Sometimes the words flow from the fingertips more freely than others and I wonder if someone else is taking control.
Got Zeppelin singing Nobody’s Fault But Mine and less than a minute into it my hand slips and bangs a key moving the music to Everybody’s Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey.
It is funny to me for reasons I won’t share but I will share a link to the iTunes Playlist for those who might think I am making this piece up.
“C’mon, your inside is out and your outside is in.“
This week is wreaking havoc upon my nerves and I am perpetually exhausted, though some of that might be blamed on people around me and a dog that keeps wandering in and out.
It is one of those moments in time where I know I am operating more because of force of will then anything else because without it I might sleep for three days straight.
But this time if you hear me mutter “I am the baddest motherfucker in the Valley” there is a little swagger that hasn’t been there for a while and that can’t be a bad thing.
The funniest part of that is I never used to talk to myself out loud and now I do it a little bit for two basic reasons.
1) Sometimes I read my words out loud because it helps me edit and that habit has sometimes spilled over into life in general.
2) See number one. Wasn’t going to add another number here but I figured some of you want things to be balanced.
When 18 Meets 50
The funny thing about those two pictures is 18-year-old me has the same shirt as 50 year-old me and vice-versa.
Guess it is proof that I know what I like and have some consistency.
Anyhoo, if you are among the long time readers or in the inner circle you know I am focused on making some changes in my life and that some are tied to the 18 year-old.
That kid had high hopes and big dreams and some are unlikely to ever be realized because I am never going to play for the Dodgers or Lakers, not that I really expected to then.
But a boy with an imagination like mine can come up with possibilities and so can a man my age.
If I managed to accrue a ridiculous amount 0f cash I could buy the team(s) and make myself a player but the likelihood of that happening is probably slightly greater than my taking a pill that would give me another six inches.
Given that I don’t feel a burning need for another six and am comfortable as is the odds are further reduced to a point where it is not happening unless I find the genie in the lamp.
But I digress…
The hardest part of this week hasn’t been the waiting for the phone to ring or the incessant checking of my email.
Nor has it been looking in the mirror and wondering what other dietary adjustments I have to make to carve and resculpt things the way I want them to look.
It is not feeling the usual adrenaline high of the workout. I attribute that to not being able to lift the way I want to.
And the self diagnosed reason for that is tendinitis.
I gave myself some time off and have felt the ache start to fade away and have slowly been working my way back but it hasn’t been easy.
This aging thing isn’t for the faint of heart. Hell, I pushed through the discomfort for a while thinking I could just work through it but it didn’t change as I wished.
So I reluctantly adjusted and well here I am, desperately wanting to push a little bit harder but trying to be smarter about it.
I hate sounding like an old man.
That kid in the photo would be disappointed as we swore some of this wouldn’t happen. Of course we swore a few other things wouldn’t happen and they did.
Remind me to go back in time and kick him in the balls so he remembers to listen to the good advice he ignored.
Been thinking about two or three of the stories I carry around inside my head and wondered how many of them will end up in a book.
Rolled the tape inside my inner movie theater and listened to the dialogue and decided at least two of them could be commercial successes.
There are two burning questions that I’ll have to address before we get to that point.
1) Am I willing to do the work to move them from the internal screen to the external world so they have a shot at proving my hunch right or wrong.
2) Am I prepared to follow Stephen King’s advice?
“If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.”
― On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Time Will Tell
That 18 year-old believed he might get somewhere with writing because he won some awards in writing contests and had a few positions that helped fuel that thought.
He thought that King was an ok writer and that Whitman was an ok poet.
But the 50 year-old has lived a little bit and thinks both are beyond ok. More importantly he knows that Whitman quote is the key to writing success, but that is a story for a different day…maybe.
