“You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people that you do.” (Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, page 22)

So we’re at war. Life seems to be barreling ahead whether I stop to reflect upon it or not. And I was doing so good there for a few days. Okay, want to know a secret? I really wasn’t writing for several days in a row. I just wrote once, and broke up those thoughts over different days so it looked I was a responsible blogger. Pretty sneaky, huh? It’s so easy to mislead.

So what’s been going on? Houses. Jobs. Not having either. Snow camp happened. I survived. A trip to Green Bay happened. I survived. My job hunt has oscillated from hoping to find something to hoping I don’t find something so I can write my first great American novel. The pipe dream takes over and I sadistically hope a sudden bout of unemployment will bring it all to fruition. As if a book would solve all my woes. I started re-reading Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird this week to regain the proper perspective. “If you’re not enough before the gold medal, you won’t be enough with it,” (Lamott again, page 218–and no I haven’t finished the book already, I just skipped to the end and read the underlined parts).

Publication is shit. That’s what I tell myself. Obviously it has some practical value. If some sucker never published your work you’d never get paid the piles of pennies that you do. But it really is just piles of pennies. The average writer makes about $10,000 on a book. That’s it. You’d have to pump out three to four books a year just to maintain a lower-middle class lifestyle. Louis L’Amour could barely pull that off.

So I keep telling myself my first great American novel won’t solve my upcoming unemployment. It’s not a wise solution. Even if it did have a big pay off, I’d have to write the stupid thing first. And I’m not exactly experienced at that. In the years since high school, when I thought my short stories were good, I’ve let my fiction skills atrophy a bit, and I’m not sure if they could handle a freakin’ novel. The last short story I cranked out required a class deadline, plenty of caffeine, a sacrificed Saturday evening, and Radiohead at full volume. It wasn’t exactly a pleasant experience. And that was only a six-page short story.

But I’ll plow ahead anyway. I have this idea in my head. It’s actually dangerous to say this here. Every time I mention here that I have this idea it dies a slow and painful death of neglect. It’s as if broadcasting the idea to the entire world creates expectation and expectation equals death. World, meet my idea. Idea, meet–oh crap, it’s dead. Nevermind.

Maybe I’ll overcome it by telling you nothing about my idea. It’s just an idea. Let’s leave it at that. It’ll probably require a caffeine-induced Saturday evening of Radiohead just to keep the idea on life support for all the hype it’s already received. But I plan to pursue that idea. I want to chase it down. I want to pursue it and see if it does have something worth the hype. I want to follow the idea, pursue the dream, and see if I can’t actually write a novel. I love to write. I want to write. I yearn to write. Who else would be sitting at their computer on a Friday night, ignoring friends and family, just to type some stupid reflections on life that no one really cares about? You have to like writing to subject your life to public scrutiny for four years straight for the sheer thrill of it. It’s not like anybody ever follows that little support link up there to see what that’s all about. This thing has no rewards. Except for the sole satisfaction of writing. And amazingly enough I keep coming back for that and that alone.

So you see, I have to write a book. At some point in my life I’m going to have to do it. It may be the suckiest novel that ever sucked, and I’ll bury it in the backyard, but I’ll have written it. Anne Lamott suggests writing shitty first drafts, and I want to write the shittiest first draft of all shitty first drafts. Let’s just hope I have the guts for round two.

I think that’s enough for “today.”

I want to write words that mean something. I don’t want it to be something that disappears, a line that’s said and never remembered, a movie you watch and can’t quite remember how it ended. I haven’t sat down often these past few months to pen my thoughts. Maybe I’ve been less pensive. Maybe I’ve been too busy. Maybe I just don’t care. We all have dry spells. I have been thinking. I’m always thinking. You can’t walk a mile and a half each day by yourself and not think. I probably come up with ten good ideas during every walk home from the bus stop, and forget nine of them by the time I get home. I usually forget the tenth one, too, just after supper.

Neglect. I don’t mean to neglect. I have been writing. A few things have been published, a few thoughts committed to paper. I certainly haven’t been focused. It’s hard to be focused when you’re married. Part of me loves to just dive into the computer when I get home and type and type and type. And then part of me remembers that I have a wife and I can’t spend all my free time in front of a computer. And some days I’m absolutely sick of sitting in front of a computer and you couldn’t pay me enough to sit in front of one at home. But those days aren’t too frequent.

Focus. It’s also hard to focus when you consider the medium. Audience is a blessing and a curse. Knowing your mother reads what you write is not always encouraging. Sorry Mom, that’s the way it is. What do you think Shakespeare’s mom thought? She was probably always reading into his work and wondering if he was suicidal or gay or just plain nuts. And you can’t really avoid audience. I can’t tell my mom not to read what I write. But sometimes it makes you hold back. That’s the problem with these online journal things. They’re the latest and the greatest, but they’re really not as real as everyone thinks they are. Some people are so careful in what they say and what they imply. They know who is reading and who’s probably not, and they know what they can say and what they need to insinuate. It’s almost a game.

And it’s not just my mom. It’s my wife. It’s my friends. It’s my in-laws. Sometimes you have things on your heart that you really don’t want others to know you’re thinking about, or at least you’re still trying to work them out for yourself. Or it’s an issue you just don’t want to be open about at this point in your life. That’s what the old physical pen and paper is for, but I’m a child of the 90s and I just can’t move the pen as fast as I can think. I have a better chance with a keyboard.

So what do you do? You drift away. You lose focus. You find another medium.

Some days I wonder if these Ponderings are slowly dying. I hope not. But in some ways they may be. I’m 23 years old. I’m married. Children are on the horizon. What happens then? Can I blabber about my kids for the whole world to read? Is that really something I want to do? Won’t they be embarrassed in high school when the Google archives uncover their dad’s ponderings about the time they peed everywhere but the toilet while potty training. Do I really want to subject my kids to that? I suppose the answer is yes. After all, I am a writer. Most other writers just publish a book and rake in the royalties off their kids’ embarrassing childhood moments.

Sometimes it’s just a wash. You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. Maybe I’m just afraid of talking about certain subjects with certain people. Is that a healthy fear? Or is that just a societal impulse that keeps us from being open with each other? Maybe I just need to loosen up and say whatever I want and offend whoever gets offended.

Maybe I’m just moving on. Maybe it’s another phase of my life. I used to love making Web pages. I haven’t made one in a while. I don’t even take the time to archive the proper months of these ponderings. Is that just a shift in my focus? A change in my priorities? Are the insignificant things in my life suffocating me? But what else are you going to do, drown in dirty dishes?

I can only ask questions and wonder why. Wonder as I wander, and some day we’ll get to where we’re going. Children ask questions. They’re always wondering why. Sometimes we can learn something when we stop to ask. We may not get an answer, but the wonder is still there. The openess is still there. The ability to learn and grow is still viable, and so there is still a chance.

It would be an interesting sociological experiment to catalog my thoughts over the past five years or so. I’ve changed a lot in the past five years. I graduated high school and college, my parents divorced and remarried, I dropped out of a major ministry and ended a three year relationship, I left my fundamentalist Baptist church and started going to a liturgical Episcopalian church, I started a 9 to 5 job and I got married.

A brief overview of my writing from the past five years would give you a glimpse of the vast changes. I’ve always had a lot of swirling thoughts and dreams and competing ideas of what I wanted to do. I’ve always seen myself as a writer and always wanted to do something with that. I graduated with a degree in writing, and now I work as an editor. I love the work, but I still have that yearning to write. I want to write a book. Part of it is probably wanting to see my name in print. That bit of pride whispering to myself how cool it would be to see my name in print. Of course when that voice starts speaking another voice is telling me how quickly my name in print would be lost in the sea that is the modern publishing business.

But I still want to write a book. I want to tell stories. I want to impart wisdom. I want to challenge. I want to inspire. I want to make people see the world in new ways, the way books I’ve read have challenged, inspired, and made me see the world in new ways. I’m not even so concerned about what kind of book I write, I just want to write one. Another voice tells me that’s a good sign that this is an egotistical drive. But maybe it’s just the writer in me wanting to put words on paper one way or another.

A psychotic thought has gripped me the past few days, and I finally realized it was centered around what would have been an ideal writing environment. I was able to ignore all the downsides of this idea because it would force me to do the writing that I so want to do. Which really makes me think about my priorities. Maybe I just need to suck it up and start writing that book. Maybe I need to be anti-social (or more anti-social) and write this book. Maybe I need to let other commitments go and just fuel this need to write and see what happens.

I would expect my pride will take a big blow. And I need that. I think once my ego is deflated and I learn whether or not I can write, and whether or not anyone will ever see my writing, then I’ll be in a position to see the real value of writing and (hopefully) it will all be worthwhile.

It’s funny; if you surveyed my thinking over the past five years you’d find many rantings just like this one. One of these days I’ll act on it; hopefully before I’m 65.

Sometimes I think writers are granted an excuse from the normal expectations of life. In some ways it’s an excuse, and in other ways it may be seen as a curse. In order to be a writer, you have to actually write. Most writers don’t start off getting paid to do that, so you have to do something else to pay the bills until you can work your way up to supporting yourself with your chicken scratch. Most never make it. The result is that writing is something you have to make time for. You sacrifice things like a social life in order to be a writer. You have to come home from your day job and sit down and pound out a pile of words every night, just so you can hope to improve and some day have something you call yours. I’ve never really thought about that sacrifice before.

In some ways I’ve let this collection of online thoughts be my writing for the past few years. And in some ways it has been. Every few months I’ll pound something out here that will end up being the rough draft for something else. But notice the term “every few months.” If that’s as often as I’m doing some serious writing, I should really give up on my dream of being one of them paid writers. In some ways this collection of thoughts could be seen as a sacrifice. I’ve spend twenty minutes a day, not quite every day, for the last three years putting these thoughts together. I never edit them. And often I don’t go back to them to pull anything out. Not much of a sacrifice. That’s like offering your toe nail clippings when spilt blood is required.

So lately I’ve been thinking that I need to get serious about writing. I need to actually do some writing. I need to stop sitting on my butt watching TV every other night when I could be writing. And it’s not that I’m a big TV watcher. There’s probably three or four TV shows I watch on a regular basis. If you add it up it’s about four hours of TV watching per week. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but imagine if that was four more hours of writing every week.

Sometimes I think writers and artistic people just like to sound all sacrificial and pompous. Look at me, giving up something for the sake of my high artsy-fartsy calling in life. My wife would probably make fun of me if I told her I wasn’t going to watch Judging Amy tonight because I want to be a professional writer. I should make fun of myself for that. But at the same time, there’s a certain amount of work and sacrifice that needs to be done if I want to call myself a writer. It’s not about being professional or being famous, or even making a buck (although that’s always nice).

And the beautiful thing is that if you’re really honest about wanting to be a writer, it’s not a sacrifice. If I really want to be a writer, then I should be writing rather than watching Seventh Heaven. I should enjoy writing, not see it as a load of work I have to do in my evenings to work my way into the publishing world. That’s a crock. That’s the wrong motives. That’s focusing on what writing gets me, and sucking it up so I can get there. I imagine most true writers love the writing part, and aren’t too thrilled about the professional world of writers. If I really love writing, I wouldn’t bitch and moan about spending my evening writing. And I hope I’m not doing that.

You know you’re doing what you love to do when you do it even though you’re not on the clock. If you’d volunteer to do your day job, then you’re a lucky bastard. I’d like to be a lucky bastard someday.