From the Archives - Guitar Man

Introduction

In 1986, I took a high school creative writing class. The teacher, Mr. Kroop, wore Jams and played whale music and didn’t do a lot of lecturing; instead, he gave out gobs of assignments. We seemed to have something due almost every day. One day he assigned us a character sketch. I think my effort came to more than that, in its primitive way. (Note: by “sketch” he meant only in the literary sense. The drawing below had nothing to do with the assignment and Mr. Kroop never even saw it.)

Guitar man – February 3, 1986

Olga leaned back in her chair. It creaked, threatening to collapse. She belched loudly, and then slumped over the little built-in desk. She was in a meeting at an alcohol rehabilitation center, where she had been sent as part of her sentence for shoplifting at a Liquor Mart. Having smuggled in a flask of Jack Daniels, she was too inebriated to pay attention to the lecture that was being given. Plus, she spoke almost no English.

A bearded man came around passing out magic markers and big sheets of butcher paper. Olga assumed they were to write lists of some kind. Goals? Reasons to do better? Excuses? She wasn’t feeling inspired to write anything, and nobody would be able to decipher her Cyrillic characters anyway. So she just slumped at her desk, her cheek resting on her arm, watching the proceedings unfold sideways. The bearded man said something to her which she ignored. Then she happened to spy, on the wall, a framed picture of a man playing a guitar.

Something was weird about the picture. It was sideways. Of course, Olga’s head was turned on its side, so the picture ought to look sideways, she reasoned, but it just wasn’t right. It was, like, double-sideways. She sat up and looked at again, with her head straight. Now it was upside-down! She shook her head a bit as if to clear it. She looked again. Yes, she had been drinking, but not that much, and the picture was definitely upside-down. What was this, some kind of joke? Some kind of trick? Or a result of very haphazard janitorial service? Was this some visual aid, to be used in some group exercise, serving perhaps as some metaphor? Well, it didn’t matter. Not Olga’s problem. And then she remembered something she’d learned once in an art class, decades ago, back in the old country. Something about drawing upside down, and how it helped you draw what you see, not what you suppose something looks like. Olga realized that, with her butcher paper and marker, she was in a position to draw this right now. Upside-down.

She hadn’t drawn anything with a marker in ages (a spray can being her preferred medium), and she held it tightly in her fist like a toddler with a crayon. She drew rapidly, looking at the framed picture rather than her paper. Once in a while she glanced down and was thrilled to see her drawing taking shape and looking, actually, a bit like a work of art. Some of the lines kind of did their own thing, some petered out instead of joining anything up, and she noted with a frown that the guitar player’s right hand looked a little palsied, but all in all it wasn’t bad. Now if she could just not screw up the face! She focused on the lines and tried to forget what they were supposed to be leading up to. Halfway through finishing his head she couldn’t go on—there was too much goodness on the paper to risk screwing it all up. It had to be considered Done.

She turned the paper around so it was right-side-up and gazed upon her work. Had she really just drawn this? How much time had passed? She realized suddenly that the room around her was in motion, chairs scraping back as people stood up. Somebody was collecting the papers. No! Not hers! She started to roll it up but her fingers were fumbling. It was like she’d used up all her skill and had nothing else left for this task. She stood, stepped back, and tripped over her chair. Her arms flew back and she caught herself from falling, ending up in a crablike position. Her contraband whiskey bottle flew from the pocket of her baggy overcoat and spun across the floor. This caused massive commotion—with all the alcoholics in the room, that bottle was like blood in shark-infested waters. Olga lumbered off toward the exit as if in flight, embarrassed and ashamed to have her smuggling operation discovered. The door swung closed behind her, letting out a little sigh.

The bearded man shook his head and strode toward the abandoned whisky bottle, which was still half full. Nobody raced him for it, but all eyes were on it. Suddenly there was motion again at the double doors, a struggle from the other side, and they started to open together. Olga staggered through, a look of fierce determination on her face. The bearded man practically sprinted for the bottle, but to his surprise Olga marched right by him. There was a large sheet of curled paper near the chair she’d overturned, and she snatched it up, rolled it into a tight scroll, and—flashing a defiant and satisfied look—strode off, in her galumphing way, back out through the door.

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Because It Amuses Me: the albertnet Subhead

Introduction

My wife is starting a business, and recently read up on how to build a good website. This has given her some ideas for albertnet, one of which is to have some kind of subheading, beneath the masthead, that conveys the nature of this blog. I guess the subhead is meant to be kind of a slogan, or a mini-mission-statement. It should ideally answer the question of why the business exists: i.e., what is the point?

Having been thus encouraged to apply this idea to my blog, I’ve had to do some head-scratching. One result of this is the subhead you see above. At least, you should see it above, if I updated the template properly. In any case, you can see it below:

My thought process, including further examination of the question “why albertnet,” follows below. If you’ve ever wondered what the hell this blog is even about, this is your chance to (maybe kind of) find out.

Not a business

First and foremost, albertnet is not a business. Since I pay for web server storage and for my domain names, but receive zero revenue because I refuse to turn on AdSense advertising, this blog is actually a cost center for me. This means the answer to “why?” can’t simply be “because money.” Meanwhile, I can’t call this is a non-profit, pro bono type of business, because I have no way to tell if it’s actually benefitting anybody. To date, this blog has had about 890,000 page views, which pales in comparison to a great many blogs (though in absolute terms it strikes me as a somewhat large number). I’ve posted over 700 times over a period of about 14½ years, so 890,000 views is not a lot of bang for the buck. I also don’t know whether a page view represents somebody reading an entire post or just glancing at it and deciding it’s not the Google result he was looking for, and closing the page. So to assume I’m serving some market and satisfying readers would be pure guesswork.

Does that mean I shouldn’t bother trying to promote my blog? Not necessarily; after all, what writer doesn’t want to attract an audience? But that doesn’t mean I have the time or patience to work much at it. After all, technical tricks like search engine optimization and content marketing are not nearly as interesting to me as, say, writing. So what if I double my page views? From the financial perspective, two times zero is still zero. From the “actual reader” perspective, leading people here does not make them read.

What do readers want?

For a blogger—that is, the kind of writer who can’t simply look at book sales to see if he or she is successful—page view counts might seem very valuable. Data mining is certainly a popular practice in corporate America; I recall a big boss once advising me, “Metrics are important in this space.” (Man, I think I actually bruised my eye sockets at that moment, so forcefully did my eyes roll.) Another time my director was counseling my boss and me on a tough decision we had to make: “Go with your gut,” he said, and then—seeming to suddenly remember the business zeitgeist of the time— he quickly added, “but make sure it’s data-driven.” Um … okay.

Okay, fine, I’m poking fun at puffed-up pronouncements here, not the data behind them; what does page view data actually have to say? Could I use blog post popularity data like a mini-focus-group? Well, consider that my most popular post of all time, as of today, is “Spelling Focus: Is It ‘Kindergartner’ or ‘Kindergartener’?” which has racked up over 11,000 views. Should I conclude that this the kind of post albertnet readers love, and do more posts like it?

Well, not so fast. I think when companies make data-driven determinations like this, they’re using the feedback to try to react quickly to the market. But if this “Kindegart(e)ner” post were a TV show, it’d have been canceled immediately, because it was initially stillborn and generated practically zero page views for the first two years it was up:

This isn’t an isolated phenomenon: my most popular post of the past month (though it’s only so far climbed to fifteenth overall), “Selecting Bicycle Wheels – Part I,” was largely dormant for over nine years before suddenly gaining traction about six months ago. It’s been going strong ever since, getting almost 1,700 page views (about 60% of its total over time) in the last three months alone:

I see this again and again with albertnet posts: “Everest Challenge ‘Pep Talk’” took six and a half years to go anywhere and is now my tenth most popular ever; “The Problem With Soccer,” my eighth most popular, malingered for almost a decade before building any momentum. So why should I put any stock in page view stats, knowing that any of my 700+ posts could, theoretically, suddenly tip? All I can really glean from the data is that albertnet posts are not timely. But then, I knew that.

Now, it’s tempting to think I could set the numbers and timelines aside for a moment and simply look at the topics of my most popular posts and try to figure out what they have in common. Here are my top five of all time (as of today):

Hmmm. No single theme is jumping out at me. The top post is about spelling. Second most popular is a news story about a cyclist setting a world record. In third place is an essay about whether highbrow entertainment is actually superior to lowbrow. Fourth goes to a harrowing personal history about having my balls shaved and my vas deferens snipped. And the fifth most popular is a poem about bicycle gearing. In terms of topic, these posts almost couldn’t be more different.

Could it be some other characteristic they share, that makes them popular? Well, I guess they’re all arguably funny—but then, I try to find humor in everything I write about, and these posts aren’t necessarily standouts in that regard. The one about the cycling world record, for example, has a few decent gags but isn’t nearly as funny as, say, “From Farting Liberally to Liberal Arts: the Flatulence Files,” which has performed dismally, with under 600 posts total over nine years.

Should I care what readers want?

When I look over those top five albertnet posts, I can remember how each of them came about—and in every case, worrying about whether the topic would attract readers never crossed my mind:

• The corn cob post was a result of a cycling teammate of mine ribbing me about the randomness of my blog topics. As I wrote in the post’s introduction, he said, “You could write an essay about each cog, or better yet, you could write a sonnet, an ode to the corn cob!”
• The vasectomy post was simply a great yarn that demanded to be told; from the shaving of my scrotum, to the mysterious ConMed Hyfrecator machine, to the mid-procedure power outage, to the doctor declaring ominously, “I’ve got your vas,” the confluence of events was practically literary entrapment
• The “Highbrow vs. Lowbrow” post came about because I’d wasted a bunch of money at a museum and wanted something to show for it, if only an essay
• The cycling world record post almost didn’t happen … it seemed like an interesting opportunity to actually report on some breaking news, but I was feeling lazy, and prevaricated before finally deciding, what the hell, I’d go ride South Park Drive a bunch of times with a wannabe world record holder
• The “Kindergart(e)ner”post was simply to help out a curious friend, who puzzled over the spelling but wasn’t as keen as I to dive down rabbit holes after arcane knowledge

The common thread you can discern about those posts is that the likelihood of an enthusiastic audience wasn’t the point. And why should it be? Writing for me is simply a hobby, and how many hobbies are measured by some worldly notion of success? Does the fly fisherman care how many fish he catches (particularly if he always releases them, as many do)? Does the bird watcher mainly do it for the bragging rights? Does the Netflix binger hope his encyclopedic knowledge of “The Crown” will bring him glory at the office water cooler? No … we do these activities simply because we enjoy them.

The joy of not caring

At the end of the day, many if not most bloggers are amateurs. Many of us have probably considered writing for a living, but that means pleasing our publisher and editor and getting worked up about what critics have to say, and how well we’re selling. That sure seems like it could take the fun out of the activity. If I always write with some potential readership in mind, then I’m really doing this for them. But since this is my hobby, why shouldn’t it be about me? And if others happen to find my stuff useful, funny, or insightful, why not just consider that a bonus?

So if you’ve ever come to the end of an albertnet post—perhaps this very one!—and thought, “Man, that really didn’t do it for me,” don’t be disappointed. This blog was never about you. It’s about me, and more specifically, whatever I think it’d be fun to write about. And thus the answer to “why albertnet?” is a simple one: “because it amuses me.” (I hope it happens to amuse you, too.)

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From the Archives - This Is a Short Story—NOT!

Introduction

When I’ve lately searched my archives for an old essay worth posting, it’s felt like I’m down to the absolute dregs. One thing I’m resolute about sparing you are the short stories I wrote during high school, which are painful to read. The following essay, which I wrote in college, examines the difficulty I had with fiction, while sharing some personal history I hope you’ll find amusing.

This Is a Short Story - October 21, 1989

This is a short story.

Actually, it’s not. It’s just another ... well, whatever you want to call it. Essay, report, letter: whatever it is, it ain’t fiction. A family member reported recently getting shivers when reading about my life, and wishing it was fiction. Hey, if my memoirs make you uneasy, you should read my short stories! Or maybe you shouldn’t.

See, I’ve always had problems with fiction. A few years back, I could write it pretty readily—but it was really, really bad. My characters were either boring, unbelievable, or undeveloped. The situations were worse. Real life provides all this for me; I just have to write it all down. The only trouble is, I have to patiently wait for characters to show up and situations to happen, which takes too long … unless I delve into my past.

I’m probably the only 20-year-old alive who’s ready to write his autobiography. I could write a new volume every twenty years until I’m dead. So instead of the story I was going to try to write this evening, here are some reminisces.

 At my high school, most students hung out in packs (I’d say “cliques” but that’s such a stupid word). Within these groups, everybody tried to look like everybody else, so most of my peers in high school could be easily categorized: jock, egghead, stoner, hic, punker, cheerleader, reject, etc. I always had a strange fascination, almost an admiration, for those who took great pains to distinguish themselves and stand aloof from everyone. Take this guy in my Russian class, Timofey. That’s not really his name, but it’s the English phonetic spelling for his Russian name. Outside of class, he probably went by “Tim” which doesn’t fit him nearly as well. Who knows, maybe he adopted “Timofey” beyond the classroom … I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

Timofey made punk rockers look like Eddie Haskell. He wore this black leather jacket with a painting on the back of a pit bull with an arm sticking out of its mouth. Big block letters spelled out, “Pit bull for sale: loves children.” As you read that, it sounds stupid. And it was. But the fact that he wore that thing, without copping any kind of rebellious attitude, was unique. Unlike punkers, he was friendly and outgoing. His hair was even wilder than his jacket: a kind of square shaped, white ‘do with little vertical curls set in epoxy. I’m not kidding, epoxy—I asked. He was really funny not just to talk to, but to look at. He might have been smart; I couldn’t tell (though it was said that he was the first Russian language student in 20 years to fail the class). 

I guess the real reason I kind of respected the guy was that he wasn’t trying to relate to the punkers—in fact, they wouldn’t go near him. Where you would expect them to look at him with awe, their expressions seemed to say something like, “Gawd, that guy’s WEIRD!” He singlehandedly made their own poses look pretty weak; after all, most of these rote punkers would have cleaned up just fine and could be installed in a church service pretty readily. But not Timofey. I mean, how do you get hardened epoxy out of a kid’s hair?

When I started high school I was as judgmental and easily shocked as the next rank-and-file member of the nerdy wannabe-elite. Having Timofey in class, and finding him harmless, helped me let my guard down. I was also led toward greater acceptance of the unusual by this punk rocker chick named (in Russian) Masha. She had this way of looking at you with a half-smile, curling her lip like Billy Idol, as though she was kind of inwardly laughing at you, except you knew she wasn’t even paying attention to you, so she must have been laughing at everyone, at this class, at this whole stupid high school scene. I had a sizeable crush on Masha, even if her bleached, gelled, and shocked-up hair wasn’t set in epoxy. My only issue with her is that she almost never came to class.

So, yeah, exchanging pleasantries with Timofey and Masha (yes, they’d actually talk to me!) really expanded my worldview, to the point that when my brothers’ friend DT began an eerie metamorphosis into an unrecognizable hybrid of comic book villain and standup comedian, I rolled with it. He stopped wearing bike race t-shirts in favor of a big long overcoat, which accentuated his 6’4” 200-pound frame (which was itself a recent thing—he seemed to suddenly grow giant overnight). DT dyed his hair red—but not a realistic redhead red, but a lustrous dark black-cherry-red right out of a color comic book. Then he wore the old-school Steve Dallas sunglasses, let a good three days of razor stubble build up on his face, and clenched a cigar in his teeth. Maybe you never saw him like that, and if not it’s probably a good thing. You would’ve hated it, probably, because this was DT, a guy we all knew, a guy we didn’t want to laugh at like a strange exhibit from the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museum. How are you supposed to hang out with a guy who looks like that?

To engage with DT and his new look took some adjustment. After all, he didn’t create that image so he could blend into the woodwork. He wanted to be noticed, to call attention to himself, just like the young rebel teen punk who sports a foot high blue mohawk and a studded collar and says things like “I just wanna be left alone!” To give DT a hard time for his carefully arranged look would be no fun, as would pretending you didn’t notice. I think he wanted us, or at least me, to play along with his transformation. One time he dropped by my locker after school, even though he had graduated years before. This stands out in my high school memories as one of the finest, having been charged with real (well, fictitious) menace.

First of all, DT was obviously not a Fairview student—way too old. He came swaggering up the ramp towards the student center, this huge, creepy looking thug made even bigger by his massive overcoat, with that stubble and cigar, clearing a path of high schoolers as he went. They must’ve thought he was some kind of lunatic … they gave him plenty of space and then stood there gawking. About thirty feet from me, he called out, “Yo, DANA! Hold it!” I acted real nervous and looked around as if for an escape route, and when he reached me he said, “Tell your friend David if he calls me Mike again, he’ll wake up dead!” All the people around my locker sort of cleared out at this point, and gathered at a safe distance to see what was going on. DT looked around, and sort of put his arm around me like he was going to inflict some kind of pain if I acted up. He whispered, “Hey, Dana, what’s up? You wanna come look at that bike?” but we both knew people assumed he was saying, “It’s too late to back out now. I’ll go easy on you but you miss this next score and you’re dead meat.” I stammered out something like, “Hey, man, I don’t want any trouble.”

Then DT escorted me down the ramp towards the exit, his arm around my shoulders like we were friends but with the suggestion that this could become a headlock very suddenly. Once we were out of sight, we broke out laughing. To my delight, the next day I got some nervous questions from the guys in my honors classes, and I replied in a suitably evasive fashion. I felt like I’d made some important transition from standard nerd to somebody slightly more complicated. (Yes, it has dawned on me that my pose was about as ridiculous as DT’s, but no matter.)

So, I think I’ve known some pretty interesting people, who could be given code names and assigned roles in some totally fictitious story. Like, maybe Timofey and DT meet at a U2 concert and decide to sneak backstage or something. Except that’s dumb, they wouldn’t hit it off at all. Timofey probably wouldn’t be caught dead at U2, he’d be at a Fear concert or something, and DT would be too busy hitting on some girl in the t-shirt line to even think of sneaking backstage. And even if they did, they’d just get chucked out by security, and where’s the story in that? It’d be a really amazing memory if it actually happened to you, but stories have to be way more exciting than that, at least if they’re the type that could make me famous so I could go on “Donahue.”

So, I guess what I’m saying is, though I’d love to be a famous fiction writer, I really don’t know how, and to try to fake it makes about as much sense as changing my hair and outfit and hoping that’ll make me into an exciting, unique person. But faking it at fiction would actually be worse, because you’d read my stories and think, “This just sucks,” whereas Timofey’s hair, Masha’s tongue-in-cheek sneer, and DT’s costume were at least entertaining. So I’ll just keep reporting on that sort of thing, and hope you like it.

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From the Archives - Kroopian Poetry (Dactylic Trimeter)

NOTE:  This post is rated R for mild strong language, gross imagery, and crude sensual themes.

Introduction

Sometimes I don’t have time to think up a blog topic.  Taking a cue from the movie industry, and from the Book of Ecclesiastes, I’ve decided there’s nothing new under the sun and I’d better just rehash some old material this week.  So I’m posting two of my old poems—one that’s 30 years old and another that’s almost 20—and providing all-new commentary in the form of footnotes.  Pretend you found this in your Norton Anthology of American Teen and Sophomoric Adult Poetry.

The Blue Tube Club – spring 1986

Splat mud splut, Cow chud cud, Dog dung stunk.

Nose snot rots, Booger blood, Anal hair;                            2

Armpit sludge, Dick Butkus, Damp crotch rot.

Happy love, Friendly peck, Snuggle up,

Happy-sap, Special friend, Hugga bunch;                           5

Smurfy love, Special coo, I Love You.

Stupid jerk Fire Up Total butt

You all suck, You’re a prick, Gimme that;                           9

Go to hell, God you suck, Just shut up!

Footnotes & commentary

Title:  The Blue Tube Club

The Blue Tube Club was a club that my two oldest brothers and two of their friends formed in the mid ‘80s.  If you think four people is barely enough for a club, you’re probably right.  This club was either too elite to accept others, or (more likely) its members were too shy and self-conscious to do much outreach.  What isn’t disputed is that they refused to offer me official membership, despite the fact that I hung out with them most of the time anyway.  The idea, I think, was for me to be really bummed out about this and press my nose sadly against the window, wishing I’d be invited in to play their reindeer games.

In fact, I couldn’t have cared less.  This was put to the test when my brother Bryan asked me to write a letter to the Casper, WY Chamber of Commerce thanking them for allowing the Casper Classic bike race to be held there.  I refused.  (My perspective:  what did some local government functionary need with another piece of mail to process?)  Bryan said, “Come on, think of the Club!  What is the Blue Tube Club?  It’s a bunch of guys helping each other.  You know, like Bill drives us everywhere, and I fix the Volv’ [Bill’s car], and Geoff welded the roof rack, and I fixed the Volv’, and Dave … well, Dave makes us laugh.  So you should write that letter.  It’s time you started pulling your weight.”

To which I replied, “First off, I’m not even a member of the Blue Tube Club, as you’ve made abundantly clear.  Second, I’m not interested in pulling my weight.”  This last quote became my signature utterance.  To this day, it’s occasionally trotted out as proof of … well, something fundamental about my character, I guess.

Byline:  Maynard Steele

Maynard Steele was (and sometimes still is) my pen-name.  I didn’t come up with it myself.  In junior high French class we were passing around the sign-up sheet for the student directory, and (unbeknownst to me) my friend Phil erased my name and wrote in “Maynard Steele.”  That’s how it came out in the directory, and I decided to run with it.

Line 1:  Splat mud splut, etc.

It doesn’t take long for the astute reader to realize there isn’t much meaning in this poem; it’s arguably more nonsensical even than Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky.  This was an assignment for my high school creative writing class.  The teacher, Mr. Kroop (I hope I’ve spelled that right) assigned us a “Kroopian poem,” which had the requirement of being written in dactylic trimeter.

What is dactylic trimeter?  It means each line had to consist of three dactyls in a row.  A dactyl is a foot of poetry with the first syllable accentuated and the next two syllables not.  An example of a dactyl would be the word “hangover.”  You place the emphasis on the first syllable and then the next two are non-emphasized:  HANG-over.  Another example would be the word “jettison” (JETT-ison).  In normal speech, you might occasionally stumble across three dactyls in a row, like “GO to the MAR-ket and STEE-al stuff,” but I wouldn’t say it happens a lot.

At the time, I was furious about the assignment.  It seemed impossible to write a single line of dactylic trimeter, much less a whole poem.  So I decided to be really sneaky and write the whole poem using nothing but single-syllable words.  I erroneously thought that strings of one-syllable words couldn’t be proven to be non-dactylic.  (This isn’t actually true, as I’ll get to later.)  Figuring my poem would be nothing more than a blatant act of rebellion, I didn’t bother much with the meaning and basically wrote whatever words popped into my head.

Line 2:  Booger blood, Anal hair

As you can see, I kind of faltered in my pugnacious resolve to use only one-syllable words.  Perhaps the better part of my brain realized that two-syllable words could be employed here without too much difficulty, and to good effect.  As you can see, both “booger blood” and “anal hair” are properly dactylic.  They’re also pretty gross, which was my way of celebrating the freedom I had in Kroop’s class to write whatever I wanted.  Mr. Kroop was famous for not only letting students write short stories that were brazenly, graphically sexual, but for reading these stories aloud in class.  (This was probably a myth:  when I was in Kroop’s class nobody wrote such stories, and no student work was read aloud.)

Line 3:  Dick Butkus, Damp crotch rot

This line demonstrates my failure to grasp dactylic trimeter.  First off, “Dick Butkus” isn’t dactylic.  I was correct that “Dick” is accentuated in this phrase, but I failed to notice that “But” also is.  It’s “DICK BUT-kus,” not “DICK butkus.”  If you don’t believe me, just ask him.  And while you’re at it, ask him why he never changed his name.  What kind of nutjob would willingly go around with a name like Dick Buttkiss?  Why didn’t he at least go by Richard?

The phrase “damp crotch rot” shows where my all-one-syllable strategy failed.  It’s pretty much impossible not to accentuate a word like “crotch.”  It’s a word that demands emphasis, even if you’re embarrassed to say it.  And the phrase “crotch rot” naturally comes out  as the trochaic “CROTCH rot,” perhaps because—specifying, as it does, the kind of  rot we’re talking about—“crotch” gets the emphasis, as would any word it its situation.  Consider this line of would-be iambic pentameter:

His house was fairly riddled with dry rot.

It sounds wrong, doesn’t it?  The last syllable of a line of iambic pentameter is supposed to be accentuated, but you cannot accentuate “rot” in the phrase “dry rot.”  It’s “DRY rot,” not “dry ROT.”  Many two-word phrases are like that, as I’ve explained in my post about how to write a sonnet.  “Dry rot” is trochaic, just like “HOT dog.”  And so is “CROTCH rot.”  Which makes it even worse, doesn’t it?  “Oh man, I’ve got a bad case of crotch rot, and it’s become trochaic!”

Lines 4-6:  Happy love, etc.

This stanza captures my frustration at teenagers in love.  There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with love, of course, but teenagers are annoying enough without deciding they’re in love.  You know how teenagers seem to think they know everything?  It’s particularly annoying when, at 16, they think they’ve found “the one,” and everybody around them knows they haven’t, and that this is just a stupid practice fling that will end in deep embarrassment for both parties, but they still go on like they’ve discovered what it means to love.

A teen would be arguably better off dabbling in the occult than messing around with romance. At the time I wrote this poem, my oldest brother was in love, which involved a lot of snuggling and even cooing.  It wouldn’t have been enough to say “Get a room!”—I wished he and his girl would go jump in a volcano or something.  Yes, some of this was sour grapes, but mostly it was the spectacle of all that James-Taylor-grade sappiness.

At the time, a buddy of mine did a long stint at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs and had some long phone calls with his girlfriend back in Boulder.  Now, my friend had the good taste to keep the mushy stuff to himself, and treat the affair lightly, around his friends.  I suppose that many a teenager was labeled crass who was really just observing a delicate teen-specific form of decorum.  This could be a group sport:  at one point, another OTC athlete was waiting for the phone, and—perceiving from my friend’s tone and diction that he was talking to his girl—did a crude pantomime and cried out, “Plow ‘er, dude!”  This has become my friend’s signature utterance (even though he himself didn’t utter it).  To this day, it’s occasionally trotted out as proof of … well, something fundamental about his character, I guess.

Perhaps it’s out of a residual distaste for sappy, smurfy love that to this day, my friend and I will occasionally cry out “Plow ‘er, dude!” whenever some guy starts using goofy language like “relationship.”

Line 7:  fire-up

At age 16, when I wrote this, I was a pretty quiet fellow, as now, but with a very hot temper.  This could come out without any obvious provocation; it could be triggered by male hormones, typical life frustrations, instinct, impulse, and/or the effect of being your basic social outcast.  This volatility was exacerbated by those around me.  My two oldest brothers were a study in contrasts:  one was dreamy, quiet, largely disconnected, and (as described above) shamelessly in love; the other, meanwhile, was what you might call an angry young man.  The angry brother, whom we sometimes referred to as “Mr. A,” once chewed my head off, without a trace of irony, for stinking up the bathroom, as though that was some decision I made that could have been avoided—as if I’d decided to crap in a wastebasket or something.  The other members of the Blue Tube Club could also be a bit hard to take:  one had an excessively drippy girlfriend and liked to blow his nose on his shirt, and the other—a giant guy—liked to wear a big trench coat, smoke cigars, and make wisecracks 24x7, and would  spontaneously tackle me to the floor and pretend to hump me.

So as a result of keeping this company, and also due to my essential nature, I would sometimes lose my shit completely.  The label my brothers gave to these outbursts was “fire-up,” as in, “Uh oh, Dana’s on the brink of another fire-up!”  My fire-ups were very loud, and this stanza captures some of that.  Of course I made no effort, as a livid teenager, to yell in dactylic trimeter, so much verisimilitude has been lost here.  For example, I’m quite sure I used the phrase “total asshole” a lot but never once said “total butt.”  But of course “total” and “asshole” are trochees, so the phrase “total asshole” cannot be rendered in dactylic trimeter.

Teacher’s comment:  Did Max help do this?

My brother Max had Mr. Kroop’s class a year before I did.  To say Max was a mediocre student isn’t really fair.  I think it’s more accurate to call him an F-student.  But he got an A in Kroop’s class, and earned it.  He was, and is, a great writer, and his style, particularly in those days, was blunt, wild, raucous, and utterly uninhibited.  In contrast I was much more reserved, with poems like “The Paperboy.”  So I wasn’t surprised at all that Kroop saw (or thought he saw) Max’s hand in this strange poem.

                                         

A Voice Will Sing – December 7, 1997

Once in a while a voice will sing praises,

Something to levitate everyone’s spirits.                        2

Somehow the faithful will manage to fear it,

Calling it chanting from somebody crazed.

Must we all be a collection of skeptics,

Fearing the good we’ve been trying to summon,           6

Finding the evil in everything common,

Feeling that praise is not ours to accept?

     Witness your neighbor and salvage his soul,

     Count up his evils and call them the whole.            10

Footnotes & commentary

Line 1:  Once in a while a voice will sing

After I’d turned in the Blue Tube poem, Mr. Kroop read the class his own Kroopian poem, and to my astonishment he did just fine with the tricky meter.  The only line I remembered later was “Once in a lifetime a voice will sing.”  It bothered me that I’d taken as impossible a task that was not.  I vowed to try again at the Kroopian form, but of course never got around to it … well, almost never.  For over a decade I kept thinking about tackling dactylic trimeter, and finally got ‘er done.

I decided, after much messing about with this meter, that I didn’t really care for it, and that a slight enhancement would make the lines gallop along better.  I attached a trochee—that is, 2/3 of a dactyl—to the end of each line, and I think you can see it helps.  Without that last trochee, the line kind of lurches to a halt, like it’s been clotheslined.  Then I decided, having forgotten whatever rule Kroop made about rhyme scheme, to use an ABBA scheme (reminiscent of a Petrarchan sonnet), whereby the second line doesn’t rhyme with the first, but the third line does rhyme with the second, and the fourth line then rhymes with the first.  I also determined, somehow, that each stanza would have a zippier finish if I lopped off the second half of the final trochee.  To maintain the rhyme, this final syllable would have to rhyme with the penultimate syllable of the first line.  Thus, “crazed” rhymes with “prais-,” not “praises,” and “accept” rhymes with “skept-” instead of “skeptic.” 

Rather than paying a verbatim tribute to Kroop’s “Once in a lifetime a voice will sing,” I changed “a lifetime” to “a while,” because “once in a lifetime” didn’t makes sense in the context.  Plus, I didn’t want anybody to think I was alluding to the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime,” since I was alluding to Kroop’s poem (which for all I know was alluding to the Talking Heads, but no matter).  And based on my adjustment to the meter, I needed to tack on that trochee anyway.  Could “sing” be a transitive verb, setting me up to slap on a direct object?  Sure.  What can you sing?  A song, obviously, but that’s only one syllable.  “Ballad” is trochaic, but the fact is it didn’t occur to me.  I landed, rather arbitrarily, on “praises,” which really set up the content of the poem.

Line 2:  levitate

This word choice is probably my favorite thing about the poem.  I could have so easily put “elevate,” but “levitate” gives it a slightly creepy air—are the faithful right to call this voice a crazed chant?—but also points up the fact that the state of somebody’s spirits is kind of an illusion.  Anything that improves your emotional health could be reasonably labeled a placebo, could it not?  And your spirits, though raised up, are always so delicately perched … they could come down any minute, so isn’t the tenuousness of “levitate” better than the false solidity of “elevate”?

Line 8:  praise is not ours to accept

It’s important to keep in mind that I was fundamentally unconcerned with the content of this poem.  I was interested only in getting the meter and rhyme right, as this poem was a warm-up exercise for the real, serious poem that I intended to write next (and did, in fact, write—but you can’t see it as I wrote it for my wife).  So I think it a minor triumph that I managed to convey any meaning at all with this poem.

Isn’t it odd that religion is supposed to be an emotional balm, but so many strains of it bring negativity to the table?  For example, if somebody (even, or perhaps particularly, your inner voice) buoys up your spirits by praising you, you’re not supposed to accept—because that would be committing the sin of Pride!  After all, all praise be to God!

Line 9:  salvage his soul

At various points in my life, certain well-meaning types have decided my soul needed saving.  I’ve always found that vaguely insulting … like my soul is so far gone that some chance acquaintance—armed with little more than faith and a bible—can just sweep in and rescue me.  To me, such spiritual meddling is like a salvage operation.  (Both “salvage” and “salvation” stem from the Latin salvare, to save.)  As these do-gooders pick through the apparent disaster of my spiritual world, what bits and pieces are they looking to rescue before leaving the rest to slowly dissolve at the bottom of the sea?  And how is this operation supposed to bring a message of hope?

Line 10:  call them the whole

In all likelihood nobody has made it this far into my solipsistic morass of literary criticism, and even if somebody has, nobody is taking my quasi-religious rambling very seriously.  But if you have, and you are, please remember how little attention I actually paid to the content of that poem.  If changing a word made the meter or rhyme right, I did it, whether meaning was served or not.  In that sense, you could change this final line to “Count up the syllables and call that the whole”—but then it wouldn’t be truncated dactylic quatrameter!  It wouldn’t be neo-Kroopian!  See how this works?

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - The Paperboy

Introduction

I’m running out of archival stuff to recycle on slow news days.  So today I’m going way, way back and posting something I have only in hardcopy, from 1986.  Since I don’t feel like retyping a lot of text, or messing with a scanner and OCR software, I’m posting an old poem.

As a bonus, I’m going to provide all-new end notes on this poem.  Pretend you found this in your Norton Anthology of American Teen Poetry.

The Paperboy – April 28, 1986

Is it worthwhile to get up every morn
And lug myself so slowly out of bed, ooooooooooooooooo2
To go and work in any kind of storm,
To earn myself a little bit of bread?

I have to fold so many newspapers,
And put a rubber band of red on each. ooooooooooooooio6
And plastic bag ‘em when a rainstorm stirs,
And throw them on those porches I can’t reach.

I tell ya, though, it really ain’t that bad
To watch the morning sun come rising up;oooooooooooo10
To know how many people will be glad
To have their paper with their coffee cup.

oooThough other jobs may get me better pay,
oooI like my paper route more every day. oooooooooooo14

Footnotes & Commentary

Line 1:  get up every morn’

This line is pretty absurd.  I mean, everybody gets up every morn.  The point I was trying to make is how fricking early I had to get up.  But the poem doesn’t say anything about that.  The reader has no idea.  It’s a good thing I went easy on myself as a teenager, or I wouldn’t have written anything.

For the record, I had to get up at 5:50.  The route had to be done by 6:30.  This was not a crunch.  Folding the papers—there were about 30 of them on weekdays, 45 on Sundays—generally only took a few minutes.  My record was well under 3 minutes.  As far as the delivery, it was also really fast because this was a condominium complex so all the porches were really close together.  I figured out the optimum path through them, which in some cases meant throwing the newspaper onto a subscriber’s back deck (which confused people at first, but they caught on).  I did the route on my bike and could hit every porch without even putting my foot down.  My record for the whole route was around five minutes.

If I had unfinished homework, I’d do that as soon as I got back home.  If I didn’t, I often went back to bed.  During the summer, I always went back to bed.  Sometimes I’d wake up around 9 and panic, having no memory of delivering the papers.  I’d run out on the back deck and check the patio of the downstairs neighbor, which was always my last delivery.  The paper would be there and I’d breathe a sigh of relief.

Line 4:  any kind of storm

Considering that all paperboys, back in the day, were children, it’s amazing how stringent subscribers’ standards were.  It could be pouring rain, or gusting at 50 mph, or there could be two feet of snow, and if I was five minutes late finishing my route, at least one customer would call and complain.  Imagine, grown adults sitting there impatiently, staring at the clock, phone in hand, waiting for 6:30 to come and go so they could dial up the Daily Camera circulation desk and rat me out.

The complaints were taken very seriously and reported back to me on the computer printout at the top of the stack of the next day’s papers.  Complaints were called “kicks” and if you got more than like one a month, you’d get docked.  Paperboys prided themselves on going months and months without a kick.

Once, before I had my own paper route, I was subbing for my brother and hadn’t gotten the hang of throwing the papers yet.  I missed a porch by a mile and broke a garage door window.  This caused a big scandal, with my dad getting an angry phone call, and he had to go replace the window himself.  All the adults involved seemed not only disgusted but outraged, as though I’d cut the subscriber’s dog’s head off and stuffed it in the mailbox.

Line 5:  so many newspapers

I shudder to read this line.  The meter is all screwed up.  The word “newspaper” is dactylic—that is, it has one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed.  For that reason, it cannot be used (no dactyl can) in a line of iambic pentameter.  Obviously as a lad of 16 I didn’t grasp this.  In my defense, I didn’t have access to a handy blog post explaining how to write a sonnet (the World Wide Web didn’t even exist), and I didn’t get to take a private sonnet class.  I just had to wing it.

Line 6:  rubber band of red

Geez, this is embarrassing.  “Rubber band of red” ... how poetic, in the worst possible way.  If I were to yield to temptation and fix this sonnet up, I’d change the line to, “And put a fricking rubber band on each.”

Line 8:  those porches I can’t reach

Man, kids are so stupid, even the ones who write sonnets!  Well, at least I was.  In truth there were only a couple of porches (those in my condo quadrangle) I could drop the paper on.  The vast majority I had to throw.  Everybody knows that.  Well, everybody except modern people who may not even know what a paperboy is, or was.  I think it’s silly for adults to deliver newspapers using their cars.  I see them out when I do really early bike rides.  But then, I guess it’s a sign of the times ... there are so few subscribers, the routes have to be really long, etc.  I had no idea, when I was a paperboy, that I was an endangered breed.

Line 10:  to watch the morning sun come rising up

First of all, “morning” is needless here, since the evening sun doesn’t come rising up.  I should have put “watch the egg-yolk sun come rising up.”  But the line would still be flawed, as the whole idea is fanciful, if not downright sentimental.  Think about it:  I’d do the whole route in 5 or 6 minutes, so what are the odds I’d catch a sunrise?  I guess I could have seen them for brief periods during the spring and fall, but I doubt I paid much attention.  There’s something almost cynical about how I trotted out this old cliché about enjoying a sunrise.

I suppose I should mention that I really didn’t try very hard, or take much time, on these sonnets.  This was one of four sonnets I wrote on 4/28/86.  (I may have written all four in class.)  The fact that there’s no grade on this one suggests I didn’t even bother to turn it in.  These were for  Mr. Kroop’s 10th grade creative writing class at Fairview High.  He was a groovy guy who wore Jams and tie-dye shirts, and played weird music (perhaps involving whales?) in the classroom.

Line 12:  have their paper with their coffee cup

Considering how important the morning paper is to people’s daily rituals, it’s kind of surprising to look back and consider how ungrateful my subscribers were.  How do I know they were ungrateful?  Well, I already mentioned how often they’d complain.  On top of that, they never tipped.  There was a holiday tradition of paperboys putting handwritten cards in each subscriber’s newspaper, as kind of a hint-hint gesture.  I can’t remember what the tipping mechanism was, but there was one, and I always enclosed the cards, but I almost never got tips.

The better way to get tips was to deliver the Denver Post instead of the Daily Camera.  With the Post, you had to go door-to-door collecting the subscribers’ payments.  (This ritual is parodied in “Better Off Dead,” with the paperboy hounding the hero throughout the movie for his “two dollars!”)

The downside of “collecting,” as it was known in the trade, was that there were a whole lot of deadbeat grownups out there who were either never home, always pretending not to be home, or not able to cobble together the cash to pay the paperboy.  The paperboy, meanwhile, had to pay his employer (i.e., the newspaper), regardless.  This is how two of my older brothers managed to lose money on their paper routes.  Imagine doing all that work, and ending up in the red!  Those poor bastards.

On the flip side, my best friend delivered the Post, and took the liberty of jacking up the subscription rates when he collected.  He was practically printing his own money!  I challenged him on this, and he said, “The way I see it, I’m buying the papers from the Post.  I should be able to sell them for whatever the market will bear.”

The Camera didn’t require paperboys to collect.  My boss told me, rather bitterly, that I was the highest-paid paperboy they had.  I made six cents a paper—about $1.80 a day, and $2.70 on Sundays, for a total of about $55 a month.  The going rate was about five cents a paper.  And the guys who delivered to single-family dwellings needed more like 15 minutes to do the whole route.  Suckers!

Line 14:  like my paper route more every day

My mom loved this sonnet.  I was working at the same hospital she worked at, typing lab manuals into the computer.  That paid like $8/hour, which was a fortune to any teenager in the mid-‘80s.  We both reported to the same manager, who was a real jerk.  My mom actually showed him this sonnet, to try to scare him when he balked at giving me a raise.  I’m sure I took that threat even less seriously than he did.  (As I recounted at the end of another post, I made a serious career-limiting move with that boss, so it’s a good thing I had my paper route to fall back on.)

It strikes me that there was something noble about the paperboy.  Today, it’s hard even to find an adult with such an unfailing work ethic.  We were responsible for our route 365 days a year.  If we went on vacation, that was never the newspaper’s problem—we were required to get a substitute.  In my case this meant having somebody all trained up on how to do my route, which was difficult because the condominium complex’s address scheme was truly byzantine.  (There’s a reason I was the highest paid paperboy at the Camera.)  Imagine trying to motivate somebody to learn your route just so he’d have the opportunity to earn $1.80 a day while you were on vacation.  Honestly, I don’t know how I did it.

So, are modern teens willing to do this kind of work, for similar wages?  Don’t make me laugh.  These days there are probably more teenagers writing sonnets than delivering the paper.

How to Succeed at Blogging

In this post I provide five rules for successful blogging.  This is not a post about how to be a wildly popular blogger, or a successful writer.  I don’t know how to do those things.

Rule #1 – Define success carefully

Consider the following Motivational Poster.

When’s the last time you encountered an unsuccessful housecat?  And if you decide a housecat is unsuccessful, you think that cat cares?  Have you ever encountered a depressed housecat?  Of course not.  (“Wait,” you may protest.  “My cat sleeps all the time—isn’t that a sign of depression?”  No, your cat is not sleeping because she’s depressed.  She’s sleeping because she’s a cat.)

My definition of a successful blog is one that shows up for work:  that is, a blog that’s updated regularly.  This might sound easy, but it’s obviously not.  My Blogger dashboard is like the damn obituaries.  To paraphrase Woody Allen, a blog is like a shark:  it has to move forward constantly or it’ll die … and what we got here is a lot of dead sharks.  Here’s a list of how long it’s been, for five of the blogs I follow, since the last post:  1 year ago, 9 months ago, 1 year ago, 10 months ago, 1 year ago.  Unfulfilled good intentions might not be the saddest thing on Earth, but it’s on the list.

Using this definition of success, my best advice is to set a goal for number of posts in a month, and commit to it.  No matter how much you have to reach for that next post, get it done and your blog won’t wither on the vine.  Of course, this is no easy feat, which is where the other rules come in.

Rule #2 – Know what you want

I’m guessing that most moribund blogs are the result of their creators getting discouraged.  I can’t blame them.  It can feel like you’re blogging into a void.  People don’t comment very often; about half of my 179 posts haven’t received a single comment.  But lack of comments doesn’t mean nobody is reading your stuff.  Lots of people are shy, and lots more struggle with typing in the unreadable codes that Blogger challenges them to type in (which is to keep robot spammers from taking over).  I get half of one percent as many comments as pageviews, and not all the comments are positive.  (One commenter wrote, below my Cowboy Sam post, “You have ruined all my wonderful childhood memories. Thanks.”  This may have been tongue-in-cheek, but the next comment, voicing agreement, certainly wasn’t.)

My point is this:  you shouldn’t look for any encouragement from your readers, if you even have any.  Who do you think you are, a writer?  Of course not.  If you were a writer, you wouldn’t be a blogger.

Okay, now I’ve hurt some feelings.  I didn’t mean to.  Let’s take a moment to define what a writer is, vs. a blogger, and situate you properly.  That might really help when it comes to fighting off discouragement.

A writer, for the purposes of this discussion, is somebody who writes for a living.  For him, writing is not just a hobby; it literally pays the bills (unless he has some crappy minimal job that lets him write all night and/or gives him material).  By definition, a writer is willing to make sacrifices.  He will tolerate poverty; will forego time with his family (or having one at all); will face the fear of total failure of his dream and his livelihood; and will humbly make changes to his stories or articles to please his editor or his market.  (Yes, I’m aware many writers are women.  I tried to do “he or she” and “his or her” but that became even more cumbersome than this parenthetical aside.)

A blogger, in this context, is somebody who wants to write but isn’t trying to make a career of it, and is unwilling to make the sacrifices a writer will make.  (I guess there are paid bloggers too but as I see it, they’re basically writers.)

Consider this schematic:

I believe that covers everybody:  all of humanity falls into category A, B, C, or D above.  Here are the categories:

A – Great writer and/or miserable failure

B – Hack or failed hack

C – Person who doesn’t write and is completely fine with that

D – Blogger

You might be surprised by my assertion that category B exists.  Isn’t somebody who wants to be a writer also somebody who wants to write?  By definition?

Well, not my definition.  I hold the sacred act of writing to a higher standard.  To me, wanting to write means writing well, which means reading constantly and widely, studying how great writers write, reading like a writer, loving language, working really hard to get the words just right, and always striving to satisfy that burning desire to produce the most honest rendition of your idea you can. 

It’s not hard to find examples of fairly successful writers who have no use for reading widely, writing well, and/or pursuing truth.  Within these pages I’ve criticized three such writers:  here, here, and here.  I disagree not just with what these three have written, but with how they approach their work.  They’re being sensational and shocking, without seeking the greater truth that, they may well realize, might tamp down their articles and make them seem less bold.

The above poster doesn’t reflect deep searching and the greatest heights of the craft of writing.  In fact, it’s pretty sensational.  But it was penned by my daughter when she was only five.  Let’s cut her some slack.

Moving on to category D:  yes, it is true that although I want to write, I don’t want to be a writer.  Don’t get me wrong, I’d like to be a writer, if somebody came to me and said, “I’d like to pay you big money to write whatever you want, and I’ll make sure it gets widely promoted, and if things go well you’ll soon have your own staff of gofers and cooks and geishas.”  But when push comes to shove, I’m just not willing to make the sacrifices real writers make.  So I blog.

Because blogging doesn’t pay anything, we bloggers are the literary equivalent of street mimes or graffiti artists.  Except that we don’t disturb the peace.  Imagine if a big city set aside certain small quiet neighborhoods for these mimes and graffitists to discreetly do their thing.  Well, that’s the blogosphere.  It’s a place to do our work, taking advantage of the infinite Internet.  Sure, we don’t have a huge subscriber base, but the flip side of this obscurity is that we don’t have to force-fit our big square posts into the tiny round holes that an editor and a market would give us.

(I guess there’s a related category: people who don’t want to write, and yet want to reach an audience.  They do Facebook and/or send off-the-cuff tweets like “Check out this TwitPic of me sitting here tweeting!” and “Just got off the toilet … am reminded of @FatBastard when he says, ‘Wait!  I didn’t eat any corn!’”)

Perhaps if you see your blogging in this context, and have modest goals like getting more practice writing, and having a free offsite server on which to store backups of your work, you’ll more easily accept the fact you’re not famous yet, and won’t be as liable to ask, “What the hell’s the point, anyway?”  Go easy on yourself, and hang in there!

(That poster has confused some people.  It’s a photo I shot by accident while crashing my bike.  The point of the picture is that, despite the fact that my bike is pointing at the sky, I’m still holding on to the bars with the non-camera hand as if I could save it.  No, I didn’t manage to, but it wasn’t a bad crash.  I was climbing a 14-percent grade, at walking speed, when it happened.)

Rule #3:  Know your audience

One of the great things about being a blogger is not having to answer to anybody (see above), and not having to “deliver an audience” (i.e., write something that will please a target group selected by advertisers).  The downside of this is that is that you get no guidance, and have no idea who is reading your blog, and what he or she thinks of it.

That’s where friends come in.  Advice from friends has given me my blogging manta:  screw the reader.  For once I think it makes sense to only listen to what you want to hear.  (Remember, we’re trying not to get discouraged.)  In my case, input of the non-praise variety usually takes the form of an apology:  “I tried to read your post but it was too long.”  To the last guy who said that, I replied, “You might try Ritalin for that.”  There’s this idea that the Internet reader has a shorter attention span than traditional readers.  Well, that may be, but I’m not going to cater to such intellectual frailty.

I once got even more pointed advice, when a writers’ group, comprising journalists and recovering journalists, let me attend one of their meetings.  At least one or two of them didn’t manage to have anything written for the meeting.  Most of them didn’t read my submission to the end; it was about four pages, single-spaced.  One of the writers ostentatiously waved my printout in my face and said, “Don’t give us this”—here he ripped the last two pages off and dropped them to the floor—“give us this!”  I didn’t know what to say.  I was stunned, thinking, “Who are you?  What are you?”

I was reminded of when I submitted the first installment of my senior thesis to my college advisor.  We met in his office to discuss it.  He waved the pages in my face and said, “Look, you’ve got a good close reading of the text.  Don’t ruin it with this.”  Did I blow him off, too?  Of course not—my grade was on the line.  If he’d told me to write about Maxine Hong Kingston (with whom he was having a feud) instead of Vladimir Nabokov, I’d have done it.  If he told me to change my topic to “Why Ms. Kingston is the self-appointed pope of PC and her paycheck is rightfully mine,” I’d have obeyed, even if the resulting paper went completely against my own beliefs.  But that was college.  As a blogger, I don’t have to take that kind of “advice.”

That said, I can’t blame those professional writers for finding my work self-indulgent and verbose.  Expanding on my previous analogy, I was like a street mime crashing an aerobics class.  Journalistic training teaches you to get to the point in the first few sentences, and keep everything nice and short.  That’s fine if the main purpose of your piece is to inform rather than enlighten.  (I might not have this exactly right; I suspect the main purpose is actually to create a body of print that can be stuffed with ads.)

I think you should consider your blog’s audience to be the kind of person who reads what you want to write.  If you love really short stuff, write it.  If you love fiction, write that.  If you like a lot of pictures, include them.  Look, you can’t bend over backwards for a reader you’ll never meet, so you might as well please yourself. 

I’ve written things I didn’t expect a living soul to read, such as How to Write a Sonnet.  That post had a completely over-the-top 500-word introduction which I thought about shortening, before deciding that the long intro wouldn’t put off the kind of nerd who might actually have the patience to learn how to write in iambic pentameter.  I didn’t let it bother me that this hypothetical audience might consist of somewhere between zero and five people.  And as it turned out, it’s become my second most popular post ever, and (despite being over two years old) got more hits last week than any other post.

One caveat to this “audience of you” principle:  don’t pull a reverse-Woody.  I’m coining a term here based on the Woody Allen quip, “The good thing about being bisexual is that it doubles your chance of a date on a Saturday night.”  A reverse-Woody is when you alienate half your potential audience by being overtly political, or sexist, or otherwise bigoted.

Rule #4 – Develop a system for your writing

Getting back to the main characteristic of a successful blog—consistency—let’s spend a moment on how to ensure you’ll make the time to write.  To some degree this is just a matter of priorities—after all, people seem to find plenty of time for TV.  But I think part of the struggle is that unlike simpler forms of expression like Facebook, texting, and tweeting, real writing requires large chunks of time, without distractions.

I can’t recommend a specific system because everybody’s life is different.  But I’ll describe my technique as an example.  I try to brainstorm ideas all the time, whenever I have unoccupied moments, by pondering things.  (Obviously it helps if you’re not always pitching yourself face-first into TV, smartphone games, “Us” magazine, crosswords, or Sudokus.)  Once I have an idea, I do a lot of pre-writing work by popping a No-Doz and going for a good hard bike ride with lots of steep climbs I can zone out on.  Between the adrenaline, endorphins, increased circulation, and caffeine, I get a whole lot of ideas for the essay.  No idea, under these expansive circumstances, seems weak or stupid or lame; the overactive critic in my writer brain can’t get a word in edgewise.  Meanwhile, I have zero distractions (other than the descents, when I repurpose my brain for the matter at hand).

But I don’t start writing once I get home.  It’s not a great idea to write while jacked up on caffeine (or adrenaline).  (I refer you to the study of spiders on caffeine:  their spinning output was great but their webs sucked.)  Of the ideas that seemed great during the ride, at least half look pretty stupid to the calm, sober mind and have to be jettisoned.  But the other ideas, which often include a basic outline and even some fully formed sentences, can be put to use.

Exactly when to carve out time to actually write the post is a more complicated matter.  Staying up late, skipping a weekend bike ride, or skipping an episode of “Modern Family” (actually, skipping the whole series, and all other shows) also helps.  A final strategy:  I don’t ask anybody to critique the essay before I post it.  That would surely improve it, but just takes too much time.  Similarly, I don’t slave to perfect my posts; at some point I have to decide they’re good enough.  It’s just a blog, after all.

Rule #5 – Let’s be careful out there

No matter how well-maintained a blog is, it’s not a success if it violates anybody’s privacy (including the blogger’s own), embarrasses an innocent party, or in any way causes the blogger to regret what he’s posted.  (Needless to say, it’s impossible to completely remove a post; anything put on the Internet is like a tattoo.)

Here are some good questions to ask yourself before posting:  is there anybody on the planet I wouldn’t want to see this?  Could my career be affected by my boss reading this?  Could my mom be offended by it?  Have I committed any reverse-Woodies?  If I ever ran for public office, would anything on my blog lend itself to compelling attack ads by political opponents?

This doesn’t mean your post needs to be defanged—you should just be aware of what you’re getting into.  Consider my post on Doping Journalists, and “Un-Boosting,” in which I suggest that the writer Andrew Tillin is an out-of-touch, self-absorbed jerk.  When I sent a link to that post to a friend of mine, who is well-connected in journalistic circles, he replied, “I sent that to Tillin!!”  Whether he was joking or not (I suspect he wasn’t), I didn’t gasp in horror.  I’d already considered the prospect of Tillin googling himself and finding my article, and if I hadn’t accepted the idea of going toe-to-toe with him I’d have toned down the piece before posting it.

Don’t want to blog?

Fine, don’t.  There are plenty of us out here already, and besides, all the best writing is found in books anyway.