Reporter

First, last, and I guess always, I am a reporter. If given facts I can spin them, quickly, making gold where others see dross. As Will Sonnett said, “No brag. Just fact.” Combined with a natural inquisitiveness, a need to understand what I was looking at/hearing, a need to make sense of things, it all served me well. I used these skills to write important documents for drug manufacturers when I knew only a little science and even less engineering. Asking questions make you seem intelligent, it seems, at least if they’re intelligent questions. (Yes, Virginia, there are stupid questions.)

For that reason, I’m redirecting this blog. The poems and essays won’t disappear, but I will write more frequently if I indulge my many ideas playing across my mind, ideas which don’t fit neatly into the holes for “essay” or “poem”.

I spent my teenaged years with a significant amount of time at the kitchen table just talking with my mother. She liked to talk. I like to talk. When the conversation turned to “what are you thinking for your future?”, my response was, “Ideally, I would have a job where I could just talk like this and make money from it.”

I partially achieved that when I graduated from college (finally–it took an “extra’ 18 months) and started working as a news editor/reporter on a weekly newspaper. I listened, I wrote, I published, I basked in the glory…or rather, I got paid a paltry wage that seemed a gift from heaven. After moving to another paper, though, I realized, “hey, I don’t really like going out to find things that people are saying or worse, aren’t saying but we really would like to know. I want to just say things from the heart of me, from inside. I don’t want to have to go find it.” Truthfully, going out there and trying to drum up stories seemed like work.

So I went into teaching. That was great. Except that I realized after nine years…I don’t really love kids, not like my fellow teachers said they did. It was a great run, taught me a lot about being assertive and ‘out there’, gave me a great background in labor issues when I negotiated the collective bargaining agreement with the school district’s administrators (or later, lawyers), but in the end I just accepted that as much as I liked TALKING for six or seven hours a day, this wasn’t my gig.

I decided to realize my dream of being a freelance writer, i.e., a writer who writes what he wants and somehow makes a living at it. I had no idea how to do that, and basically learned over 15 months that I had absolutely no discipline to do this for a living. I entered the business world, used my skills at writing, analyzing, and computing to make a very successful career. But…..

Writing manufacturing process assessments and standard operating procedures (SOP’s) didn’t permit the craziness to get out. I found minor ways to let it out, but they were limited. Some semi-anonymous vice-president isn’t interested in my poem about the reality deep in my hidden soul. After more than a decade of this, Facebook seemed okay for this sort of thing, at least a little….

Pissing away my writing skills on Facebook festered like a chancre. I harbored the desire to write. After this, after that, I started this blog in September 2021.  Now, a year later, I realize the need to write WEIGHTY STUFF just isn’t there, not in the sense that it’s going to happen here on a regular basis. Maybe it’s the lack of discipline thing again. Accordingly, ….

I’m repurposing this blog. It will be the lengthy post I could never do on Facebook, the chattiness that drives my wife crazy, the off-the-cuff observations that might not have any substantial exposition. What is written may fuel the more substantial things which will appear also.

One piece of writing has been sitting for twenty days at this point, waiting to be born. If I worked solidly at others, that wouldn’t be an issue, but that’s not what is happening. The piece of writing I reference had a timeliness which said “publish me quickly”. That hasn’t happened, and now it needs to rewritten. I need to keep priming the pump with whatever is on my mind, even if it’s not sufficiently weighty or well-written. I need to be chatty again.

Here we go.