Several times a day something will happen that would make a great subject for a blog post. Sentences start forming. I might even scribble some of them down on scrap paper along with cartoon ideas. They pile up while I get swept along from event to event, or deposited in the sediment for a while to lie around in a recovering stupor before trudging into the jostling round again.
In my ideal life my thoughts form and gather methodically, compacting into well-defined masses that pass with peristaltic majesty to be introduced to the world. The ideal blog is one that gets updated daily. Those with more frantic fans might be happy to see multiple updates in a day, but certainly one a day rewards the regular reader with a new treat and time to savor it. That has not worked out for me, which is one reason Bike Snob is a hot ticket and I'm not. But it's certainly not the only reason.
As one reader remarked when looking at a pile of Tom Clancy's first or second book on a table at a book signing in Annapolis in the 1980s, "That explains why he was such a lousy insurance agent." Those of us with literary pretensions often consider our day jobs to be the time-wasting black hole in our lives, even if they also provide us with the material that defines us as authors. Clancy did not write about heroic insurance agents defending the free world any more than J.K Rowling penned a memoir about serving in a restaurant. Sometimes a job is just a job. Or the job as inspiration falls victim to the actual need to work there.
Case in point: my lunch break just ended with the arrival of someone who needed to buy a used cardboard box. That's more important than anything I might have been tapping out at my lunch table.
2 comments:
You have flashes. "Peristaltic majesty." I like that.
Yeah, that was a good one.
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