Prodigal Writer

I haven't written in so long this feels strange.

I mean I've written. I've done work. But sitting in front of a computer for my own reasons has been something I conveniently avoided. The flux of returning from a year of traveling the world into a home-country ravaged by COVID-19 provided wonderful cover. Who could argue with my sincere explanations of needing space and time to process what had happened, what was and continues to be happening in the world?

Only, things are always happening.

The world is always turning and tragedies, big and small, are always here or on the horizon waiting to make grand entrances. The truth is much more garbled than the eloquence of global tragedy. The truth is lazy and scared and stifled. So today I sit in front of my computer, only a month late to my 2021 plans for myself, to write.

Writing when I travel has always been an easier task than writing at home. Life feels so much bigger when I'm recounting trying to chase a stubborn Jagenda, my chicken, out of the living room where she insisted on laying a single egg on the couch every morning; or having the kids (and adults) laugh at me as I tried to carry the water from the pump on my head like everyone else. But what convenient excuses those expectations of my daily musings set.

No random animal stories? My pen should be still. Not drenched in water and left with only half full bucket? My fingernails should not click against keys.

The last two years have been flush with lessons and realizations and triumph and terror and love...so much love. There have been quiet victories and small stinging tragedies that dwarf in the shadow of death and sickness and houselessness- but they are no less tragic to me.

So this year I want to return to my pen. Return to telling the tiny stories of food and fancy and friendship. Share the warmth I am able to gleam from those I love, the ones who by some magical turn of fate and gift from the heavens, love me too.

I quit!

In the middle of life. A crisis. Some would call it a midlife crisis. By the purest of definitions it was

that. Someone marching through life, maybe skating, maybe barely sliding by…but getting to some mid-point and maybe expecting something. Anything. Anything more than what they brought with them.

I find myself at that point. The general milestones of career checked off the list. Kind of. The more personal ones, less so but not abhorrently so. It isn’t a matter of “if only…” except, “if only I knew what the point is.” 

I don’t.

Years ago my head went through the back window of a car. There are skid marks where skin clung to pavement and the constant irritating reminder that I was lucky. Lucky to only have 33 stitches. Lucky to have been taken to a hospital- no matter how scary the hospital was. Lucky to not lose my eye.

“You’ll shoot your eye out kid.”

And in the aftermath of that accident I was sick on antiretroviral medications because there was too much uncertainty about where the needles that sewed me up came from. I lost 15 pounds in a month, a patch of hair larger than my hand, and the symmetry of my face that I’d taken for granted.

I vaguely remember a change in perspective on the world. But at 25 my perspective was relatively new so how much change could there have been.

Now, in my 40s, I question my perspective and contemplate crafting a new one. 

The thing no one really tells you about bucking convention is that it pays to be brilliant at something if you take that route. Straying from the well-worn path is amazing when you have vision and purpose. I have frustration and disinterest- not really things you can forge a path with. 

Still, I stand with my toes peeking over the edge of some unknown decision. Some path not yet taken, and keep taunting myself. “Do it. Do it. Do it.” I dare myself. I say it out loud to people so their knowledge of my plans might shame me, inadvertently into making it happen. 

I texted my sister a few weeks ago, “if I leave the country I’ll have to ditch my phone”. “If?!” she responded, “when” she corrected me. And I need that because otherwise the lack of an alternate plan to my current distress falls away as easily as tentative brunch plans. A last minute cancellation with the promise of a reschedule that may never come. 

Fear and laziness are at the core of so many lives that wanted more but didn’t manage to get it. I suffer more from the laziness than the fear – though the fear of retirement and unemployment and returning to exactly this same feeling do persist. But the laziness. 

Just write. Just plan. Just imagine.

It is paralyzing.

Maybe it is fear masquerading as laziness. Fear donning a different face to keep me off balance and uncertain. Whatever it is…today I ignored it. Today I walked into my boss’s office and gave notice of my resignation.

Come January I’ll fold my uncertainty and angst into the battered travel pack I’ve had since 2001. The one that has been with me to every country I’ve visited except Japan. I do not know what this jump into the unknown will offer up…only that the fear that grips me is reason enough to jump.

10-year-old certainty

I still greet my dad with, “hey, old man.” It started as a joke sometime around graduation from college. As a military family we are Southern by inclination if not always location and respect was an expectation in any interaction with someone older than you. Hell, I’m almost 40 and I still pepper my language with “ma’am” and “sir”. 

“Old man” isn’t respectful, but crossing into true adulthood, where I’d pay my own bills and go my own way, it was allowed. The moniker was taken as I intended, a term of endearment, and a gentle jab. I didn’t really think my dad was old but he was older than me so…old man ribbing it was. 

His response was always, “better than the alternative,” a nod to the idea that getting old was better than being dead. I have to agree with that perspective. Dad has lots of thoughts on aging. When I chastised my parents for their inability to remember when and how long they remained engaged they both told me to, “go ask your aunt Sunday.”  At that point they’d been married about 25 years (now its 45 years and they really don’t remember).

“How can you not remember?” I asked, incredulous. “Keep living and you’ll see,” my dad responded with a smile.

He was right. There are any number of things I don’t remember now. Things I was certain there was no need to write down because – who forgets important things. Apparently forgetting runs in my family or maybe it is my age bracket; either way, if you ask me now what 10-year-old me wanted to be when I grew up I’m at a loss. 

The military brat within has to first do calculations about where we were living so that I can at least picture my life. It sounds silly to anyone who hasn’t moved much, but in my family we always start with “where were we?” as grounding.  At 10 we had left Florida and were living in Texas.  That means the Hinkle house. 

If we were in the Hinkle house than I was hanging with the Dudettes – a group of friends that for some reason that was a cool way to identify ourselves (whatever…we were 10). But that’s where I draw a blank. I remember sleep-overs and walking home from school. I remember my Girl Scout Leader and cutting my finger while chopping cabbage, and nightmares about my fourth grade teacher Mr. Phiester.  I do not remember what I wanted to be when I grew up. I’m not sure I thought about being anything other than a 10-year-old. 

Fast-forward a few years to when I was 12 or so and I remember wanting to be everything…I concocted a way to design houses using rooms that fit together like puzzle pieces so people could decide what their homes looked like, I had an advertising sketchbook filled with imaginary products and the marketing plan for each one, I constructed a paper “movie projector” and sketched out “films”, I considered child psychology, I wrote plays for me and my twin cousin to act out with our Cabbage Patch Kids, and I wrote poetry: 

the sun and the moon go to war each day and the one that wins is the one that stays;but he doesn’t stay long ‘cuz the other comes along and its war all over again.

I don’t remember thinking I was going to “be” any of those things. Not really. In my mind, I was those things. In my mind I was revolutionizing architecture and selling amazing (if fictitious) products and writing moving poetry. 

In my 10-year-old brain, as far as I can remember it now in my 40-year-old one, there was no need to think too heavily about what might be in light of what already was.

That differs greatly from where I sit now. 

Now I know architecture has a lot of math and, because I was math-phobic in high school and college, it vanished from my “could be” horizon. Psychology, especially of the child persuasion, struck me as depressing, and writing took a more utilitarian turn – I majored in journalism and had a short stint as a journalist through college. All of those things I was somehow faded away.

The work I do now did not exist in my 10-year-old brain. I didn’t know about non-profits (although my 10-year-old self knew about profit…I once made $22 off a box $1.49 box of brownie mix selling slices door-to-door) or international aid/development work. International development was my job until just a few years ago. And what I’ve transitioned to, working stateside in violence prevention, did not register at all when I was 10 because I didn’t know anything of violence. Lucky me. 

More than what I’ve chosen to do professionally in my adult life, the greatest differences between me-way-back-when and me-inching-up-in-age-now, is certainty. 

My 10-year-old self was pretty confident. The things I fancied doing I was certain I did well. So certain, that in my early days of writing I would cry big raindrop tears when given any critique on what I’d produced. And while I’m glad I learned to take critique as a tool for improvement rather than an assault on my talent, I do miss the certainty that what I offer the world is something it needs and will be better for having. In the absence of that certainty I find myself asking now what I never asked then, what the heck am I going to be when I grow up?

Courtesy of the DailyPost writing prompt:Ballerina Fireman Astronaut Movie Star.

Benevolent (Shopping) Dictator?

Four a.m. and awake despite heavy eyelids and the desire to sink into my mattress, but I wrestled sleep down, held it at bay to finish the last few pages of The Hunger Games. And when I found myself at the end, I was no more sated than the few pages before because there I was, dangling on a cliff…or rather a cliffhanger. There was not neat packaging of the characters for me to file away as happy or sad or tormented or anything in particular. I wasn’t looking for a particular kind of an ending but I was looking for an ending.

But The Hunger Games is a trilogy and that was simply part one and so there I was, awake enough to wonder “what next?”. Ten years ago, hell, five years ago and I’d have had to wait. In the morning I’d have trotted out to the library to see if they had a copy lurking in the shelves or gone to the closest bookstore and purchased a tangible copy. But the gift of a Kindle and the ever available internet convenienced the patience right out of me. 

Instead of settling in for a few hours of sleep and time enough to conjure up my own scenarios for what happens next, I instead grabbed my phone and went to Amazon and downloaded the next instillation. And before I had exited the browser the book appeared on my Kindle and my eyes burned with fatigue as I read on.

I share that to put into context what I’ll say next. 

Amazon is big and we, the reading and buying public (not to mention writers) are in a precarious position.

In recent weeks Amazon and Hachette Publishing have been in a very public feud. It is easy to get caught up in the largeness of the story and immediately apply archetypal characteristics to each in order to understand what is going on. But in this news story there is no “little guy”, at least not in this particular fray. Amazon has become the megastore of megastores but Hachett isn’t a little startup or indie operation either. These are both big companies with specific aims and interests.

So why care? Stephen Colbert, among others, has weighed in on the dispute about the undisclosed demands of Amazon on Hachette, Hachette’s refusal to acquiesce, and Amazon’s subsequent delay in the shipping of Hachette books, deliberate counter-marketing of their books when people seek them out, and raised prices.

Insert deep sigh here because Amazon, a website that makes my life - as someone who hates to shop - so much easier, is essentially proving itself to be the online version of Wal-Mart. 

Great, one more thing I might slip up and my give business to in a moment of desperation and then feel guilty about. Did I mention deep sigh?

The thing is, I see how this gets dangerous. Or at least how it could. 

I sent a friend this Ney York Time’s piece knowing all the while what his response to the notion that although there is a need for old school publishers to adapt or die, an Amazon unchecked by competition could be problematic even in the areas that they currently shine. My friend disagreed:

I don’t see a problem with Amazon dominating the industry. If there is a competitor who can provide a better end user experience for the consumer…then the market would react accordingly. That entity doesn’t exist and Bezos/Amazon’s success was hard won…they have earned the right to dominate. 

In theory I agree with him. In theory I believe that markets correct themselves. But that is theory and theory happens in a vacuum, something Amazon does not exist in. and so a hundreds of things impact Amazon’s ability to dominate and what that domination could mean long term. 

Right now, Amazon treats its authors well. Right now it provides incentives that lure them away from traditional publishers and line their pockets with cash. The writer in me is drooling just a bit wondering how I can get my name in an Amazon cue. But even my greedy would-be-artist senses see the similarities to this method of reeling people in and say…drug dealers. At least all the drug dealers I saw on tv growing up. You know the ones, “sure, have a joint/rock/whatever; enjoy yourself.” And then when you are good and hooked, all of a sudden there is a price to be paid.

The difference here, of course, is that high on publishing royalties (so to speak) and all of the other publishers pushed out of business, if Amazon doesn’t want to pay me anymore than what recourse is there?

It is an imperfect metaphor, sue me. You get the point though.

Sure, people are smart and in theory, someone will enter the fray and provide a supply in that aching chasm of demand (for a platform to publish and purchase books that allows decent pay and decent prices) but still…we aren’t in a vacuum. And then my mind wanders to our government’s seeming unwillingness to enforce antitrust laws and some emerging (seemingly unrelated but so very related) issues like net neutrality and I wonder how successful emergent competition could be.

I think competition is a good thing. I think it pushes innovation. 

Competition (and technology) produced the ebook and made it possible for me to sit in my underwear and access almost any book I want at any time I want it. And I appreciate the addition to the market and do not mourn for traditional publishers because it is impacting their business model. They need to adapt. 

My cousin urged me to frequent local independent bookstores because they are slowly dying out. And she’s right. But token purchases won’t save them. People nostalgic for the telegraph couldn’t save it in competition with the phone; new technology and a new business model established itself and brought us here. This may sound like I am arguing the counterpoint but I’m not. Extinction by unnatural forces – acting quickly and without balance – wreak havoc. Living things have no time to adjust and instead are wiped out. Think what the stoats did to the kiwi in New Zealand, the nutria to the wetlands of Louisiana, and humans pretty much anywhere. Adaptation is as necessary for businesses as it is plant and animal life. 

Or better, think of the one crop nations that collapse when the prices fall. The West Indies with sugar, South America with bananas, West Africa with cocoa. No one seemed to mind there was one market and once source until that one source decided prices were too high. Crisis is never a good time to negotiate especially when there is so little leverage. 

I’m not sure how to ameliorate this situation. Thigh high in Amazon if only through my kindle (never mind the abundant shopping items), I’ve cut down greatly but I’m not sure where the alternative is just yet; but I’m looking. I can’t complain about the beast all the while feeding it.