When my wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, and I were on vacation up in Nova Scotia many years ago (if you haven’t been there, you must, must go), we encountered some remarkable collapsing architecture. It seemed that land was so cheap up there that, sometimes, when people needed a new house, they didn’t bother tearing down the old house – they’d just build another house next to it, and leave the old one there. One night, we encountered a house, surrounded by aimless cud-chewing cattle, which was deformed at a 5 or 10-degree angle, as if the TV station it was tuned to wasn’t coming in quite right (those of you who don’t remember analog TV may want to ask your parents about that one). Just sitting there, minding its own business, cluttering up the yard.
As far as packratting goes, I’m not quite that bad; certainly, I don’t have an extra yard to build a house on. But my basement, well, my basement certainly reflects the great Amurrican preoccupation with not getting around to throwing things away.
I was inspired to do something about this, several weeks ago, when I went down to the basement to reinforce a section of the basement wall that had leaked profusely in last year’s winter storms (and yes, I should have done it in July – stop bugging me). And there was a pile of crap in front of the place where I needed to repair the wall, and one thing led to another, and suddenly I was down there with my laptop and a flashlight and a mat knife and a magic marker and an endless roll of packing tape, just trying to figure out what the hell we had.
I found paint cans for rooms that apparently no longer exist. I found sheet music from my popular piano days, when it seemed to make sense to want the keyboard arrangement for “Highway to Hell”. I found thirteen boxes of academic material from my “delusions of intelligentsia” period, which lasted from my “good little Jewish boy” period right up to my “Lord, let me just finish this dissertation so I can be done with this discipline” period. There’s a lawnmower – we don’t actually have a lawn. Most of this stuff has been thrown out, given away, or (in the case of the thirteen boxes of academiana) shipped off to an old academic friend who will give it a good home. But there’s some stuff that I could not bear to part with.
It turns out that I had a secret life – secret from me, actually. See, I’ve been writing humor (or so I claim) for years now. In high school, I wrote a terrible novel; I wrote soap opera and literature parodies with my friends. I had a column on the college newspaper. I remember all these things – but what I’d forgotten was how serious I was about it all. Apparently, I wanted to be Calvin Trillin.
That’s right – I was a two-sport athlete, so to speak. As I excavated the material in the basement, I discovered stories I didn’t recall writing; major, major characters, characters I’d worked on for years, I’d completely forgotten I’d invented. I found the terrible novel. And the thing that flabbergasts me is that there are two full drafts of this terrible novel. And this was back in the days before home computers, when we etched our manuscripts into soft clay with sharp sticks (I’m convinced that today’s children are convinced that we went directly from inarticulate Cro-Magnon grunts to Twitter – not that there’s a difference). I even (I wince as I recall this) wrote an oh-so-clever note to Mr. Trillin himself, thinking that I might be able to attract his attention – which, of course, I was not able to do.
So what happened? Well, I’d forgotten this part, too. When I graduated from college, I took a writing class and met some people and attempted to have a writer’s group, and wrote one really good story and a bunch of crap and realized that of all the things I did in my life, writing gave me the least amount of pleasure: it was incredibly time-consuming and difficult, it made me no money, and I had no particular talent for it. And rock’n’roll beckoned, and the romance of loud music and dangerous women was infinitely more appealing than the Algonquin Round Table. So I stopped. Just – stopped.
I stopped for years. I hardly wrote another word, in fact, until I started this here newsletter. And looking back, leafing through the detritus of my previous writing career, I’m astonished at how much I seem to have learned in the meantime. It’s almost certainly a side benefit of the attention I pay to my lyrics, which is meticulous bordering on sadistically ruthless. The idea of a half-rhyme, a filler word, a mis-stressed syllable, they’re all fingernails on my interior chalkboard, and I seem to have pared it all down to some sort of essence. The voice that speaks to you from this page is as pure as it’s ever going to get, in its snark and exuberance and melancholy. And I’m pretty pleased with myself for it.
Many, many years ago, when I was a wee lad, we moved from one house to another, and my father dismantled a not-quite-legal extra kitchen that my grandmother was using, and brought some of the bits with us, most notable the vent fan from over the stove. And fifteen years later, when we were remodeling the kitchen in the house we’d moved to, we needed a new vent fan, and my father went down to the basement and dusted off the fan he’d salvaged, and we installed it, and it’s still there. And so, apparently, is my prose.