Things I'm Good At (Or Were...)

I think I could have earned a paycheck though my writing. It might have been a verrrrrry small and infrequent paycheck, but it could have happened. Having read, and reread, and reread, and reread a few thousand car magazines in my youth, I had the style down pat. I just didn't have anything worth writing about.

I've tried my hand at novels and have an appreciation to those who are able to bang them out, one a year, for decades on end. I could have done that, but gawddamn, it gets boring after, say fifty or seventy-five pages. I know how the murder mystery was created: after a hundred pages and half again as many rewrites, you want to kill your characters. Another problem for me is that the experts all say that you should write about what you know. I wanted to write about people and places I didn't know at all -- that's what made them interesting to me. As a result, I spent nearly as much time researching stuff as I did writing. Fun, but not highly productive, page count-wise.

I love to drive. Banging out a 155 mile round-trip commute each day doesn't bother me. I think it was breeding. My dad, for much of his life, was a salesman and sales manager who traveled the country by car, by rail, by airplane. He would spend as much as half the year on the road, and then when vacation time came, he'd load my mother and I into the car and go drive some more. We never went anywhere and stayed -- we just drove hundreds of miles for a week or longer. I loved seeing the USA in our Chevrolet, thank you very much.

Related to the above, I finally bought a motorcycle when I was in my thirties. It was everything I loved about driving, combined with a sense of agility, effortlessness, and occasional momentary terror. At the end of each ride, I knew I had experienced something only one out of a hundred other people on the road had felt that day. To ride well takes your full concentration; as such all other issues of your life are not just secondary, but forgotten. I came late to motorcycling, and left it behind too soon.

In my time, I was damn good at designing advertising. No boast, but in 25 years in the business, there were only a couple of people who could best me. Not that it matters anymore. Why I mention this, I'm unsure.

Wifey tells me I have a quick wit. They say that puns are the cheapest form of humor, which must make me the entertainment industry's equivalent of the local dollar store. Hey, youse want a cheap joke? I gots yer cheap joke right here, fella.