Writing for fun? Yes, it's possible!
Old habits die hard, I s'pose. I was reading through previous
posts and getting a bit unhappy with the fact that my last entry was a month
before I had my 'season-ending back surgery.' Yes, my second spinal surgery in
19 months and my third in nine years.
A guy I used to work with said
he wanted a fusion several years ago and when he told his doctor the doctor
responded with a joke; "What do you call a guy who has had three back
surgeries?"
My buddy replied "I don't
know. What?"
The doctor dropped the punch
line; "An optimist!"
In short, he didn't get the
spinal fusion he was after and he's not unhappy about it now.
I have about a week left in my
near two-and-a-half month recovery leave and I'm half looking forward to going
to work again and half kinda dreading it. Things are changing at work and I
guess I'm not crazy about change. I mean, I'm not Sheldon Cooper not crazy
about change, but it tends to make me less comfortable.
I haven't gotten near the
amount of stuff done that I had wanted to finish up while I was off, but to be
honest, the recovery has gone a lot more slowly than I expected and I think I
won't get back to as good as I was before the back issues. That was the
expected outcome, but that doesn't mean you can't hope, right?
To be honest, I'm so much
better than immediately before the surgery that I should be focused on that solely.
Is the glass half-full or half-empty? (Who cares? The cat's gonna knock it off
the night stand anyway.) I'm trying to move around to the positive approach,
but I'll bet that will have to wait until I can string together a couple of
good days in a row.
Still, even a bad day now isn't
a fraction of what a bad day was before the surgery. That would be the days
when I was eating pain pills just to function. It's been nice to NOT have to
take pills just so you can walk around without wincing, or focus on the
conversation you're having, so there's another positive to look at.
One of the good things that has
come out of my idle time recently is that I started writing again. Though it's
sometimes hard to tell from this blog, I enjoy writing - especially if it's
something I know a little about. That pretty much narrows it down to music and
hockey. Since the hockey 'zines I've written for have unceremoniously folded
and not resurfaced, that leaves music.
I was reading a music blog and
found that I liked the guys' style of writing. He'd posted an entry lamenting
the fact that as it was a one-man-show and he was getting busier and busier he
found that he would have to really scale back his writing for the blog. Since I
liked his approach pretty well I wrote and offered my help if he wanted it.
Here's a link;
http://fasterandlouderblog.blogspot.com/2017/07/a-somewhat-major-announcement.html
That's the announcement posted
after he'd read a little of my writing - both here and in some of the other
stuff I'd done - and decided maybe it wouldn't be a bad thing. On the page
you'll land on with the above link, the entry starts as follows'
"So after six years of operating this blog entirely as a one-man show,
I have decided that the time has come to open the door to additional
contributors. Tomorrow I will be posting the first-ever F & L review not
written by me, and I think readers will really enjoy it!"
In case you were curious, the "...first ever F & L
review not written by..." him is my review of Cheap Trick's newest release
- We're All Alright! Yes, that's a fact of which I'm fairly proud.
I'll end with a request of grade school and high school
teachers (Boy I bet there's a boatload of them reading this, eh?). Please don't
use writing as a punishment. There are few enough people in the universe who
can write acceptably at this time, I wish more potential writers weren't turned
off permanently by having to stay after class and write "I will not act
like a dipstick in class." 500 times on the board.
If you don't believe my comment about 'few enough people who
can write acceptably' please look through your local newspaper. The nationals
are bad enough, but if the shallow end of the writing talent pool is all many
papers and a whole lot of web sites have to offer, we need an infusion of new
talent and we need it very soon!
I saw a single-pane comic a while back where there's a
balding guy in glasses wearing a suit standing at a brick wall next to some
gang-member-looking guy. They're both spray painting graffiti on the wall. The
guy in the suit looks at the gang-looking guy and says; "I know proper
grammar and punctuation isn't exactly street, but that's how I roll,
m----rF----r."
Suffice to say that if your writing
proficiency is on display writing something like "OMG! R U there?
lol." please look for your next job somewhere you speak and don't have to
write. Practice saying things like "You want fries with that?"
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