My brain is mush from what I thought a busy week, but the welder neighbor at career day has fifteen kids.
“Fifteen..! Are they all yours?”
“Yessir.”
“How do you have time to sleep?”
“I don’t.”
A quick dispatch about career day at the local high school, and a big thing I got from it:
What’s that bias that assumes that everyone thinks like you? I’ve got whatever that is. Or, have it, but the world is slowly blasting it away (and that’s good).
When I talk to the “impressionable youths”, I have a bad habit of being ever so slightly smug. I’m thrilled that I get to do what I do for a living, and imagine that everyone else would want to do the same.
The students filtered through a dazzling array of booths from the local businesses. Some drifted aimlessly, others stumbled along, still trying to figure out how to use their newfound height as only teenagers can. (Ah, to be young.) But most knew exactly what they were there to do.
Referencing their papers with the careers listed, they visited the booths that interested them. The nursing table next to me kept a steady business, and even collected a few resumes.
Eight hundred kids walked down the halls.
Exactly three of them approached my table on purpose.
Exactly one wanted to be a writer.
Most of them wanted to be welders, or nurses, or mechanics, or join the Army, or run a tree service.
The girls lined up, and listened to the hospital HR staff talk about hiring at the table to my right. They looked like nurses that I worked with, listening to their daily briefing.
The boys stood around the table across the room in work boots and talked with the men lucky enough to be out in the field, a wistful gleam in their eyes, waiting their turn, a thousand times tougher than I’ll ever be.
It was career day for me.
You Missed the Point, Lenny
To further destroy any country cred that I hoped to be building, have you ever heard Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story live? The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra celebrated his 100th birthday a few years ago, and I was there.
Boy, did Lenny miss the point of what drums are, and can be.
His are weak, effeminate, constrained, bridled, quiet.
A snare drum is a gunshot, not a finger snap choking in a tuxedo.
Blues legend R.L. Burnside shot and killed a man once.
He later said (paraphrased), perhaps unrelatedly:
“They say call 911, but I call .357. It’s…quicker.”
He was a guitarist, but understood how drums work, too. He got the spirit.
I’ve been like Bernstein, so stuck in my bubble of “creative”, that when I could finally see that there’s more to life than guitar and writing, I only saw it’s shadow, a pale imitation, something that would be flung aside when the opportunity to be a podcaster rolled down the line.
It sounds silly to type it, but I see it infecting the majority of writing in the modern world.
Alex Perez is a retired ballplayer and dazzling writer, exploring similar themes and the mind-boggling echo chamber of the modern creative scene.
We think other people want to be writers, but aren’t lucky (and smart) enough.
(And to top it off, we consider ourselves “intelligent.”)
I’ve been subtly and gradually mistaken, thinking that I want to do most is universally viewed that way.
That gets even stickier: If it’s universal, and I’m doing it, and most people aren’t, then I must be one lucky duck, and probably a heck of a lot cleverer than the average Joe, and that leaks out.
Highbrow composers write weak drum parts, and writers assume their inky air rarified (oooo what a fancy phrase, eh?)
The rest of the world shrugs it’s collective shoulders, and gets back to work.
Nice hat, bro.
It was good to go back to school and learn something.
–Josh