A few thoughts for my reader...

“Work as if you have no money. Love as if you have never been hurt. Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. And live everyday as if it were your last" - Anonymous

Do I have the right to call myself a writer? Need one who writes be published to consider oneself a writer? Is writing in an internet blog constitute published writing? Should I approach my writing like one of the lines in that anonymous saying above? How about: Write like thousands are reading it. Or should it be: Write like one person is reading it?

I’m asking myself these questions, and many others, recently. Questions like, “Just how much time do I have left?” The answer to that is, “No one really knows”. All we do know is that we have today, maybe only half of today. So be it. “...live everyday as if it were your last”.

How do I take all of my memories, all the fifty seven years of fodder that clutters my brain daily, and put cognitive thoughts on paper that I would enjoy reading? That’s right, that I would enjoy reading. Don’t I have the write to enjoy my writing? Should that not be true if I expect others to enjoy it? I don’t know the answer to that question yet either.

When I was working as a radio D.J., early on in my career, someone told me that I should present myself on the air as if I were speaking to one single person...not thousands. Why? Because chances are my individual listeners were listening in that singular context. They were alone at the breakfast table, sitting in their car, or at their desk at work. I was told never to say things like, “How are all of you doing out there?”, or, “Good morning ladies and gentlemen”. I wasn’t on a stage. I was sitting alone (for the most part) in a dark, little studio with the company of a musty smelling microphone, a couple of old turntables, a control panel held together with duct tape, a few over-played records, and my thoughts. There weren’t miles and miles of airwaves between me and my listener...there was only a few inches between me, my microphone, and the radio speaker from which my voice eminated. It was very intimate.

Later on, I had the opportunity to work on the air with other people in the studio, the advent of the so-called Morning Zoo format. Evidently, that is what people wanted to hear on the radio...and still do to this day. They want to hear conversations, interaction, laughing, responding, chatting, mindless prattle and blathering between “players” in the studio. Listeners have now truly become a fly on the wall in the D.J.’s world, listening to them do their thing. The one-on-one that radio of yesteryear offered has pretty much gone the way of the Do-Do bird, full-service gas stations, and 12 year old virgins. From a strictly business, commercial standpoint...it’s a done deal.

So now, for me, it’s back to one of the last vestiges of what could still be considered intimate journalism. Putting down my thoughts, not on paper, but on an internet blog site. A small, but somewhat satisfying, venue to exhibit a few thoughts extracted from those fifty seven years of, at times confusing, fodder that resides in my brain. An opportunity for yours truly to sort out some things, to compare notes, to reshuffle and reorganize the files, to, hopefully, entertain and not bore a reader. That’s right, I said a reader. I have come to the conclusion that if one single person reads these words, than I am, indeed, a writer of sorts. How good a writer remains to be seen...a rationalization that only I can speculate on.

There’s a line from the movie Sideways (allegedly from Charles Bukowski) that goes something like this, “Sometimes I feel like a smudge of excrement on a tissue floating out to sea with a billion tons of other sewage”. That’s not how I feel everyday, just once in a while. But, until I write a novel like Ham On Rye, I suppose I’ll just keeping plugging away right here...for that one person who may be reading this.