recovery | The Gad About Town

Daily Prompt: Ten Years Out and Four Back

Posted on August 6, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for August 6 asks writers to write about writer’s block, a question that would on the surface seem unanswerable: “When was the last time you experienced writer’s block? What do you think brought it about—and how did you dig your way out of it?”
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When one is in the throes of a block, the helpful suggestion to write about “anything,” even to “write about writer’s block,” feels like an excuse for justifiable homicide on receiving it.

Anyone replying to this prompt is not at present in its throes, so, good for us; I am patting us all on our collective shoulder. Because it feels like a physical ailment, writer’s block. First, it presents a heady sensation of having multiple thoughts at once, of a richness of topics and sentences available at all moments (justpickoneanyone!) … except this one, followed by a dread that one has committed to the wrong topic or married it to a disaster of a sentence, followed by a helpless sense that one always picks wrong, that one has no right to give privilege to any single thought, sentence, syllable over any other. No right to! Don’t finish, never start, just drool.

In his great novel “The Information,” Martin Amis describes the self-torture his character Richard Tull endures:

For an hour … he worked on his latest novel, deliberately but provisionally entitled Untitled. Richard Tull wasn’t much of a hero. Yet there was something heroic about this early hour of flinching, flickering labor, the pencil sharpener, the Wite-Out, the vines outside the open window sallowing not with autumn but with nicotine. In the drawers of his desk or interleaved by now with the bills and summonses on the lower shelves on his bookcases, and even on the floor of the car (the terrible red Maestro), swilling around among the Ribena cartons and the dead tennis balls, lay other novels, all of them firmly entitled Unpublished. And stacked against him in the future, he knew, were yet further novels, successively entitled Unfinished, Unwritten, Unattempted, and, eventually, Unconceived.

For years (the novel was published in 1995) I would set “The Information” down upon reading that passage (it comes early in the book, after Amis describes Tull’s middle-aged inner self-knowledge of his self-failure in only 20 or so sentences), because that was the bookshelf in my mind, too. And I was not going to describe it better than the master, so why attempt to? My own inner self-knowledge of my self-failure extended to believing that someone else had done a better job of describing my inner self-knowledge of my self-failure. Amis is a great novelist and essayist, one of my favorites, but he is not in my head (lucky him). (There is a pun there.)

I would read and re-read that passage, though, almost recite it like a sick mantra. Because while I could see the comedy in it—it is extremely funny, after all—I could not laugh at it with anything more than a mournful, rueful, “Heh.”

Whatever failures I have as a writer, and as a person for that matter, being too critical of myself usually was not one of them. If anything, I was not critical enough, often enough: If I was not going to attempt to try but was going to get all showy-mournful over the loss of my attempt, how was I “my own worst critic,” as I sometimes hear people describe themselves?

Through the 2000s, I did not write. I was in a writer’s block that felt terminal. (Some may wish it had remained so.) Oh, there was the occasional email of some length—I shudder at the memory of an attempted mimicking of Bill Simmons before he was famous (we even exchanged emails once) that described an afternoon at a Cubs game that I sent to friends—but the breaks between attempts grew longer. I moved part-way across country and then back, with some friends not knowing I had returned, because they did not know I had left four years before.

The irony is that for five of those ten years, I was professionally a writer, first at a factory, then for IBM. My work with a radio comedy group dried up, too. Ultimately, it all ended. I attempted this very blog in 2006, something which I had forgotten about until I started The Gad About Town in October 2013 and was told by Blogger, “This email address already has a blog, would you like to see it?”, requested the password, and discovered that I had started two posts, neither of which had a complete sentence. (It was kept private then and will remain so.) If there is a Rosebud to my writing life, it may be in those half-paragraphs.

For someone who has only wanted to do one thing, write—my family still has furniture I marked up with crayons, drawing words instead of pictures on every surface when I was two or three—the experience of not writing was a painful one. It meant that my psyche was left alone to receive each perturbation and clash like it was a brand-new, unique, and uniquely awful thing.

Until July 15, 2010, I was deeply engaged in doing the one thing I did best: Get drunk. My will to engage in much else in life was slowly being sucked away, but I also believe that my writing block was partly the result of a perverse sense of integrity and honesty: Nothing that I could or would write was going to be honest. I could not write out an honest shopping list, since the one thing I was actually leaving my house for was not even on the list. Any blog post, comedy piece, essay, memoir, to-do list was a lie of omission, and I do not like to lie. So, “Unpublished, Unfinished, Unwritten, Unattempted, Unconceived.” Until I was willing to blush while saying (or writing) the words, “My name is Mark Aldrich and I am an alcoholic,” nothing else was going to come from me.

That coin you see up top? I am pretty proud of it. (I tried to photograph the actual one but it is too shiny.)

So for the last year, I have been writing regularly. The Gad About Town has over 60 published posts; 13 of them responses to the “Daily Prompt.” But the lack of confidence that a writer’s block presents, that still visits. It did so this spring. My girlfriend’s help—really, I am a lucky guy—and my choice to do the Daily Prompt every day (even though it “is not me coming up with the ideas. Grumble”) have me writing now. So responding to the Daily Prompt every day is part of how I can respond to a Daily Prompt about writer’s block, a topic that would be unanswerable if I was in one.

Daily Prompt: Stress Is a Six-Letter Word. So Is ‘Human’

Posted on July 29, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for July 29 asks: “After an especially long and exhausting drive or flight, a grueling week at work, or a mind-numbing exam period—what’s the one thing you do to feel human again?”

Historically, I have been a great example of the mock dictum “Take my advice—I’m not using it.” I am someone who can introduce stress into the least stressful, innocuous, and even pleasant experiences in life, so sometimes the parts of life that others find stressful, I hunker down and find the effort inside myself to make them more stressful.

In one of my lesser achievements in the field of stress management, I gave myself a black eye while tying my shoes. These were boots with leather laces (I was not a cowboy) and such laces take effort to yank into position. While securing my “half-knot” on my right shoe, the length of lace in my left hand broke and I clocked myself in the right eye. I was 34-35 years old at the time, not eleven.

One of my co-workers asked, “I’m not sure I ought to say anything, but are you okay?”

“With what?”

“You look like you were in a fight or something.”

“Heh. Funny story, I did this this morning. Heh.” Embarrassed, I mumbled a series of words without connections between them to sound like a sentence or two: New laces. Need. Not leather. Store tonight. Because I lived alone and was ostensibly an adult, my friend did not call protective services on my behalf.

But I was perpetually stressed out by that job, a completely stress-less employment (technical writer in a factory) in a stressful environment (it was a job, and jobs are stressful). I was a contract employee who had been taught that, for contractors, “The last one hired is the first one fired,” and I was the last one hired in this office. Twice, a contractor was hired in my department (the “New Guy”), which afforded me the comfort of being the Not Last One Hired, but both times, the individual quit within days, which restored me to my place as Most Worried. Further, the head of the department who had gone on the hiring spree that had led to my employment was fired in front of us less than a year after I moved to the job. Under these circumstances, in which every week at work was “grueling,” you’d give yourself a black eye tying your boots, too.

It amazes me how much one can accomplish with no confidence in oneself. I held that job for four years, but it felt like twelve.

In those years, I believe I was addicted to being in perpetual (and slight) fear all the time, because I had a method for relieving stress that I trusted above all others, which presented a feeling of relief that sat on the pleasant side of the scale far more heavily than any stress sat on its side of the scale. The method is called vodka and it is no longer a part of my world. So what do I do now?

The question implies that during a stressful period one is not human and needs to be restored to a natural state of calm serenity and continuous need-meeting, but only when you have needs, mind you. When you have no needs, there is no need-meeting, which is perfection. All things in moderation, except moderation.

I have friends from the military, friends who have fought in hand-to-hand combat with enemies, and they report that when a person leaps from one serotonin-soaked event to another, one acquires an either/or outlook on life. They describe post-war life as one in which the soldier will either perceive everyone as an enemy, including the guy taking too long pouring himself coffee, or they return home to a world in which he loves everyone and sees every human being as a fellow traveler on this big blue marble of ours. He’s the vet who hands the half-and-half to you on line and then lets you step in front of him at the counter.

So I am a stress-filled person, certainly not a soldier returning from a war zone, except, perhaps, the one in myself, but life presents me with obstacles and challenges like work, life, relationships, life, long journeys, life, ongoing tests, life. And life. The only plane trips that have been successfully not stressful for me have been the ones in which I struck up a conversation with my seat mate. I am, as I am with much else in life, an uneasy flyer. I am the passenger across the aisle from you with white knuckles and clenched jaw. The trips that I remember most fondly are the ones in which I made a temporary best friend: A flight to Chicago in which my seat was switched on the plane from a seat surrounded by a family with three kids (making me the fourth) to a seat next to a woman who was also doing the crossword puzzle. A flight after 9/11 in which the entire plane got involved in a conversation about coming home to upstate New York and what we missed about living there. This approach to life works well on planes, in waiting rooms, on the coffee line.

When I remember I am a human being, I do not need to do anything to unwind or remind myself that I am human or to feel human. When I don’t, life is a grueling week of work spent on a plane flying me to a final exam that I have not studied for. It’s one broken shoelace after another.

(Daily Prompt) 45 and Me: A Love Story

Posted on July 27, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

The WordPress Daily Prompt for July 27 continues a recent preoccupation with age, aging, adulthood: “‘Age is just a number,’ says the well-worn adage. But is it a number you care about, or one you tend (or try) to ignore?”

One friend, upon hearing me describe a new ache or an old pain, used to reply, “You’ve never been (insert age here) before!” At first, I found this insulting, then, later, very insulting. But knowing the friend as I did, I eventually realized that he was not being dismissive when he said this, but was instead reminding me to do something I did not have a long history of doing: To pay attention to my body.

He was also saying that almost everything we experience is unique to us and not at all unique. That sentence is either wise in its simpleness, so simple and wise that “simpleness” is too complicated a word for it, or incredibly banal. I’ll go with banal. We are all growing older.

Age is a statistic and mine are these (feel free to play with the age calculator for your own numbers): As of July 27, 2014, I have been here for 16,687 days, which is also more than 400,000 hours and approximately 360,461,595 breaths, and 1,730,215,656 heart beats since I was born. Have I made each one of these days, breaths, and heartbeats count? Have I lived “each day as if it was my last?” Of course not. I spent at least 12,000 of these days either waiting for payday or avoiding late fees and deadlines. I also do not dance like no one is looking and rarely think before I speak.

I am 45 (and a half), which is somewhere in the middle of the middle. (I knew a woman in her 90s who used to tell people, “I am 93-and-a-half!”) Either I have already seen more sunrises than I have yet to see, or I have not even seen half of them. (I get up late, anyway, and have missed at least 16,000 sunrises.) I still possess a lot of my boyish lack of wisdom and am adding middle-aged foolishness to it. It’s a complicated age.

It is also an age that is not given much positive attention in art, music, or literature. Not just 45 specifically, but mid-40s. A character in his or her mid-40s is often tragic, a figure who is in need of change and perhaps pursues it but is incapable of changing, which is where the tragedy lies. Or he—and it is usually a he in this case—is in a mid-life crisis (in need of a change) and his pursuit of a solution is comic, impotent, or merely silly, and he learns his lesson and returns to his old ways. Karl Marx wrote, “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” In art, a 20-year-old character’s life is romantic, passionate; the life of a 45-year-old with the same emotions: farce.

It is the Age of Assessing Things, which would have sounded as boring and banal to my 25-year-old ears as it must to any 25-year-old’s ears.

(Not that there is not passion in my life; there is, and love now seems to count for more and feel more enduring than any love I have yet experienced. Life is amazing when one starts paying attention.)

Element 45 is rhodium, which is very rare—part of the platinum group of elements—and very expensive and yet we encounter it every day on our roads. It is used in catalytic converters, which of course are employed to convert the pollution our car engines create into less toxic pollution. My view of the age 45 is influenced by this coincidence of element and age. Forty-five, for me, is the age at which a lot of the life I have lived so far is being converted into something more breathable. That is not farce, but my life is not literature.

What have I learned so far in this life, and how many of these things do I really need for the rest of the journey? Which of these things are worth keeping? A lot of them, as it turns out, but not all. This particular lesson is not often the theme of art, as I wrote above, but around when he was 45, Elvis Costello wrote “45,” in which he sings: