âI confused things with their names: that is belief.â
âJean-Paul Sartre, The Words
NOPE. WRITING IS NOT for me.
Iâve failed.
Time to give up.
I did everything possible: Kept diaries and journals, wrote stories, plays, essays, and screenplays, self-published a novella, took a shot at a novel, scribbled in notebooks for years, wrote song lyrics (a few times before and once at 13, which got produced because my father paid for it! Cheater papa!) that experience was fun because itâs like line drawingâŠyou sketch in stuff until you see a form and then go from there. Or not.
So over writing writingâthat is, the shit Iâm doing now and have no idea why. Throwing in the towel. This is my swan song. Gonna jump in the shower and consider a late-career pivot to accounting. Sounds crazy, right? but numbers donât lieânope, numbers do. Not. Lie.
Words? Bullshit, man. Anyone can write. Whatâs the deal with that? Itâs just like talking to paper and passing it over to someone whoâll read it. Now thatâs writing. Seamless stuffâjust poof! into another personâs headspace.
Magic.
Canât do it.
Not in my wheelhouse.
âYou... HEY. Donât even.
Ainât going there.
âŠ
âŠ
whut.
âŠ
nuh nuh no writing
muffled slap-fight
âget off myâyou just stop it. just. STOP. Git offa me.
You see, I had a thought that maybe this newsletter, the final one this season about Daytalking, would be about humor and sadness and tragedy and laughter and holy moly did I get depressed slinginâ that stinky ink around. âTears of a Clownâ (yeah, thatâs original) was the working title.
Oh no no, no no no, not that. No clowns, no tears, no songs that even GO THERE.
Instead, I had memories projecting into my sleeping hours. Like, last night, I woke up punching the fuck out of my pillow. It was weird! But then I remembered the dream and in it some guy was on the phone toâwell, this was a dream, remember? Itâs a lie within all the lies the subconscious ever sets out to tell. (Or maybe itâs the truth? If so, news to me.) To the point, the guy was talking to someone I cared about and I pulled the phone away from him and punched him in the face.
Then I woke up.
Feelinâ like a champ.
So, that was a dream. And hereâs another one: this last newsletter of Daytalking Season 4. Back to those memories. I got curious: how many can you use to write a newsletter? Well, as many or as few as you want.
Iâm a big fan of five. Five everything is just right. Five courses in a meal: 1) Drinks 2) Apps 3) Soup or salad 4) EntrĂ©e and 5) Dessert. Right? Five apostles that Jesus had. Wait, that doesnât seem right. It was eight, correct? Thirteen? Who bailed? Someone bailed. Pretty sure there was a deserter.
Well, I chose five. Then I had to risk whether that was going to work out and suddenly realized: Hey dummy, thatâs what rewriting is for. Oh yeah that. Works every time.
Rewriting! Itâs like writing, only more time intensive.
Hey Iâm as curious as you are to know what the hell this is about.
So letâs let âer rip.
UpâNorth, or Above
Imagine you are standing just now (not sitting down). Youâll appreciate this.
Up is above your head. Think of the crown of your head and imagine whatâs above your skull. That may or may not be planetary north but its orientation is the âopposite of where your feet are at.â Fair enough, right?
This, to me, is a joyful thought. The sky above me. Flowers surrounding me. I am alive in this. The senses assault me (at my age it varies), but thereâs the joy of touch, sight, smell (breathing in and out), hearing, youâre in the world and itâs amazing. Right?
So what is the âstoryâ of up? How is âupâ a part of Daytalking?
Oh, oh, oh, please. Itâs everything. Itâs largely expectation, since thatâs how you best punch my buttons.
If you say, âHey Mike, letâs plan a get-together next Friday,â Iâm all aglow (especially if I like you already)âŠso, âupâ includes expectation, anticipation, flow-y-glow-y, joyful dancey-prancey happiness that, wellâ
Itâs silly, like bright flowers in a ridiculously blue sky. Or maybe brain chemicals in superabundance or the proper arrangement. Who knows.
But it happens and, as my Daytalking friend, I want you know it comes out of left field. If youâre not seeing it these days, go look for it.
Stay open and hopeful, as happy as you can reasonably be. Look over to the right and that left field will creep up on ya.
Youâll find it.
DownâSouth, or Below
Iâd written about this before, as in the family of four humans among whom I was raised, Mom was air, Dad was water, my only brother was earth, and I was ⊠fire. Came into life hot and plan to go out that way. Temperature running high, thermostat a tad too rad. When I was younger, I apologized for it.
Now I donât have the energy to care.
Maybe my nuclear family was a tad too uptight for the creative person I was becoming. Iâd totally forgotten the anxiety of family life: the pressures from Dad, the shaming to and from a younger brother, the distance from Mom the gap of which I longed to close but couldnât quite get (especially when I needed it since I adored her), and all the moments that seemed to add up to more anxiety and family pressure.
It made me warmâoverheated you might sayâas though I was burning myself into cinders just by staying alive.
Later I realized it was my nature. Itâs just a temperament, a disposition, a value I chose early on. Down, down below, meant sexuality too, something Iâve stuffed away and only trotted out when I met the right Daytalking friend (thatâs happened a handful of times, but each time ended in heartache).
Do I regret any of that?
Oh no. Not at all.
You live, you love, you love, you learn.
(Or you donât.)
LeftâWest, or Heart
Sharp turn leftâthatâs where you will find my heart.
I nearly lost it in 2010, but slowly itâs coming back. Itâs been tough to be without the things that once defined who I amâat least, who I thought I wasâwhen they were forever taken away.
Itâs early autumn on the East Coast with Dad wearing his cardigan and me holding a beach towel which means we had just come from or were going to the public pool for a swim.1 When I was underemployed a scant seven years ago, the country club menâs locker room where I worked had an assortment of toiletry items and I got emotional smelling my late fatherâs aftershave lotions and everything that immediately called up memories of him.
Memory through olfactory recollection.
Left is where the heart is. âI Left My Heart in San Francisco.â Out west, way out west.
You see, there was no telling where life would lead. Totally out of left field. Astonishing, really. Itâs great to be Daytalking about this since I was probably happiest in two places: in Maryland and our first home in Minnesota on Lake Minnetonka. After those two places, Iâve been endlessly disoriented about my environment.
Iâm not sure where my heart is in the photo above, taken in probably 1969. We would leave for Minnesota the late winter of 1970, and I recall feeling somewhat imprisoned by middle school, a bit lonely after elementary school, in-between worlds. I never fully grasped at the time how fortunate I was to be in a supportive family. Sure there were issues and anxieties (Sunday morning getting-ready-for-church stress is a clear example, since Dad didnât like to be late for anything, ever) but overall, you knew you belonged. You had a home to call your own.
Right now, thatâs an open question for me at this stage in my life. It feels like an end, but then again Iâve had that experience before and it wasnât true.
Itâs never true.
Itâs not the end untilâ
RightâEast, or Head
Writing this newsletter hasnât been easyâinstead of going with the initial idea about humor and sadness. It feels heavier than it should be, so letâs turn to a story. Something after the college days, the first job, the first apartment, the creative hive I built with Dadâs help in that apartmentâand something that directly ties into thoughts, thinking, overthinking, ruminating, and all that nonsense.
Crack âer open, Tommy boy.
Too much headspace, yâall. But, I will say this, when youâre inclined to be a thoughtful person, youâre just gonna go there.
So suck it up, buttercupâyour amygdala is showing!
Apparently my folks wanted me to use my noggin to become a research scientist, a doctor, lawyer, physicist or something like that and I just kept shooting gutter balls into the arts side of the bowling alley. What if there was a story attached to all that thinking? Some place to land, even if imagined, conjecturedâor just plain daydreaming?
Bored at my corporate job, I thought about my childhood. Those âInvisible Brainsâ the folks bought for me hoping Iâd get all clinical and analytical? So I wrote up a party invite intending to send it to friends. What, I wondered, if we got some folks together to assemble their plastic model brains, fill them with art or poems or mottoes of our making and thenâtake guns out and have a âBlow Your Brains Out Partyâ ⊠slowly realizing: 1) we have no guns; 2) there should be no drugs or alcohol involved; 3) no one I knew made âartâ to begin with, and, well, 4) nice try, brainy boy: let it slide.
And that was that.
But I will say this.
Thinking works best when it comes down to one thing: well-being. Acknowledging and feeling gratitude for any physical, emotional, mental sense of well-being. Iâve learned to do regular gut-checks on this and itâs been instructive.
All heart, manâstraight to it.
WithinâCenter, or Spirit
Finally (but never last) we come to the center. The core, the crux, the everything.
Iâll be honest: Iâm not sure I know what soul or spirit is. You might get glimmers of it when someone loves you, or in the eyes of a sincere and caring friend. Heck you might even find it in the church of your choice.
However, connected to âwithinâ is Stargazing, my hot take on curiosity and wonder (and the subject of the forthcoming StoryShed newsletter season 5)âbut as connected to Daytalking, center or spirit is more about tenacity and personal will than anything else. Stop and think about it: You generally feel drawn to people with a strong sense of self, right?
But how do you cultivate that within yourself? Certainly not by looking for confirmation from other peopleâit took me 60 plus years to amend that awful mistake.
Going back to the previous four directions, it took time to grow from the center outwardâwhat I recall as a never-ending battle for solitude and the peaceful reflection that writingâthe real work of a writerâdemands.
Which brings us full circle.
In anyoneâs world Iâd make a lousy accountant.
Writing was there from the beginning and I guess weâre stuck with one another.
Have you ever struggled with a longtime gift and how did you âcome to termsâ with it?
Notes
Wondering who snapped the pictureâsurely not my brother as he wouldâve been five or six at the time. Likely it was my shutterbug paternal grandfather, and maybe this was over a Thanksgiving holiday visit in the late 1960s.
All I can say, Mike, is âWOOOOOO!lâ
Love this! And your photos from that time look familiar to me, as all such photos do, since I was born in 1961. My own struggles with writing have been inner: I always wanted to write, but I thought writing meant writing fiction, and it turns out I'm not a fiction writer. Around age 50 I started a blog, and that was it; I'd found my format. I always compare myself to the best, so I never feel I measure up â but still, in my 60s I finally feel like I'm doing what I'm meant to be doing.