… not a sprint.
Last night, I watched the pilot of a series that has gotten some good press – The Marveleous Mrs. Maisel. (When I mention watching something my loyal readers, all eight of them, should presume I watched something with my better half) Maisel won a Golden Globe the other night. It was pleasant enough but I’ll have to watch at least one more to see whether I can spare the time to watch any more than this.
The heroine who is contemplating a career in stand up comedy asks Lenny Bruce, famed for his coarse candor (He had a routine about peeing in the sink) if he loved being a comedian. Maisel had just bailed the Bruce in this series out of jail. This Bruce went on to describe how horrible the comedian’s life was in grim detail. But do you like being a comedian Maisel wanted to know. The answer some of it mimed seemed to be that the audience reaction was more than worth it. Of course Bruce famously died of a heroin overdose so I wasn’t convinced. Maisel apparently was…..for the sake of the screen writers who came up with the rest of the first year’s episodes following the pilot.
I too would like an audience. I’ve spent the better part of my adulthood A. Making sure I knew everything despite the impossibility of this task and B. Teaching myself how to write so that it reflects what I’m thinking C. In hopes that something inside my head will lead other people as the best writers and thinkers have led me.
I check my stats (daily readership) with considerable regularity. I test my audience. For one thing I post posts before I’ve proof read them. Readers who come across them after my initial posting will likely see lots of mistakes. Those who find it a few hours after my initial post will likely find far fewer of them. As I told a recent critic I write the way I snow sculpt on my front yard. I let viewers/readers see the process of putting something together. I do have some qualms about critics printing out unfinished posts and beating me up about them but that hasn’t stopped me from continuing this practice.
This morning I have about a dozen things I’ve gleaned from the news that I want to bundle together to write about. Its already 10AM and I’ve decided to swim laps for the first time in a month. Claudia suggested that because she’s meeting with her book club. I also have other things to do like continue the sifting through years of accumulated papers to make room for the new clutter I intend to create writing some books. And writing some books is also about an audience. So was my return to the Duluth Reader. It has a potential of close to 20,000 eyes substantially more than the 250 I get on my slowest days. Of course the web puts me in contact or potential contact with billions of eyes. But, of course, that’s purely theoretical.
So far my most visited intellectual achievements have been viewed by millions of people a handful of times. Those are the occasional snow sculptures that catch the public’s mood. Ah, but I’d like a few of my words to reach that kind of audience.
I’ll mention two of the myriad of things that caught my attention today. The first of these was a story from the Washington Examiner about how great things are going with our New President. It was sent to me without comment by a former fan turned off by the insults I hurl back at Donald Trump. I suspected that the Examiner was one of the new breed of far right newspapers and did some checking on it. I already knew the Washington Times was (It’s owned by the Moonies)
Indeed the “Examiner” is owned by an arch conservative and one of my fellow Kansans, Philip Anschutz Unlike me Anschutz is a billionaire. He, like his fellow Kansas Billionaire Charles Koch, contributed a billion dollars to conservative Republican politicians in recent years. However, the Wikipedia article just linked to suggests to me that he is mostly an old style conservative worried about the future of America. With a billion dollars of mad money he certainly has influence beyond my loyal eight readers.
I too am worried about the world and its heating up and overpopulation. This story about bats dropping dead out of Australian skies is representative of many I’ve read even though it pales compared to stories about the bleaching of corals, the deoxygenation of the Oceans the 3,700 drownings believed to have occurred in the Mediterranean last year from fleeing refugees. Perhaps that’s because I remember the flying foxes of Sydney Australia’s Botanic Gardens from my visit. (I took some pictures of them but just realized I have no quick way to find what I did with them – including a month’s worth of travel – one more thing for me to organize)
But before I let another five or six paragraphs creep into this post I’ll force a conclusion. I figure I have twenty years of senicence in me. If I don’t work on the marathon but just work for those nightly laughs like Lenny I’ll squander my influence. If the best of my posts are any indication I have some worthwhile books in me. They take a lot longer to unfurl than quick postings on the Internet. So does learning a new language. I’ve been working on French for three weeks now. I’d like to speak serviceable French before the year is out to some Parisian waiters where I intend to do a little mangeing. There’s more but I’m going swimming first. Then it will be language training, then organizing…….I’m sure there will be a post or two in coming days. They might even be worth reading.
I’ll proof read this a little later. By the way……I figured out that toodle-loo comes from a french term for goodbye – “A tout a l’heure” Gotta keep working on keeping my brain plastic – especially if I expect to keep writing into my nineties. This is a marathon.
