Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Business, casual

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At a gate at Midway, as I waited to visit my Phoenix publisher, a mid-50s guy in jeans and a pressed shirt called someone and started talking about the other person's golf plans for the day, and the weather where the other person was.

And the big Alabama game from two nights before. (The other person, I gathered, had been rooting for LSU. "Yeah, those kids were just completely outcoached and outprepared," our man said with an easy authority that's common in people in jeans and pressed shirts.)

And an e-mail the other person had sent out that morning.

"I have to tell you, that was hilarious," said Jeans-And-A-Pressed-Shirt, without laughing. "Just great stuff. I'm going to send it to a few people who will appreciate it."

"Say look," he said, "I think I'm going to make it out to the January meeting, but probably not February. Yeah. We're going to have to look at revenue and operations, and make sure we're doing as well as we should be. Yeah. Because revenue is gonna have to be the cure-all, obviously, and revenue is soft. And if we don't have a plan for improving it, it's just not going to be enough for us, frankly. So maybe you'd like to get together before the meeting? Whatever's convenient for you, yeah, whatever works. Great, fine, that's perfect. yeah, I'm in Chicago, and they haven't had any snow here at all. Yeah, just a weird winter, yeah. Okay, well thanks, and we'll talk to you soon."

Word to the wise

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When searching for a light family movie to watch on with your eight-year daughter because she's home on Martin Luther King Day … "The Champ" is not a good pick. The fucking dog was crying.

Getting old is like getting young again, almost

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I would hesitate to divulge the original size of my ego, if I thought my readers hadn't sensed it long ago.

In a college notebook that I filled in 1989 when I was a 20-year-old English major at Kent State University (and living at Sunrise Apartments). I was preparing to become a writer—writing about becoming one—and I predicted (forgive me, Fitzgerald) that I probably wouldn't feel satisfied if I became the next Kurt Vonnegut, the next Ernest Hemingway or even the next William Shakespeare.

Yes, my notebook really does say that. Someday you'll be able to look at that it at the Smithsonian, but you'll have to wear special white cotton gloves.

And now I'm reading the new biograhy of Kurt Vonnegut, and I am finding out that though Vonnegut was a "reliably funny" guy, he wasn't happy or even all that pleasant, and his children considered the great humanist a distant and even scary presence. (Though you'd be scary too if you had seven kids tearing around the house while you were trying to write Slaughterhouse Five.)

Anyway, this new information surprisingly returns to me the courage of my youthful conviction, that no, I would not be satisfied to be the next Kurt Vonnegut, because the the last one didn't even like the job.