the list post (or why I don't do them)

All the cool kids in the blogosphere do lists. I mean they really do ‘em. They do ‘em to the degree that the damned things are practically art. They:

v      write them for themselves to keep their organized selves all organized and shit;

v      use them to great community-building effect on their blogs, either:

o        Making lists of cool things they’ve learned or done, or;

o        Making lists of questions to ask their readers, or;

o        Making lists of amazing things they’ve found;

v      make them into poetry, with brilliant segues and dazzling syntactic cliffhangers;

I find it awe-inspiring. I’m envious. I’m not a list maker, not at all. Like multi-tasking, I’m capable of writing them, but I find it personally distasteful to actually do. Not in an “I’m going to throw up if I have to write one” way; Just in the sense that it provokes a mild sense of queasiness.

I do write lists from time to time, often for the same reasons that many people I admire write them. I write them to:

v      remind myself of tasks that must get done before I slip back into a pleasantly irresponsible state;

v      order the things I absolutely can’t procrastinate any longer in regards to;

v      create an order of operations so that I can complete boring errands in as efficient a way as possible so as to facilitate slipping back into the aforementioned irresponsible state.

But these are exceptions to my rule of being, things I have to do. They are an equivocation to the way the world is. In my ideal world, the one I usually try to experience in my loopy head, there are only lists consisting of one thing at a time, and a list of one is not a list really, now is it? It’s just an item. I guess maybe I’m an item-maker.

Lists give me no comfort at all. They weigh me down. They loom.

I could have a made a list today about all the things I wanted to get done, but then I would have had to stick to it to gain closure on my day. Surely, on that list, at the end of it, would have been the item: Get to bed at a reasonable time so you can get up early and edit for your freelance job. That is a reasonable and sensible goal to include on a list. And, that item being there, I would have felt a great conflict when, at the appointed time, I decided to write a blog post instead, a post concerning lists, for example. I would have been left with a giant, gaping failure – a huge open check box at the end of my day that would not, could not, subsequently be filled.

I would have been despondent.

You see, I know these things about myself:

v      I am not a goal-setter – I am a dreamer;

v      I do not wish to be a multi-tasker – I desire to be gloriously obsessed;

v      I don’t want to win – I just want to run.

I also have a really hard time making lists longer than three items long, as you might have noticed by now.

I think that maybe it’s genetic or something. I have an anti-list retro-virus, perhaps. We could call it QLV – Quasi-Bohemian Listodefficiency Virus. Or perhaps it’s congenital, a quirk of natural DNA splicing that was undetected in the womb and, in mid-life, has blossomed into an untreatable (I hope) syndrome typified by aimless walks and drives, and ponderous ponderings for extended periods of time during which I could almost appear to be asleep were it not for obsessive chin-whisker fondling, open, unfocused eyes, and occasional, spontaneous outburst of laughter or weepiness.

Here’s the truth: A life without lists feels more to me like the summers of my youth, when I climbed trees and roamed hills and made up stories and even wrote them down sometimes. When I swam for hours, and lay on the raft on the lake and stared up at the clouds all afternoon, seeing heroes and villains and all the characters in between soar over me in a kaleidoscope of private mythology.

Even then, even in my daydreams, I was never the first hero. I was always a supporting character, the dissenting voice on the team, the one that questioned everything, especially himself.

I look back, and forward, from this place and time, and I know these things:

v      that boy was unformed in many ways, but;

v      I was closer to my best self then - I was wild there, and;

v      I need to get back.

So this may be the closest I ever come to a list post. It is, perhaps, too bad, because I love it when other people do them right. I guess it’s just one of those things that I’ll have to learn to appreciate from the outside.

You know, while I’m scratching my chin, happily obsessing, and looking opportunistically for a good metaphorical raft.

finding wild and the things we do for love

A friend on Twitter, Jennifer Garam (who goes by the Twitter Tag @writieouschick – that’s so cool), posted this quote by Isadora Duncan last week: “You were once wild here. Don’t let them tame you.”

It had an impact. Several of us appreciated it, Jennifer posted on it on her blog, One Writeous Chick, and then another friend, Judy Clement Wall, riffed on it too on her blog Zebra Sounds. We came up with a little hashtag magic - #youwerewildhere – and now we’re enjoying our little not-so-secret movement in the Twitterverse. It's growing, very slowly and very organically, and I love that it's staying humble. Every day someone new jumps in, and there's another blog post, and the whole thing feels pretty real.

This is my contribution, such as it is.

I started a new job on Monday. Actually, it’s an old job. After nine years of casino work leading into the life inversion that got me out of there, I started back with the casino that I first worked at earlier this week. Dealing cards. Back to the beginning.

When they say that writers need to cultivate multiple sources of revenue, I never imagine this as part of my fantasy. I really didn’t want to go back. I would have been happy as a clam to never actually set foot in a casino again. I really would have.

The life inversion was and is, in large part, about rejecting the consumerist world. I wanted to find the best me out beyond the bright lights and bells and whistles of the casino world, away from accumulating stuff and living up to popular social standards. The whole thing is an illusion, a fantasy of winning, a mirage of possibility, wealth and vanity inside a reality of desperation and narcissism.

It’s yucky.

But, dealing is also a chance to make twice as much as I could anywhere else at entry level. There are bills to pay, jobs are scarce, and I still know people in that world. It’s still about who ya know, not what ya know. And, frankly, I know how to deal cards. I can work two days a week and cover my minimal nut. This will allow more time to write. It’s kind of a no-brainer. And yet…

I keep asking myself if this is a compromise that I’m making, if somehow I’m losing the compass heading and drifting back into an orbit that I worked so hard to get out of. It’s not pride or vanity; It’s not wearing a uniform again after so many years in a suit. It’s the fact that it’s a casino. I hate that world. Love the people (some of them), hate the environment.

And when I realize that - how much I hate being there – I stop worrying. Other than the bare minimum of revenue to support me while I write, there’s nothing I want there. It’s not me anymore, in any way shape or form. It’s just a thing I do to help me chase my dreams; chase my better self. Living a life without compromise was always a dream, never a goal. The world doesn’t work that way. The goal was to make as few compromises as was possible, and to make the ones that were unavoidable count.

There was a time that casinos offered the possibility of a career, a chance to learn new things, and some sense of helping others by being a good manager, a good leader. It was fun to feel important and capable for a while in that milieu. I thought I was wild there once, briefly, but I let that environment, its pretty lights and the promise of career, meaning, importance and security tame me. I bought in. That won’t happen again.

I don’t claim to have found the wild me - the better me - again when I left the casinos twenty months ago, but I found the path to that me. I found the journey, and the journey is what it's all about.

The writing is wild. Hell, it’s the wildest thing ever. The better me I aspire to exists, not at the end of this road, but every step along the way, every page I type out, every bit of craft I learn, and even more when I ignore the craft and reach for magic. Every day I can spend rummaging around in my imagination, or soaring on the creative thermals that blow when things are just perfect, is a day spent being wild. And like most things, the more you do it, the better you get at it.

This casino gig isn’t a compromise, it’s a sacrifice; a distasteful thing I have to do that harms nobody else but me, and even then only if I let it. It allows me to pursue the dream, to rummage and soar. It is the sacrifices we're prepared to make that define how much we love the thing we're chasing. I find that I am prepared to make some fairly large ones. This sacrifice, this little thing? 

It’s just a small part of finding wild.