A running diary, with the most recent items at top. Consume items from bottom up. —DM
Thursday, April 16, 12:36 p.m.
By now I’ve been on TV, radio and two dozen high-profile youth sports podcasts. And of course today’s the day I’m nervous—for my book talk, at City Lit Books. It’s sold out, and the majority of the folks there will be friends of so many stripes that the next time they’ll be together is at my funeral (if I’m lucky). I want to take a nap to get ready, but the heart palpitations are not allowing it.
Wednesday, April 15, 10:28 a.m.
“Likes” and Amazon rankings run through you like shit through a goose.
But if you pay attention, you do figure out what feeds you, and what fills you up.
Writers you respect praising your writing. Parents you respect praising your parenting. Even go-getters you respect praising your drive.
I’m glad to be finished flogging the book as a concept, and so eager to engage in conversations about what’s actually in it. One memorable note I got yesterday out of what must have been hundreds—thank you, my friends—was a hilariously elaborate account of the book’s “first reading,” by another dad on Scout’s soccer team. He said he knifed the package open at 6:32 a.m. and finished the book at 9:47 a.m. One of Scout’s teammates listened to the Audible version yesterday, quoted a passage she liked, and texted, “Scared it’s gonna be finished in one day. I don’t want it to end.” And Scout’s college coach let me know he’d read the college section of the book, and texted, “We are going to have some very good conversations”—on coaching/parenting podcasts, we hope—”that are going to help a lot of people (hopefully).”
We’re getting into the good stuff.
And I’m hungry again. Gotta get something in my stomach before a live Facebook call in half an hour with Skye Eddy, the pioneering founder of SoccerParenting, and a generous endorser of Soccer Dad.
Tuesday, April 14, 12:11 p.m.
Still haven’t eaten lunch.
Tuesday, April 14, 12:31 p.m.
I’m hungry. But first, here’s Publication Day, so far: Up at 5:30 to see Trib feature.
I love it, as it gives my wife Cristie a little of the glory she deserves next to Mr. Publicity Piggy. The story’s writer, legendary Chicago journalist Rick Kogan, calls me a “fine writer, a clear thinker and a good dad.” Tombstone, complete.
We have only one car and it’s pouring. I drive Cristie to work, at her school on the West Side, then slog north on Western, looking for a couple more copies of Trib. “The what?” the clerk at the BP tells me. I stop by Walgreens: None. Mariano’s supermarket: “They only brought one copy, and I sold it.” I found one copy at Jewel-Osco supermarket.
At the WGN TV studio, Disruption Books marketing director Janet Potter and I are in a green room with pictures of lighthearted and long-suffering Chicago Cubs announcers Jack Brickhouse and Harry Carey, all-time-nerdy Chicago weatherman Tom Skilling and Bozo the Clown—a beloved children’s television star from the 1960s. This is a goofball TV station, and as a master of that genre, I felt very much at home.
Afterward, a muffin with Janet. Stopped at Barnes & Noble on way home hoping for more copies of the paper. Do you carry the Chicago Tribune? “No, we sure don’t,” said the manager, giving me a smarmy-sympathetic look, as if I had pulled up in a Model T.
Back home, digging through texts, emails, notes on social. It’s wonderful. Everyone who is worth a shit at anything should have a day like this, when their best work is given the standing ovation it deserves. I’m going to try to enjoy this for everyone, too.
God, I’m hungry.
***
Three years in the writing, a year in the publishing and nine months in the promoting, Soccer Dad launched this morning. The book is featured in a Chicago Tribune column today. I’m going on WGN-TV Chicago this morning (around 9:15 a.m. Central). Tomorrow, I have a Facebook Live interview with former soccer pro Sky Eddy, founder of the huge Soccer Parenting community at 11:00 Central. Thursday, I have a live interview with former CNN political commentator and current soccer dad Chris Cillizza Thursday at 2:00 Central. And I have a book talk before friends and strangers at City Lit Books Thursday evening at 6:30.
In between, I want to write down here—for my memory as much as your edification—what it’s like to be temporarily but intensely at the center of things—your things.
Some thoughts and expectations, going in:
1. I don’t know whether I’m an introvert or an extrovert. I got married at City Hall, with only my best friend and my sister in attendance, for a reason. Yet, apparently for another reason, I have promoted this book just as I promised in the first installment of “Sales Mode”: “like an ever-more rabid, psychotic, hungry, horny wolverine, whose raging compulsions can only be sated by sales of a book, for $14.95.” I can’t filter the excitement I feel about this week from the anxiety, except when I contemplate that book talk on Thursday. I am so looking forward to seeing many friends from so many of my disparate Chicago worlds—work, literary, sports, none of the above and all of the above—and yet all I do is imagine looking out at all those friendly faces and having my head explode in a cloud of electrical smoke.
2. I’ve written here before about a gnawing feeling of frustration I’ve felt on motorcycle sorties in exotic places, like Ecuador—”and the overwhelming amount of beauty that I knew I would forget like a drunk at an all-night party. All the treed canyons, green valleys, high mountain passes, forest roads and isolated villages would morph in my memory into one of each. The alpacas, llamas, monkeys, cows, wild vicuña, one of each. Those brown, wind-cut and rain-smoothed faces of those tiny little old men and women staring or glaring or smiling or waving from the side of the road: one of each.”
And that’s what it feels like when a close community of dozens and an extended one of hundreds of people with whom you have been talking enthusiastically about your book for several years receive that book, and respond to it—in emails, via Amazon reviews, in phone calls and over drinks at the after-party after your overwhelming book talk. Or what I imagine it will be, anyway, based on my last book launch: everything everywhere all at once, so that you want so badly to spread it out—not just so that you may savor it, but so that you may meaningfully connect with all the thoughtful (and feelingful) people who have taken their precious time to read.
This diary is an attempt to slow it down and savor and connect, just a little bit. For me, and for you.
