July 07, 2006
Merlot
Until last September, for nearly fifteen years, I was becoming, day by day, not only a miserable writer, but a miserable person. Yes, there was the obvious -- I aspired to write for a living and hadn’t yet discovered the elixir that would get me there. And writing books, particularly when you’re as slow a writer as I am, saps the mornings, nights, weekends, and all remaining energy period. But it wasn’t just the fact I needed to keep working in a “day job” and toil at night to pursue my dream. Hell -- in some ways, the struggling artist dynamic was more inspirational than exhausting.
No -- what had begun to bother me was the creature I was turning into. In particular, the way this new creature -- who I’ll call Adult Me -- seemed in no way to resemble the being I once was.
Kid Me, at least the way I remember him, wasn’t anything like Adult Me. Adult Me had fallen into quite a routine: get up, get ready for work, drive an hour in the car, push pencils, paperclips, and deals for ten hours, drive another hour home, argue boisterously and for no apparent reason with his wife, spend a few minutes with his kids, decide against exercising, then maybe, on the right night, sit down at the computer for a couple hours to fiddle with a novel...then pass out, only to start Groundhog Day all over again the following morning.
Kid Me, if I recall, used to write short stories. Assemble plastic models of trucks. Paint watercolors. Play on a soccer team. Play pickup basketball with bigger kids. Stay up all night battling friends in marathon Dungeons & Dragons sessions. Collect model trains -- first HO scale, then N -- and coins too. And here’s the annoying part: Kid Me had school, too. This being the annoying part why? Because school took up just about as much time as work, right? Not quite -- but close.
In other words, there seemed no excuse, no viable explanation, for the evaporation of Kid Me -- and the horrifying appearance of Adult Me. Maybe it was just the metabolism slowing, or the cumulative effects of various disappointments, or a form of ambition seeking excellence and money rather than a balanced, jack-of-all-trades (read: poor) sort of existence. Maybe it was even noble -- in morphing into Adult Me, I’d tell myself, I’m giving my kids all kinds of opportunities to be Kids Themselves.
But there’s a reason they call people around my age middle-aged -- reason being, we ain’t dead yet. And if you’ve got your antennae up, you’ll sense it coming...there’s that moment, when it strikes, that tattoos you with a midlife crisis imprint across your forehead. It’s on your forehead so that you can enjoy staring at it whenever you look in a mirror. There I am...having my midlife crisis. Wondering what happened to the person I used to be. To Kid Me.
Some people respond by busting up their marriage. Or buying a red sports car. Or turning to the bottle. Or worse -- some ignore the tattoo painted on their forehead, then self-destruct later. One way or the other, there’s pretty much no getting around it. You hit your late thirties, or a little deeper in, and you’re stuck with facing the fact you’re halfway there. You gonna slide down the slippery slope to the end? Suck up the disappointment (if you aren’t already Donald Trump or Dan Brown) and give up on hoping for anything better with only half the game left to go?
I read something from Paulo Coelho in his own introduction to The Alchemist, and I’m sure I’m paraphrasing him badly, but what I recall of was the following rule of life: If you undertake risk to pursue your dreams, you may experience pain and disappointment. It will hurt, but you will forget the pain -- it’s only an instantaneous sting, which is gone once you feel it. Stay in a job or environment that is contrary to your character, however, and over time, the job will rack up a permanent effect -- it will turn you into a bitter, miserable person. The pain that comes when you’re pursuing what you care about can’t really change you...but failing to heed the inner voice of your dreams can, and permanently, and for the worse.
This notion rang true with me and I determined, after a while, that it didn’t matter how much money I made, or how "easy" career success might come from the “day jobs” -- the fact is, if I didn’t make a run at becoming a professional writer and filmmaker, as I’d intended to do since my teens, I’d never reverse the course of this odd, alien appearance of Adult Me. And I, as Coelho warned, would become miserable, bitter, and unpleasant. I was already well on my way.
And so -- as much in a quest for the time to dedicate to hobbies the way Kid Me used to as for the desire to write and get paid for it -- I decided it was time. The consequences be damned. I figured out how it would make sense for my employer to retain my services as a producer and writer, get more productivity out of me in the process -- and under which plan I could work from my home office and dedicate more time to writing Public Enemy and subsequent novels. I assembled a proposal; we made a deal; with that former employer as my first client, I now have a producing company, am writing a new novel, and crafting a screenplay I intend to direct.
Don’t get me wrong -- as Paulo Coelho predicted, there has been pain. There has been disappointment. For instance, I can be the first (or last in a long line of writers) to tell you that you don’t make much of a living as a novelist -- not until some freak accident occurs to land you on Oprah or for some big-shot producer in Hollywood to decide Painkiller will be Hollywood’s next big franchise.
Slowly, though -- day by day -- I’ve found myself to be more pleasant. And with the commute gone -- with the creative juices flowing for more hours each day -- I’ve also seen the creature that is Adult Me begin to infuse its life with pursuits previously relegated to the roster of activities belonging to Kid Me.
Writers need ways to procrastinate, you know. My preferred means? Four-mile runs, a model train layout beside the laundry room, and a hobby Kid Me would have had to wait till he turned 21 to pursue: I took a distance learning class, contacted a Sonoma Valley nursery, and -- thanks to a small patch of dirt my wife allowed me to seize behind the garage -- planted 35 Merlot grapevines this spring.
There’s been the pain of heavy rains so far this summer. Neither the climate nor the soil here in Connecticut are tailor-made for vitis vinifera varietals. Plus, it takes three growing seasons before you reap a half-decent harvest. And more than a few of the leaves were ravaged by aphids.
But those vines behind my garage are coming along nicely, thank you...
And so is the gradual return of that person I used to know. We’ve called him Kid Me here, but really, he’s just me.
Posted by Will Staeger at July 7, 2006 08:59 PM