Bootleg Records From Long Ago

I stopped at a used record shop for an old Genesis bootleg I had seen there last week. If it was still there, I'd count that as fate saying I just had to buy it. There it was and so I bought it. Of course I did.

I buy mostly used records. I buy some new albums, but used stuff is more interesting. Most shops are poorly organized, so I hunt for the good stuff. That's fine so long as I'm on my own. Anyone with me wonders, as the first half hour passes, when they'll be released and when I might look up and rejoin the world. Flipping through, I'm somewhere and some-when else.

Anyone who thrifts for clothes, old car parts, or what have you knows this feeling of drifting away, of solitude that is all too rare these days. I even switch my phone off while in the temples of vinyl. There were no mobile phones back in record days.

Records are things of the past. They're making a comeback of sorts but won't ever be mainstream again and so they harken back to another time. I won't say it was a better time we should go back to. That nonsense leads to racist red baseball hats. However, like cherry picked classic rock, I go back for some of that era's greatest hits.

I'm alone in the house with the bootleg record on the turntable. The recording is terrible (the audience member's microphone seems to have been incapable of recording bass), but the experience is as close as I can get to being back in tenth grade. Then there was no YouTube filled with every bootleg known to fandom. Instead, I dug through bins at Desert Shore and hoped for the best when I brought one home where, by myself or with my best friend, I'd put the record on (often with a fresh TDK or Maxell tape recording it) and listen carefully. I remember hearing this bootleg back then, imagining myself at the concert that had happened ten years before, back when I was only seven. It was a bit of magic. Now, rather than imagining the concert I never saw, I recall the red and black rug, the Technics turntable, the view out my bedroom windows, the scratched and pitted recording that is my memory and which is much less clear than the audio on this bootleg.

Flipping through records I recall my younger self trying work through the store methodically but drifting from jazz to rock, working through A, B, and C but then jumping to G and finding the bootleg I didn't know I had been looking for but which felt just right and so full of possibility. There I am, paying the bill, catching the bus from the SU Hill back home. Up in my room, I open the turntable, slip the record from its sleeve, and set the needle in the groove for a listen. It comes back to me across four decades, like an old song whose words are all still there, whose every melody is etched into me.

That terrible bootleg record sounds awfully good to me.

Balancing

This morning doing Morning Pages I was noodling, not saying much of interest even to me. That's okay though it often doesn't feel okay. I worry, this is going to seem boring when someone reads these. Then I remember no one will read them. Sure, I save the pages and maybe someone someday will be so bored they read some, but the chances of that are slim. So why worry?

The answer is simple: I worry because I always think that I should do better. I accused myself of laziness this morning writing those pages. If I had only been thinking like a writer the last few days, I'd be writing something good by now. Turns out, I'm not leading the perfectly realized life. I know, it's totally shocking.

All this hit me two-thirds of the way down page one. From there I started writing that might be of interest to someone. It was about two kinds of writing I do. The first is when I have something to say to someone. That writing seems important because it goes out into the world and maybe gets some approval. Yay, me.

The second kind of writing is me just thinking. The number of Morning Pages that fall into this second category is staggering even to me. My guess is that it's up around seventy-percent, which is why no one would ever make it through all those pages. There's just not much of anything there. Really.

But those pages help me balance and get me to the pages that matter.

I remember my high school physics lessons on moment arm (torque) and the seesaw at Our Lady Of Lourdes. A seesaw with equal weights equadistant from a central fulcrum will balance. The seesaw with me, a fat kid, on one side, and my friend, thin and small on the other was out of balance. I had to move in toward the fulcrum. He had to move out away from it. That still wasn't enough. The seesaw had three positions on which it could rest across the fulcrum. We shifted it so his side was longer and then with him leaning back, me leaning in, we found balance.

Seventy-percent of my Morning Pages and half my typed writing sits on one side of the seesaw. I think of them as less important, the shorter end of the lever arm. Then there's the fewer pages out on the end of a longer arm, the larger importance.

This piece feels pretty thin and small. Still, I'll set it way out on the seesaw, hoping somehow to keep things in balance and not slam too hard into the ground. That sort of thing hurts. It's much better to be lifted gently, high up into the air and believe I'll never have to come down.

Once A Writing Teacher

I no longer teach writing for a living. I still write. That's more what my job entails now whereas it was just a benefit of the job I used to have. Teaching writing, I found it useless to ask kids to do as I said. They didn't much listen to me. But they sure watched me carefully. "Yo, what's up with that weird ass pen?" they asked about my fountain pen. "What the fuck do you have to write about in all them pages?" they wondered seeing my writer's notebook. "You like writing? That's straight up bullshit, nigga," to which I shrugged and admitted my guilt. In class, I wrote to show them about writing, but I also just wanted time with my pen. There are few things, yo, I like better than filling pages with my thoughts, and that's no bullshit, nigga. No bullshit whatsoever.

Though I'm out of the classroom, I still have opportunities and some obligation to teach writing. Yesterday, a colleague asked me to review a piece they had written. (I'm using the plural pronoun for anonymity.) They sent me a draft of something they needed to get right. Would I look it over? Sure, I said, but with some trepidation.

Here's the thing: most people don't separate their writing from themselves or their selves from their writing. Kids in school are often better at this than adults. Maybe kids are more used to it or I built relationships I haven't yet had time to build with colleagues. Whatever the case, I know that when asked to look over a colleague's writing, they're asking me to correct typos and then say it's great. If I was still in school, I could get away with that.

(In school I often told students their drafts were better than they really were. This softened things enough that they could listen to the single bit of criticism they most needed to hear. Rather than say an entire piece was out of order, convoluted, and unbelievable, I focused on the sound of the opening and how it related (or didn't relate) to what came next. Your piece is good got us to where I could teach them something.)

I do some of that with adults too. Yesterday, I said (mostly in truth) that they had written a complete, exact, and authoritative piece. Then I said, it's too long. Length matters. (Damn it.) In the case of writing, shorter is better than longer. What's true in the other realms, I don't want to consider here.

Prior to this paragraph, the first draft of this piece was 626 words long. That's not bad. Anything under a thousand is about right for me though I believe anything online that's over seven hundred words won't be read top to bottom. I don't fuss over word count yet. I haven't finished whatever I'm going to say. (Note that I don't know what I'll say until I've said all of it. I begin with an idea, but writing shapes that idea and the shape of writing it. For instance, I had no idea this would have so many damn parentheticals.) I'll keep writing until I've said whatever it is I end up saying.

Then I'll prune the living crap out of it.

In my mother's front lawn is a shrub that was half again as tall and a third again as wide. It had grown to obscure Mom's window and taken over the garden. My brother took it way down and the whole place is better for it.

It will be the same with this piece. (The 626 words became 431.)

It was the same with my colleagues' piece. I told them to remember that people need the fewest words and shortest draft possible. I put that very delicately but still worried sending that email — an email I cut by one quarter in the second draft.

The delicacy of that email grew from knowing how people conflate their identity with their writing. They should because I perceive who people are from how they present. I once worked with a spectacular person who could not spell. His writing would have embarrassed us both he was aware (and secure) enough to have me rewrite his stuff. Maybe my colleague now will be open to learning how to be concise. Maybe not.

I started this by saying I no longer teach writing. I hear you calling bullshit on that, yo. I'd revise the beginning, but instead I'll focus on pruning (significantly) and leave the beginning so as to set up this ending. If that's wrong, someone will let me know. Probably by saying, Brian, this is good piece and you're a good guy. Now about that beginning paragraph...

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I have no idea if Alan Jacobs reads this blog (I'd like to think that he does and you should definitely read his), but this appeared the next day. Coincidence? Yeah, probably. Still, I like to dream.

Brooding, Past and Future

Like another writer I enjoy and you should read, I've been brooding.

I looked back at last year's Morning Pages for October 30 to see where I have come from. I've been listening to Bruce Springsteen's first album Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J. and thinking he couldn't have known Born To Run was in him. He was likely anxious just getting started let alone becoming one of the biggest acts in rock and roll. That led to me thinking about how I can't know where I'll be next year and that sent me to my October 30, 2018 Morning Pages where I found this:

I'm cracking up little by little. This is the phrased I used in a letter to Jerry: cracking up. I remember a special ed. teacher at F-M who was brilliant but every few years cracked up and went out on medical leave for months or a year. I feel as if I'm on the road to a crack up. It worries me....

I have my department meeting Thursday and am reminding myself to shut up. There's no winning at these things and so many ways to lose. I imagine the obligatory "celebrations" icebreaker, each of us having to say something wonderful about school. At my turn, I imagine trying to pass but being pressed by the admin until I say, "I celebrate that we're done with two months of the year and I haven't killed myself yet." I smile thinking of the reaction that would get....

I am listing all the things I need to do next. My hand is clenching the pen again. I take a deep breath and try again to relax. Let it go. Move a sixteenth of an inch away from cracking up. I won't crack up. I just can't.

No way could I have known then that this morning I'll walk to work at a new job that isn't teaching, at which I'm appreciated by all my colleagues including the people in charge. I couldn't have known I would make it through that last school year by deciding in January that I would quit in June.

There also no real way of knowing what next October 30 will look like. I don't even know what the rest of today will be but, I'm closer to Born To Run than Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J..

And get this: since Born To Run in 1975 Springsteen hit the peak of popularity with 1984's Born In The U.S.A., the peak of artistry with Tunnel Of Love in 1987, and the peak of mastery with Western Stars this year. Even he doesn't know what his October 30, 2019 will be. He just keeps writing and recording.

Me, I'll keep writing and posting and we'll see where we get to, Bruce and me.