Sunday, May 3, 2020

The "Meh"-of-All-Trades

I have this tendency to be good at things, but not great. It sounds like a brag, but it's the source of a lot of turmoil in my life.

Typically, the starting age for a professional [_____] is young, like too young. Usually it's a gymnast that is worked so hard at 15 that she doesn't get her period until she's in her 20s, or its a 8 year old kid who's father sneaks protein power into his breakfast cereal so he can hit the gym and get "swole." And then there's people like me who are average, with hobbies, dreams, and simple acquisitions.

Growing up I played sports, like, all the sports. I played soccer (field and arena), football (flag and tackle), basketball, baseball, and track and field (discus, shot put, 200 meter, and 100 meter). I never truly found my stride in any of them. The truth is you have to keep at something long enough to get good, appreciate the "rules," learn the minutiae of whatever it is that you do. Certain trade skills, after so long, become apparent. (Like sanding wood at different grit sandpaper, or playing baseball with performance enhancing drugs.) Actually, the only consistent experience I had with sports was the unrelenting day dreaming. I remember vividly knocking home run hits into the stratosphere and breaking the sound barrier on the 100 meter. You know, typical sport stuff. 

While all this was going on, there was guitar.

I used to air guitar, a lot. Like too much. I would pretend to be Angus Young and Bon Scott from ACDC and jump all over my room. I had this vision in my head of bending notes and melting faces. The moment I started playing acoustic guitar, I was looking at Angus and thinking, "Yeah, I want to do that."

So I kept playing, despite the hurdles and frustrations. But, while I was playing, I started to write.

I wrote my first "book" when I was in 6th grade. It was awful and done in conjunction with a writing assignment on ancient Greece for my humanities class. In 7th grade, I wrote another one. It was a steaming heap o' shit. This one was different though. I made a title page, table of contents. I printed the entire thing out on a Packard Bell inkjet printer, in color! Between the end of 8th grade and beginning of 9th grade, I continued this trend and wrote a serialized novel that I ultimately never finished. Every weekend I would post a chapter on DeviantArt using a title card I made out of clip art and papyrus in MS Paint.

But I stopped. I don't remember why.

I often pick up things and explore them with great intensity. These can be music genres, hobbies, routines, TV shows, books, etc. But the consistent experience I have always begins with a dream of meteoric greatness, followed by a sobering defeat at the hands of reality. I remember collaborating with a group of friends in 7th grade to create a team of highly sophisticated androids to serve the world and wield their awesome destructive power. I drew up sketches of the machines, told my friends to take science and math courses to beef up their mad scientist game, and I even drew the schematics for our compound where we would all live together when all was said and done. I wish I could go back and ask myself why I wanted this so bad. What was the end goal? Even at the peak of my wretched peer group failures in middle school and high school, the thought of blowing things up with these androids never crossed my mind. The fantasy was enough of a justification on its own.

Throughout my life up to this point, writing has meshed with everything I pursued. In college, I was cranking out papers, getting As in my English classes. In my final quarter, I wrote an novella that would eventually become Spirit of Orn for my science fiction class. After coming home from Santa Barbara, I volunteered for an academic journal that promoted comic books and pop-culture as high art. Yet, while I worked for Apple Retail I began laying out a three part novel that I am planning on starting after my current book is complete. 

The only thing I know, with certainty, is that I love to tell stories. And I think, in the same way that Umberto Eco tries to communicate the nuances of semiotics in his popular fiction, I also have a love for my subject and attempt to embed myself in the work to make it more real. When I started Spirit of Orn, I learned Norwegian, read about paganism (old and new), researched the Sognefjord language of Nynorske. I even went to Norway to see with my own eyes the lay of the land. (It was such a beautiful place too.) All this to say, I wanted to communicate the story I envisioned and went to great lengths to render it.

Writing gathers up odd things and meshes it all together, is what I'm saying. The act of creating a story instigates in me a discipline of research. I end up learning a lot about things, without ever mastering any topic in particular. To master the art of writing then (if such a thing can be done) is to be well rounded and willing to participate. One must become the "Meh-of-All-Trades." And this gives me hope, believe it or not. 

     






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