Don't Try This At Home

Last night I was sitting around with some new friends, The (Hot) Officer and Chaps (who would like to be referred to as WildCat, but let's be honest, we don't always get to pick our nicknames in life. Note the oblique reference to me being called "BJ" for the first 10 years of my life).  These two women collectively own more guns than a small Montana militia, yet they warm the very marrow of my bones. I was sitting listening to Officer Hotness play her acoustic guitar and sing last night and thought that maybe I had gotten the short end of the artistic stick. I can't sing well, I definitely can't play guitar, and "Chopsticks" is as far as I can go on the piano. In between songs, I lamented: "All I can do is write, and that's never gotten me any women". She then told me that, much to my surprise, very few women had fallen captive to her musical charms. Chaps said that it was especially hard for her to woo women on a set of drums, which we collectively agreed would be difficult for no other reason than the approximate distance you would have to sit to watch a drum player work her magic. 

Then I wondered what kind of cold-hearted bastards Officer Hotness had been singing to. Is there anything sexier than a woman singing with an acoustic guitar? If I'm not careful, I'm going to become a coffee shop groupie. If only I could sit drinking espresso in a coffee house chair typing out on my laptop about my most personal feelings. Good thing I don't drink espresso and the comfortable chairs are always taken at coffee houses, but oh, what a cliche a could be. It's a slippery slope. I would be embarrassed to know me. But writing is what I do and it's not as easy as you might think. Writing a self-confessing blog about intimate details of my life may look like fun and games, but I'm wracked with self-doubt and questions. "Did I share too much? Did I share enough to be interesting? Have I asked enough hypothetical questions to drive my readers absolutely crazy? Three in a row - that's pretty good. Let's stop there. Clearly a paragraph break is in order".

Sometimes I'm startled about the conclusions that I come to at the end of a post. My fingers write themselves with a clarity that my conscious mind can't seem to muster. So I write. That is my art. I am a writer. I'm also an exceptionally good reader, but that's not really a participatory sport, so let's just stay with writing.

For a while, I was paid to write and, like most things, the act of getting paid to write on a deadline killed any sense of joy that I felt from the spontaneous act. They I started my degree and got a job where I sat in front of a computer and worked in Excel all day, every day, and occasionally talked to people on the phone. The only way that I got through that job was by putting in my headphones and listening to hard core rap. Listening to Jay-Z and Eminem rap about the gangster life and how hard it is to stay authentic in suburban America matched my soul-crushing angst.

Now when I'm at work I listen to Deb Talan or Indigo Girls radio on Pandora, trying to soothe away my stress in between my calls to strangers. It's been a slow process coming back to my writing, but I feel it lingering. It will be seven years in February that I moved to Texas and started my blog. Happy (early) anniversary to me.