Never Underestimate the Size of My Ego...

The first eight months or so I was doing this, I didn't post cute pictures of my kids, good things I'd cooked, fun activities I'd found to do with my children. I was mostly hiding from the wreckage of my marriage (a marriage so long dead I scarcely remember what it looked like alive), drinking myself into oblivion every night. I'd write on my novel until I couldn't focus on it, then I'd drunkenly ramble here until I was fairly sure my wife was asleep. I don't like those 'why I blog' kind of posts when others do them, so I don't do it myself, but if I'd honestly done so back then, it would have gone something like, I blog because my den is the only room in the house I can lock. Even when I'm taking a dump, she might come talk to me. I'm typing to give my fingers something to do between sips of whiskey.

Why I do it now? I don't know if I have a good answer for it, but I got an interesting email yesterday.

Readers and Writers wrote a nice little bit about me and this dubious enterprise of mine. I'm sure I'm not even remotely biased by Sid Leavitt's flattery. But his is a site I'd dig even if he hadn't dug mine first.

There are a few points of vanity with me that might give me a bigger boost than praise of my writing, but... Okay, maybe not.

Praise for my graphic design skill is tempered by the fact that I do it for a living, and anyone who does something forty to sixty hours a week is bound to reach a certain competency. Tempered also by the fact that I see the work of designers far more talented and with more actual artistic skill.

Praise for my guitar playing, well, some people are easily impressed. I was much better at it back when I was going to the Foundation on Saturday nights to sit in on the after-hours session, and I have to say I was totally and completely out of my depth in that room. Which is to say, I'm glad you like my harmonized arrangement of 'I Got It Bad' and other remains of John Elliott's largely squandered tutelage of me twenty-plus years ago, but I know for a proven fact that I'm not good enough to play for free. This is not false modesty, trust me.

Praise for my beautiful children, well, I'm mighty proud of them, but that's not something I achieve by effort. That's dumb luck. Praise of my parenting feels good, but I know what a horribly flawed Dad I am.

But writing... There's where my ego can really go off the rails. I am absolutely addicted to story, awe in awe of great writers. I think America would be a better place if we took sociopathic killers like Andrew Jackson off our currency and replaced them with Faulkner, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Washington Irving instead of George Washington, Melville instead of Lincoln.

I love a lot of contemporary writers, too. Chuck Palahniuk until a couple of novels ago, Amy Hempel, Paul Auster, T.C. Boyle, Raymond Carver, Ian McEwan, Jonathan Lethem, Cormac McCarthy, Michael Chabon, Don DeLillo, even Pynchon when he's on his game. These are my heroes.

And I still have my own writerly ambitions. I haven't worked in earnest on Wealth Effects in a long time, but I've been kicking around a new novel in my head lately, feeling the story build pressure in me.

And, I mean really, this is something like my 848th blog post, and most of them ain't short. The fact that Sid actually went back and read some of the oldest posts really floored me. Because those first eight months of posts, in particular, I can't imagine them being worth reading. I was so angry about the place I was at in life, felt so utterly trapped, that the negativity alone would be lethal. And the fact that so many of the posts were written when I was blackout drunk, Sid really downplayed the txpo factor if he read many of those posts.

Anyway, I'm flattered. And looking forward to perusing the considerable list of other blogs he's rolled. He posts people's creative writing as well.