Martini Moments

I had always wanted to be a writer.  My first foray, a stint in college, yielded $30.00, a check that remains tucked in an album that sits time-zones away.

My problem is my writing comes in bursts, sporadically.  Hale-Bopp frequency.  With no jello or black Nikes.  Rather, almost like a haiku, it spills out in increments that are captured either by a mood, or a vision.  

Kinda boring, right?  Melodramatic?  Probably.  

I've written a ton of things, and probably would score a C+ in many of today's college courses.  My actual highest scoring compliment came from a creative writing teacher in college who put me in his top 11 writers over a 20 year span.  He's dead now, and in some ways so is the person who got his attention with his words.  But kind of like a parasite twin who sits inside you eating away as you go on your merry way in life, the budding author never sat quietly.  

The problem is ultimately I'm almost Faulkner-ian in my descriptions.  I almost once got published in "Cosmopolitan" magazine with a poem about the way a lady looked when she wasn't looking at me.  Highly visual, highly colorized.  A 2nd place choice, according to the editor.  And I wouldn't have changed it.

Because to me, writing is the slow development of Kodachrome.  It is the unveiling of an image, the portrayal of a portrait, that unfolds while you wait.  You can read faster, hell you can fast-forward the book on tape, but if you miss even a single portion you probably cannot absorb the efforts that I am struggling to illuminate.  

It's the description of blond highlights to a blind man.

And I try to not be like anybody else; I try to take classic tools of pen and paper, hammer and chisel.  It's not noble.  Some chicks in high school seemed to appreciate it, and I crafted some prose on our wedding day that I still remember in highlights.  But I'm not sure if my writing was to be read aloud.

Rather, it is to be played silently in a mind's eye.  To unfurl in colors unique to the reader.  To scroll across at a pace that beckons down a lane that has both shadows and light.  At times, yeah, it's trite.  At times, yeah, it's sappy.  But Harlequin sells a shitload of paper with stuff that barely qualifies.

So, it's a bit of an effort.  It's perhaps the most selfish thing I've ever done.  It's also a very transparent act of putting some things out there for others to remark upon.  

I hope over the next few days, and hopefully the next few weeks, and ultimately the discipline of years to put together something that is mildly interesting.  That can be picked up like Sky Mall, absorbed, appreciated and even taken for free if you are so inclined.

But I'll try to be clever.  Try to be different.  Try to be insightful, and try to be something that takes your mind off of a million other options of print and for a brief martini moment be something that is unique to the two of us.