Elasticity

It’s been a while.

I’m trying to write something profound but that’s not really my nature.

I’m just trying to write something.

Anything.

Without it sounding like I’ve forgotten how to write.

When I’ve actually forgotten how to do that.

I really have enjoyed writing about how I don’t know how to write. In the past, I’ve been able to sit behind a keyboard and bang out stories I’d read later on and feel smug as fuck about it all. The fact that the words I’d written made me giggle proved that I’d pulled the wool over my own eyes to allow me to believe that I’d created something worthwhile, when it was just garbled nonsense. I was recently told that it’s not particularly attractive to have a pity party for myself. I disagree, it’s actually very attractive, but I don’t know what happened to me

Maybe it was the heartache or the booze, the lack of ambition in this or the consumption of time by my career, the malaise of a post-pandemic world or the tumult of our society’s ills screaming at me every fucking day, or the completion of a goal and the insecurity to set a new one.

Whatever it may be, the regularity of writing has taken a backseat. Being prolific for the sake of being prolific was a blast, a real hoot, a building I could create brick by brick, growing a small audience and playing to a select few. You are probably one of them. Why else would you be reading this?

Now I just cascade down this white page with wandering thoughts, unsure of where exactly this can end up. Wasting your time. My time. There’s really nothing here unless you want something to be here. I’ll just keep going.

Plan B’s are always fun. When I was a youngster I wanted to be a writer, probably starting in about fourth grade, mainly due to the fact that I wrote a story - months after 9/11 and days after the World Series ended - about how a group of umpires made a series of bad calls and ran away from the baseball stadium after the game. An angry mob followed them to their headquarters - the Umpire State Building - and the frenzy ended with the umpires crashing their car into the glassed-in lobby. The mob got their way and the umpires were thrown into a makeshift jail, being pelted with baseballs by anyone who passed by.

The student teacher didn’t like my story, for whatever reason, and told me to write a new one. It was the first time an editor rejected something I’d written and I felt ashamed but also alive. She didn’t reject anyone else’s stories. That I made a twenty-something year old college student think my story was too inappropriate to share with other fourth graders was hard to grapple with.

I had to go with a Plan B.

I don’t remember my re-write.

I write this simply to say that I’ve always wanted to express words on a page and share those words with people. Sometimes I write something satisfying for the reader and sometimes I get written about on message boards, expressing their opinion that I’m mentally unstable and should be medicated.

Ambitions are interesting though, aren’t they? I enjoy criticism because creativity is born from it. Don’t like my writing and want to tell me about it? Great, I’ll write weirder shit. Like tossing gasoline on a cigarette. I derive a lot of pleasure from this exercise, but being a writer? No idea how to stay consistent, on message, or complete a story that isn’t written in one sitting. Perhaps a deeper scholastic endeavor would’ve helped me out quite a bit, but I didn’t have the patience for it.

Being a writer was Plan A.

Now I’m a superintendent at a golf course, toiling away my days at the grass factory, the sun scorching my celtic skin, re-wiring my brain to worry about fungus, pin placements, and moisture levels. Re-wiring my creativity to treat a field of green like city streets, re-routing golf carts with ropes and stakes, seeing opportunities to change a particular aesthetic, and finding ways to communicate with a group of people to motivate them to an end goal.

Being a superintendent was Plan B.

This is simply an exercise to prime the pump that was Plan A. There’s no reason to publish this. I just fucking want to. It’s messy and fun and I won’t re-read it or edit it. I just needed to dust off parts of my brain. Sorry for wasting your time.

I guess I should leave you with a moral ending. If you’re afraid your Plan A didn’t work out or isn’t working out or won’t work out, don’t. It’s going to be fine. You too can toil in a grass factory. Or become president or some shit. I don’t know. Figure it out. If a dipshit like me can figure it out, I have a lot of faith in you. If you’re already on Plan B or Plan C, or whatever metamorphosis you’re evolving through, good on you. Way to adapt. Cheers.