a personal account on how I became a secondary player in the writing game:
IT WAS WITH A MINOR AMOUNT OF HUMILITY...
IT WAS WITH A MINOR AMOUNT OF HUMILITY...
AND A LARGE AMOUNT OF ARROGANCE WHEN I first began to believe that I belonged in the writing trade. The year was 1981 and I was 45 years-old, living with a girl named Barbara in Houston, Texas after my divorce. I had no idea why I wanted to learn the newspaper business, but I did. An acquaintance of ours was a man named Blaze Ryder, who was an editor at a weekly newspaper called This Week in Texas, largely written for a gay audience in the Montrose area of Houston. I asked him one morning over coffee with Barbara at Avalon Drug Store if I could do some writing for the paper even though I had no experience. You do know that if I hire you, you'll be the only straight guy one the staff and that the rest of us 'are more than a little-light-in-the-loafers? he said. I do, I replied, but I need to learn the rhythms of writing a good story. Blaze made the decision to take a chance on me and put me under his wing on a temporary basis. My teacher wasn't Blaze because for the first couple of months I worked nights and he worked days and we seldom saw one another.
I began working with another reporter by the name of Max Little whose name I thought was quite appropriate since he was only a little over 5 feet tall and wore and well-waxed handlebar mustache on his upper lip which seemed to be as long as he was tall. He had once been a reporter for The New York Daily News, retired, moved to Houston, and began to write for This Week in Texas at the age of 71 just to keep 'his hand in the game,' he said. Max shook my hand when we were introduced and said, The first thing you need to know about me is that I like to fart in public because I get a real kick out of seeing the look on people's faces.
Max covered the Montrose and informed me that at the age of 45 I had started late and therefore had to hurl myself into the work - and his work was covering the crimes committed against gays in the Montrose and Heights areas of Houston. He quickly taught me that at the heart of every story there was a bald fact or two. Here's how you write a good story, he told me one evening over dinner at a restaurant called Baba Yega on Pacific Street. Let's say that the body of some guy is lying dead in front of a bar or in an alley dumpster. The body can be measured and weighed by the cops, but your job as a reporter is to look for scars, tattoos, and anything else you can spot that can tell you who this guy was. Always ask a cop after you identify yourself if you can look through the dead man's wallet which will reveal the facts of his identity: a name, and address, an age, his bank, the number on his driver's license, and if the cop says 'No,' you somehow find out who he is and where he lived, hustle over to his neighbors, add a few more small facts about his life and and ask them who they thought he was. Then your work begins. The facts can't record the dead man's thoughts, or his dreams, desires, confusions and ambiguities. They can't explain the meaning of his life. That part of the job will be up to you because you are the one who has to tell the reader why he will be missed or if he was a scumbag why he deserved to die.
At about eight o'clock in the evening Max dropped me off back at the newspaper office on West Dallas Street and introduced me to the assistant night editor, a man by the name of Kit Kramer, younger than I was by a few years. Frank departed and Kit parked me at a typewriter and asked me how much experience I had. When I told him none, he laughed and without pause explained the fundamentals. I would write on 'books,' 4 sheets of paper separated by carbons. The carbon copies were called 'dupes.' In the upper left-hand corner I should type my name in lower case and then create a 'slug,' a short word that identified the story for editors and typesetters. The slug should represent the subject; a political story would be slugged POLS. But if it was a murder story I should not slug it KILL because the men setting type would kill the story.
With that simple lesson, he gave me a press release and told me to rewrite 2 paragraphs, and my career had begun. I sat in the sparsely manned city room the for several nights thereafter, I wrote small stories based on press releases from the early editions of the morning paper. I noticed that Kit had Scotch-taped three words word to his own typewriter: Illuminate and clarify. I appropriated it as my motto. My nervousness ebbed as I worked, asking myself on a nightly basis: What does this story say? What is new? How would I tell it to my daughter and son? Illuminate and clarify, I whispered to myself. Illuminate and clarify...Near dawn, there was a lull as the night editors discussed what they would to with all the material they now had in type. One evening, when I turned around, Blaze Ryder was walking into the room.
He had a great walk, quick, rhythmic, taut with authority, as he moved without hellos across the room to a fenced-off pen at the far back, with red cowboy boots, carrying copies of The Houston Post and Houston Chronicle under his arm. I watched him go to his desk, light a Marlboro cigarette, watched as he shoved his horn-rimmed glasses to the top of his head as he began reading. He immediately began poring over galleys, a thick red pencil in his hand, marking some, discarding others, making a list on a yellow pad. Then he moved to the composing room, where the trays of metal type for each page were laid out on a stone-topped table. He was still there when my shift ended and Max Little gave me a goodnight. As I was leaving I asked Max, Does Blaze ever talk to anyone when he comes in? Max replied with a grin, Only if you fuck-up.
In the weeks that followed, as I started going out on fires and muggings and murders, knocking on doors in Montrose and the Heights at 2 in the morning. I came to understand that the newspaper I was now working for was a staple in the life of the homosexual community: to them it was a tough ballsy tabloid with a liberal political soul which pressed for coverage of civil rights and the reform of the police department who continued to harass the community along the much traveled Westheimer Drive. They didn't much like the negative publicity and Blaze didn't seem to care whether they liked it or not. Rumor had it, however, that the newspaper wouldn't last past New Year's due to the pressure from the police and local politicians.
The uncertainty about the paper's future didn't bother me. If the newspaper did go down I wouldn't starve. But in the meantime, I was having the best time of my life. I just hoped it would last long enough for me to learn the trade. During my initial tryout as a newspaper reporter, I watched Max and got to know other newspapermen up close. I loved their talk, cynicism and fatalism, and brilliant wordplay, as we stood at the bar and watched businessmen coming in and out; obviously hiding the fact that they were 'in the closet.' I had become friends with an immense, burly, bald copy editor named Myer Radmacher. Myer was funny and merciless. He had once 'been 'in the closet' himself and knew about the fear of being found-out. He said that he had denied himself a full and happy life and went on pretending to be something other than who he actually was, and he believed that most of the human race were 'obviously perverse' when it came to the understanding of human sexuality.
Then one stormy morning, after I had written a story about the owner of a lesbian bar having been beaten by the cops as she walked to her car, and was about to go home for the day, Blaze called me over. He held the galley in his hand. I was nervous, still on a tryout, still provisional. Not bad, he said. Thanks, I replied. By the way, I had coffee with Barbara this morning. I understand you now have your daughter living with you. How old is she? Sixteen, I said. And your former wife kicked her out of the house? he asked. She did, I replied. Because she found out that your daughter is gay, correct? I nodded. How did you feel about that? I replied, Fine. I want my daughter to be happy and feel safe. I really don't give a damn about who she is sleeping with.
He lit a Marlboro.
I was hoping you would say that. I want you to do a series of stories, he said, taking a drag on the cigarette, then sipping his coffee. But I need to ask something else and I want you to be honest with me, OK? OK, I said. Tell me the truth about your feelings with regard to homosexuality outside of your own family. Are you prejudiced? I gave a small smile, Iffy is more like it, I replied. Sometimes its hard. being a a straight guy trying to get used to guys like you. I feel like I'm a fish-out-of-the-water. He took another drag on his cigarette and laughed. You're getting good at this miserable trade, Daugs. What I'd like you to do is this: write a series of articles called 'The Bending of a Straight' as you make your way through our community and get to know us better. Will you do that for me? Sure, I said and started to leave. Oh, by the way, Blaze said. You're hired.
After I was hired, I brought my sense of entitlement as a member of the working press every week with my series 'The Bending of a Straight' and made my way through the Montrose and Heights into bars and restaurants, on the street and in homes. I couldn't wait to go to sleep so I could wake up and do it all over again and eventually won 'The Writer of the Year Award.' I was now on my way to finding my own language, style, tone and rhythm. The facts were still the core of the work, of course, but in the column form I was able to express my own feelings or ideas about those facts. From the beginning, the form felt natural to me; I was like a musician who had finally discovered an instrument that was right for me. Shortly thereafter, the newspaper went bust due to the political pressure exerted by the Republican City Council.
S0 I decided to expand the genre of my writing by attempting to write for the theater and became a member of a play write symposium at a place called Stages Theater on Allen Parkway, where my daughter Traci had once been the youngest member of the acting company until she moved to New York City to establish her acting career, and was led by a director by the name of Ted Swindley, who had been with The Steppenwolf Theater Company of Chicago and decided to create his own theater company in Houston.
Like so many journalists turn to writing novels, I chose to write a stage play to get at the truths beyond the facts about ourselves and others. If reporters stick around long enough, if they see enough human beings in trouble, they learn that the things, as the philosopher said, ain't what they seem to be, nor are people. So I plunged into an imaginary tale about a man wanting to commit suicide because a lost love had dumped him. He is saved from doing the dastardly deed by two imaginary characters who appear in his bathroom as he is about to hang himself on the shower curtain rod. One man seems to be Godlike who goes by the name of Godberg. The other is an African American gay fellow who calls himself 'O.F.' which stands for 'The Old Fairy.,' The man the two of them are about to save is a guy by the name of Kismir Wunderlick. I gave the play the simple title of: Wunderlick; and it went on to win the Best Play Award in The Texas Playwright Festival in 1986.
After my win earlier in the year, I moved to the City of New York in September of 1986 when I came home one Friday afternoon and saw Barbara happily bouncing up-and-down in bed atop my best friend Robert, who seemed to be enjoying himself until he looked up and saw me and had to run naked out of the house with me giving chase. Shortly thereafter, I joined my daughter and shared an apartment with her on East Thirty-Sixth Street,retained a temporary job as an associate editor at Conde Nast in the World Trade Center from 9-to-5, and writing plays at night. My daughter began getting acting roles in Grand Theft Auto and the Lost and the Dammed, a recurring role on the soap opera As the World Turns, as well as guest spots on Law and Order and Law and Order Criminal Intent, while establishing a career as a Voice Over Artist. By then, I was busy by splitting my time writing book covers for Random House on East 50th Street in the morning, writing for a business magazine called The Weekly Business Report on West Fifty-seventh in the afternoon, while teaching writing at a two-year college on West Fifty-sixth by the name of Interboro Institute in the evening.
It was not until 1989 when I eventually had another play produced in The East London Playwright Festival and at the Samuel Beckett Theater on Forty-second Street's Theater Row called 'Miles to Go.' It was based upon a true story of a woman that I once knew who happened to be the former wife of a salesman for the race car driver A.J. Foyt who had won the Indianapolis 500 four times and now had a Chevrolet dealership in Houston. While I was interviewing Foyt he mentioned the salesman and thought it might make a good story for an article since she was about to go trial for murder . It turned out that she was accused of gunning down her second husband while he lay asleep on their bed, dismembering him into 5 pieces out in the garage, gingerly placing his earthly remains into an equal number of garbage bags while her 2 children ate dinner in the kitchen, called her first husband on the phone who happened to be the father of her 2 children, asked him if he could take care of the kids a for a couple of days, then hauled the body parts of husband number 2 out to California in the trunk of corpse's Cadillac in the hope that her father would help her dispose of his remains. She was arrested when her father ratted-her-out, was immediately sent back to Houston to stand trial, then found innocent due to the fact that her lawyer had convinced the jury that she had committed the crime while suffering from disassociate amnesia and was unaware of what she had done. It got rave reviews in the October edition of The New York Magazine.
I then wrote a book titled The Golden Years which was published by the Golden Apple Press out of Toronto, Canada; and had reached a point in my life where I wrote every day, seven days a week. When I went a day or so without writing, my body ached with anxiety, my mood became irritable, my dreams grew wild with unconscious invention. Because I had written journalism and stage plays, I followed no set routine. Struggling writing plays, I'd spent months at my desk, a bore to those who surrounded me, friends and family alike. By now I had spent hours in libraries or newspaper morgues, worked in parked cars, in hotel lobbies, written on yellow pads and restaurant menus, and in the back rooms of bars, too. I had started on typewriters and now used a computer. Each day I learned something new and was humbled by the difficult standards of my trade.
After I departed the City of New York for life in Brentwood, California in 1999, I began to write a weekly column for a newspaper called The Brentwood Press. Writing for The Brentwood Press which allowed me to practice my trade for 13 more years. In a way these articles made up kind of a public diary, a recording of where I was and what I saw and who I met along the way. I was allowed to choose my own subjects and wrote in a meandering unplanned way about the events of Nine-eleven and my daughter's battle with multiple sclerosis, and was fortunate enough to win writing awards for both; and thankful when my daughter began to win the battle against the dreaded disease. I began to make connections among a variety of other subjects. I often chose subjects about which I knew nothing. I wrote about a homegrown fascist and the blues and investment banking and the history of Sparta. I had finally learned that as a writer specialization had no attraction for me; it would be like spending a lifetime painting only tulips. I wanted to be, and am, a generalist. One who eventually learned how to fit what I had learned into 700 words and hope to heaven that I gotten it right.
It will be two-years in May when I first began my blog and the product of that ambition was the attempt to look back upon my own life. In each of them, I first wanted to know something about what made me who I am, a place, an event, or an idea recalled in my own memory-bank. I wanted to hear the music of my life. I then wanted to pass on what I'd learned to others, looking back at many of them for the first time in a number of years. I remembered who I was when I lived them, the houses I inhabited, the people I loved, my large stupidities and minor triumphs, and yes, reliving the memory of the life that I have lived through the written word......
...Both before and after I had become a secondary player in the writing game...
I began working with another reporter by the name of Max Little whose name I thought was quite appropriate since he was only a little over 5 feet tall and wore and well-waxed handlebar mustache on his upper lip which seemed to be as long as he was tall. He had once been a reporter for The New York Daily News, retired, moved to Houston, and began to write for This Week in Texas at the age of 71 just to keep 'his hand in the game,' he said. Max shook my hand when we were introduced and said, The first thing you need to know about me is that I like to fart in public because I get a real kick out of seeing the look on people's faces.
Max covered the Montrose and informed me that at the age of 45 I had started late and therefore had to hurl myself into the work - and his work was covering the crimes committed against gays in the Montrose and Heights areas of Houston. He quickly taught me that at the heart of every story there was a bald fact or two. Here's how you write a good story, he told me one evening over dinner at a restaurant called Baba Yega on Pacific Street. Let's say that the body of some guy is lying dead in front of a bar or in an alley dumpster. The body can be measured and weighed by the cops, but your job as a reporter is to look for scars, tattoos, and anything else you can spot that can tell you who this guy was. Always ask a cop after you identify yourself if you can look through the dead man's wallet which will reveal the facts of his identity: a name, and address, an age, his bank, the number on his driver's license, and if the cop says 'No,' you somehow find out who he is and where he lived, hustle over to his neighbors, add a few more small facts about his life and and ask them who they thought he was. Then your work begins. The facts can't record the dead man's thoughts, or his dreams, desires, confusions and ambiguities. They can't explain the meaning of his life. That part of the job will be up to you because you are the one who has to tell the reader why he will be missed or if he was a scumbag why he deserved to die.
At about eight o'clock in the evening Max dropped me off back at the newspaper office on West Dallas Street and introduced me to the assistant night editor, a man by the name of Kit Kramer, younger than I was by a few years. Frank departed and Kit parked me at a typewriter and asked me how much experience I had. When I told him none, he laughed and without pause explained the fundamentals. I would write on 'books,' 4 sheets of paper separated by carbons. The carbon copies were called 'dupes.' In the upper left-hand corner I should type my name in lower case and then create a 'slug,' a short word that identified the story for editors and typesetters. The slug should represent the subject; a political story would be slugged POLS. But if it was a murder story I should not slug it KILL because the men setting type would kill the story.
With that simple lesson, he gave me a press release and told me to rewrite 2 paragraphs, and my career had begun. I sat in the sparsely manned city room the for several nights thereafter, I wrote small stories based on press releases from the early editions of the morning paper. I noticed that Kit had Scotch-taped three words word to his own typewriter: Illuminate and clarify. I appropriated it as my motto. My nervousness ebbed as I worked, asking myself on a nightly basis: What does this story say? What is new? How would I tell it to my daughter and son? Illuminate and clarify, I whispered to myself. Illuminate and clarify...Near dawn, there was a lull as the night editors discussed what they would to with all the material they now had in type. One evening, when I turned around, Blaze Ryder was walking into the room.
He had a great walk, quick, rhythmic, taut with authority, as he moved without hellos across the room to a fenced-off pen at the far back, with red cowboy boots, carrying copies of The Houston Post and Houston Chronicle under his arm. I watched him go to his desk, light a Marlboro cigarette, watched as he shoved his horn-rimmed glasses to the top of his head as he began reading. He immediately began poring over galleys, a thick red pencil in his hand, marking some, discarding others, making a list on a yellow pad. Then he moved to the composing room, where the trays of metal type for each page were laid out on a stone-topped table. He was still there when my shift ended and Max Little gave me a goodnight. As I was leaving I asked Max, Does Blaze ever talk to anyone when he comes in? Max replied with a grin, Only if you fuck-up.
In the weeks that followed, as I started going out on fires and muggings and murders, knocking on doors in Montrose and the Heights at 2 in the morning. I came to understand that the newspaper I was now working for was a staple in the life of the homosexual community: to them it was a tough ballsy tabloid with a liberal political soul which pressed for coverage of civil rights and the reform of the police department who continued to harass the community along the much traveled Westheimer Drive. They didn't much like the negative publicity and Blaze didn't seem to care whether they liked it or not. Rumor had it, however, that the newspaper wouldn't last past New Year's due to the pressure from the police and local politicians.
The uncertainty about the paper's future didn't bother me. If the newspaper did go down I wouldn't starve. But in the meantime, I was having the best time of my life. I just hoped it would last long enough for me to learn the trade. During my initial tryout as a newspaper reporter, I watched Max and got to know other newspapermen up close. I loved their talk, cynicism and fatalism, and brilliant wordplay, as we stood at the bar and watched businessmen coming in and out; obviously hiding the fact that they were 'in the closet.' I had become friends with an immense, burly, bald copy editor named Myer Radmacher. Myer was funny and merciless. He had once 'been 'in the closet' himself and knew about the fear of being found-out. He said that he had denied himself a full and happy life and went on pretending to be something other than who he actually was, and he believed that most of the human race were 'obviously perverse' when it came to the understanding of human sexuality.
Then one stormy morning, after I had written a story about the owner of a lesbian bar having been beaten by the cops as she walked to her car, and was about to go home for the day, Blaze called me over. He held the galley in his hand. I was nervous, still on a tryout, still provisional. Not bad, he said. Thanks, I replied. By the way, I had coffee with Barbara this morning. I understand you now have your daughter living with you. How old is she? Sixteen, I said. And your former wife kicked her out of the house? he asked. She did, I replied. Because she found out that your daughter is gay, correct? I nodded. How did you feel about that? I replied, Fine. I want my daughter to be happy and feel safe. I really don't give a damn about who she is sleeping with.
He lit a Marlboro.
I was hoping you would say that. I want you to do a series of stories, he said, taking a drag on the cigarette, then sipping his coffee. But I need to ask something else and I want you to be honest with me, OK? OK, I said. Tell me the truth about your feelings with regard to homosexuality outside of your own family. Are you prejudiced? I gave a small smile, Iffy is more like it, I replied. Sometimes its hard. being a a straight guy trying to get used to guys like you. I feel like I'm a fish-out-of-the-water. He took another drag on his cigarette and laughed. You're getting good at this miserable trade, Daugs. What I'd like you to do is this: write a series of articles called 'The Bending of a Straight' as you make your way through our community and get to know us better. Will you do that for me? Sure, I said and started to leave. Oh, by the way, Blaze said. You're hired.
After I was hired, I brought my sense of entitlement as a member of the working press every week with my series 'The Bending of a Straight' and made my way through the Montrose and Heights into bars and restaurants, on the street and in homes. I couldn't wait to go to sleep so I could wake up and do it all over again and eventually won 'The Writer of the Year Award.' I was now on my way to finding my own language, style, tone and rhythm. The facts were still the core of the work, of course, but in the column form I was able to express my own feelings or ideas about those facts. From the beginning, the form felt natural to me; I was like a musician who had finally discovered an instrument that was right for me. Shortly thereafter, the newspaper went bust due to the political pressure exerted by the Republican City Council.
S0 I decided to expand the genre of my writing by attempting to write for the theater and became a member of a play write symposium at a place called Stages Theater on Allen Parkway, where my daughter Traci had once been the youngest member of the acting company until she moved to New York City to establish her acting career, and was led by a director by the name of Ted Swindley, who had been with The Steppenwolf Theater Company of Chicago and decided to create his own theater company in Houston.
Like so many journalists turn to writing novels, I chose to write a stage play to get at the truths beyond the facts about ourselves and others. If reporters stick around long enough, if they see enough human beings in trouble, they learn that the things, as the philosopher said, ain't what they seem to be, nor are people. So I plunged into an imaginary tale about a man wanting to commit suicide because a lost love had dumped him. He is saved from doing the dastardly deed by two imaginary characters who appear in his bathroom as he is about to hang himself on the shower curtain rod. One man seems to be Godlike who goes by the name of Godberg. The other is an African American gay fellow who calls himself 'O.F.' which stands for 'The Old Fairy.,' The man the two of them are about to save is a guy by the name of Kismir Wunderlick. I gave the play the simple title of: Wunderlick; and it went on to win the Best Play Award in The Texas Playwright Festival in 1986.
After my win earlier in the year, I moved to the City of New York in September of 1986 when I came home one Friday afternoon and saw Barbara happily bouncing up-and-down in bed atop my best friend Robert, who seemed to be enjoying himself until he looked up and saw me and had to run naked out of the house with me giving chase. Shortly thereafter, I joined my daughter and shared an apartment with her on East Thirty-Sixth Street,retained a temporary job as an associate editor at Conde Nast in the World Trade Center from 9-to-5, and writing plays at night. My daughter began getting acting roles in Grand Theft Auto and the Lost and the Dammed, a recurring role on the soap opera As the World Turns, as well as guest spots on Law and Order and Law and Order Criminal Intent, while establishing a career as a Voice Over Artist. By then, I was busy by splitting my time writing book covers for Random House on East 50th Street in the morning, writing for a business magazine called The Weekly Business Report on West Fifty-seventh in the afternoon, while teaching writing at a two-year college on West Fifty-sixth by the name of Interboro Institute in the evening.
It was not until 1989 when I eventually had another play produced in The East London Playwright Festival and at the Samuel Beckett Theater on Forty-second Street's Theater Row called 'Miles to Go.' It was based upon a true story of a woman that I once knew who happened to be the former wife of a salesman for the race car driver A.J. Foyt who had won the Indianapolis 500 four times and now had a Chevrolet dealership in Houston. While I was interviewing Foyt he mentioned the salesman and thought it might make a good story for an article since she was about to go trial for murder . It turned out that she was accused of gunning down her second husband while he lay asleep on their bed, dismembering him into 5 pieces out in the garage, gingerly placing his earthly remains into an equal number of garbage bags while her 2 children ate dinner in the kitchen, called her first husband on the phone who happened to be the father of her 2 children, asked him if he could take care of the kids a for a couple of days, then hauled the body parts of husband number 2 out to California in the trunk of corpse's Cadillac in the hope that her father would help her dispose of his remains. She was arrested when her father ratted-her-out, was immediately sent back to Houston to stand trial, then found innocent due to the fact that her lawyer had convinced the jury that she had committed the crime while suffering from disassociate amnesia and was unaware of what she had done. It got rave reviews in the October edition of The New York Magazine.
I then wrote a book titled The Golden Years which was published by the Golden Apple Press out of Toronto, Canada; and had reached a point in my life where I wrote every day, seven days a week. When I went a day or so without writing, my body ached with anxiety, my mood became irritable, my dreams grew wild with unconscious invention. Because I had written journalism and stage plays, I followed no set routine. Struggling writing plays, I'd spent months at my desk, a bore to those who surrounded me, friends and family alike. By now I had spent hours in libraries or newspaper morgues, worked in parked cars, in hotel lobbies, written on yellow pads and restaurant menus, and in the back rooms of bars, too. I had started on typewriters and now used a computer. Each day I learned something new and was humbled by the difficult standards of my trade.
After I departed the City of New York for life in Brentwood, California in 1999, I began to write a weekly column for a newspaper called The Brentwood Press. Writing for The Brentwood Press which allowed me to practice my trade for 13 more years. In a way these articles made up kind of a public diary, a recording of where I was and what I saw and who I met along the way. I was allowed to choose my own subjects and wrote in a meandering unplanned way about the events of Nine-eleven and my daughter's battle with multiple sclerosis, and was fortunate enough to win writing awards for both; and thankful when my daughter began to win the battle against the dreaded disease. I began to make connections among a variety of other subjects. I often chose subjects about which I knew nothing. I wrote about a homegrown fascist and the blues and investment banking and the history of Sparta. I had finally learned that as a writer specialization had no attraction for me; it would be like spending a lifetime painting only tulips. I wanted to be, and am, a generalist. One who eventually learned how to fit what I had learned into 700 words and hope to heaven that I gotten it right.
It will be two-years in May when I first began my blog and the product of that ambition was the attempt to look back upon my own life. In each of them, I first wanted to know something about what made me who I am, a place, an event, or an idea recalled in my own memory-bank. I wanted to hear the music of my life. I then wanted to pass on what I'd learned to others, looking back at many of them for the first time in a number of years. I remembered who I was when I lived them, the houses I inhabited, the people I loved, my large stupidities and minor triumphs, and yes, reliving the memory of the life that I have lived through the written word......
...Both before and after I had become a secondary player in the writing game...
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