COML
Crap of my life
We all have it: The indoctrinations and miseries of our formative years. The angst of adolescence and fails of our invincible twenties. The compromising we did—aka settling, aka acquiescing, giving in, letting go of our dreams and sometimes values—in our thirties.
We spent our forties fighting the good fight and gaining wisdom, our fifties denying we were old-fashioned, battling obsolescence in our sixties, and, if you’ve made it to my age, struggling to reconcile it all our seventies.
I don’t know when I get to kick-back-and-fuck-it-all, but I suspect that’ll come just about the time my hearing gets bad enough to non-decipher the whisperings about warehousing me someplace where I’ll be taken care of and safe. Those facilities come with a two-year expiration date, by the way—three at the max. Here’s to having enough spoons to kick and scream so at least I take a couple people with me when I go.
Meanwhile, best to get crackin’ while the spirit’s still willing, eh wot? Thus I am, finally… at long-delayed last… with my heart’s unfailing cheer, my synapses’ staunch firings, and a slitted eye on the clock… writing Secrets of a Ghostwriter, [subtitle TBD] 2nd edition.
As the great Dom DeLuise would say, “No applause please; save’a for the end.”
I figured it would be both easy and laborious; after all, I’ve been teaching what I’m writing for well over a decade. A daunting amount of reference material—videos, video transcripts, supplemental writings, forms, posts, live-class recordings…. Oy. Why am I doing this, again?
Fortunately, there’s no use reviewing most of that since my Swiss-cheesed retention wouldn’t hang on to that one great line I once said about charting memoirs even if I could nail down exactly which cohort I was talking to and in what live session I was so spontaneously brilliant.
Ergo, I’m writing this text tome from quasi-scratch, using only everything except some stuff to refresh my memory and doing my damnedest to not litter the page with the amount of swearing I so frequently spew at students held hostage on weekly Zoom calls. It ain’t easy; sometimes it takes a “fuck” variant to drive home a point.
I’m sure my editors will remove as much profanity from the final draft as I can tolerate.
Meanwhile, the work-in-progress trips along. I’m more anal than in yesteryear, so I excessively edit as I go, even as my fingers type out how that’s an amateur’s trap. One part of my mind berates me to marshal my thoughts, while another insists I “just get it all down,” the better to rewrite, revise, and MLE once it’s on the page. Both parts are right, of course, compelling me to follow dual paths at once. How typically dumbasfuck me.
On the upside, codifying my process in pixels is fun and sorta self-satisfying; on the downside, it’s exposing holes I never noticed before and must needs now fix. Damn—why couldn’t the whole thing already be perfect? Am I doomed to normality despite all my innovations?
*sigh* Yes.
For ghostwriting is akin to juggling an apple, a slide rule, three slippery goldfish, and a machete while the smoke alarm won’t stop ringing and a black bear claws at the sliding door. Translation: this first book might take me quite some awhile. As an infamous leader once said, “Stand down and stand by.” I may need to call for chocolate fortification.