutes ago, I saw her in the exact same position and state of consciousness, only this time on the couch downstairs.
I was struck by the fact that at least she’d changed venue. In the meantime, I’d dicked around at the computer for fully one-eighth of the day, accomplishing precisely nothing.
An apt note, it seems to me, on which to mark the one-year anniversary of Lassitude Come Home, this aptly named showcase of my, um, “talents.”
Technically, this blog debuted on July 15, 2010, which means it won’t turn 1 until a week from today. But the facts are these: I haven’t posted in nearly three weeks ago, I’ve got time to write today (albeit three hours less of it at this point), “blog anniversary” is my only idea for today’s entry, and history tells me it’s now or perhaps weeks from now.
Actually, today’s procrastination was somewhat instructive, in that I spent most of it rereading all my preceding posts. There have been 45 of them, not including today’s. Divide that number by 12, and even a scantly developed right brain like mine can figure out I’ve posted less than once a week. This year, there’s been only one month in which I’ve posted as many as four times.
But the point isn’t quantity—it’s quality, right? That’s what I like to tell myself. At any rate, to best figure out what I want to say now about the 45 posts I have managed to write, it seemed instructive to revisit my very first post, which I’d inauspiciously given the unimaginative headline, “So It Begins.” (Why not something more provocative, like “Hell Yes, I’m Talkin’ to You!”)
That initial post, while brief, effectively laid out my mixed emotions and motivations. I’d written that I felt I needed a creative outlet but wasn’t sufficiently disciplined or creative to tackle long- or even short-form fiction. I’d expressed concern that, in a world in which every self-important idiot seems to have a blog, I merely was jumping on a fatuous bandwagon. I’d conceded that, while my main desire was to entertain the few friends with whom I’d shared the URL, my ego was big enough to want “a larger audience than one-on-one e-mail could afford.” Finally, I’d worried that my lassitude indeed would come home—that I’d be “too lazy to keep this thing going.”
So, first the good news, as I see it. Today’s post is proof that I’ve indeed kept at this. Having revisited my previous posts, I’m gratified and more than a little surprised to find that most of them, to my eyes, Don’t Suck. While this might not sound like much, it’s high praise within the self-critical edifice that is my psyche. I came into this venture aiming to be entertaining and/or interesting, and at very least not to bore. I think I’ve mostly succeeded at that. Not every time, but more often than not.
Now, for the bad news. In my first post I’d suggested brevity would be my friend. “Blog posts needn’t be long,” I’d written. And my posts wouldn’t be, I’d implied. The benefit to readers being that I’d shut up before anyone started begging me to please wrap it up. The benefit to me being that I’d approach posting less as work and more as play, which presumably would encourage me to get off my ass and write more often.
The numbers pretty well tell the story there. I posted most often—seven times—in the blog’s very first month. And all of those posts were relatively short. Like a good newspaper story (but tellingly unlike many of my efforts during my unheralded career as a print journalist), those early pieces said what they needed to say and then stopped. By contrast, I’ve posted only two times in two different months this year, and three times in three other months. Many if not most of my posts in 2011 have been 1,500 words or longer. There’s a direct correlation between length and frequency, as I expected last July there would be.
Does that mean I always need to write shorter, or that there’s never merit in writing at greater length? No. Hopefully I’m not kidding myself, but I genuinely thought, in rereading my posts, that some of the longer pieces were among my better efforts to date. (Others struck me as far too long.) Still, size does matter. And performance, I think, can improve with frequency. (The preceding messages brought to you by the SSSAAA (Sexually Suggestive Spam Advertisers Association of America.)
Finally, here’s the news that isn’t classifiable as good or bad, but that constitutes my third reaction to that initial post nearly a year ago. I‘d written then that I hoped to amuse, entertain, edify, or at very least not bore my friends with these writings. Several of you have e-mailed me, and/or posted comments on the blog itself, to let me know that a particular post or posts have connected with you in some positive way. I’ve been very grateful for that. Thanks for reading, and for making me feel good about what I’m doing.
But, that expressed, I’d frankly like to have a larger audience. (It’s not you, it’s me.) As far as that goes, I admit that I probably need to be less like Phil Hartman’s Prehistoric Caveman Lawyer character from the old Saturday Night Live skits, protesting that I “don’t understand your strange 21st-century ‘page views’ and ‘enhance-your-Web-traffic’ ways,” and should make myself learn how to market this blog in a way that increases its visibility while somehow keeping it at the periphery of the big, scary, potentially menacing grid, where mean people and loudmouths can and too often do join the fray. But, again, there’s a reason I call this thing Lassitude Come Home and not Welcome to My Brand. I’m no go-getter. And to be frank, I want cool, vetted readers, not just any old set of eyes. So, what I’m asking is, if you read me, please consider sharing me with friends and family members you think might like me (really like me! not to be too Sally Field about it).
Oh, please consider, too, targeting anyone you might know at The Onion or other fabulous Web or print entities that are looking to hire fresh (53-year-old!) talent to write satirical or personal essay-type material full-time, at a great salary, ideally at home in his pajamas, saving him having to commute fully clothed every weekday to his perfectly fine but unexciting job at a local nonprofit association. I’m just sayin’.
When I started this blog a year ago, my fondest hope was that doing so would push me to take various thoughts, reactions, riffs and rants that might otherwise comprise a few lines or paragraphs in an e-mail message to a friend, and expand them into readable essays. Pieces that would stretch and polish my writing skills and prompt me to take a more expansive look at some of the things going on around me—in my personal life, the country, even the world. Earlier today, as I paged through material that ran the gamut from religion and mortality to baseball and the funny papers, from terrorism and foreign policy to technophobia and masturbation, I felt a modicum of pride that, if nothing else, I got that goal off to a pretty good start.
One last thing: Have I mentioned—in passing, perhaps—that I’m a little lazy? So, if there’s a subject you’d like me to write about, please let me know. I’m not guaranteeing I will. In fact, it’s more likely I won’t, whether because I don’t feel qualified to do so, or because the topic doesn’t sufficiently interest me, or because it’s time-sensitive and I’m too slack to address it before it becomes old news, or whatever. The point is, though, if I use your idea rather than having to come up with my own, that saves me precious brain power. (Believe me, there’s little in there to spare.) And even if I don’t use your idea, you may be setting me up for a future post in which I explain why I axed it. Why, I may even mention you by name! How awesome would that be? (Don't answer that.)
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I really need to go. It occurs to me that Tess in some ways is a great role model.
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