How this column gets done

There are two of us behind every line of wisdom.

These are just some of the notebooks I’ve filled.

I thought it might be useful if I wrote a piece about how I have managed to write five or six columns a week for the last nine-plus months. 

Well, the last occupant we had in the White House certainly helped.  Having a certifiable maniac like Donald Trump in the highest office of the land was a godsend for columnists.  You didn’t have to go to bed at night or wake up in the morning worrying about a subject to write about with him around.  There was a period shortly after Joe Biden was inaugurated when I worried that the political forest was going to look thinned out and rather pallid.  Then I remembered that Trump was out of office, but the Republican Party was still with us, and it was his party now.  How ridiculous of me to have fretted about that.  Subject matter has never faltered, not even for a day.

But the problem of subject matter is never ending.  Usually a column will start with Tracy sending me a link to a story, or I’ll catch a glimmer of an idea on the news, or I’ll see a story in the paper or online that will touch on something that gets me thinking.  More times than I’ll ever be able to count, Tracy and I will be sitting in the living room and I’ll turn to her and say something like, “Have you seen all that criticism about the way we pulled out of Afghanistan?  What a bunch of crap!”

I’ll start yapping about how full of shit this pundit is, or what a hack that political figure is, and Tracy will turn to me and say, “Get your notebook.  That’s a column.”  I’d say about 99 percent of the time she’s right.  No, make that 100 percent.  A lot of times, I’ll be in mid-rant, and she’ll say, “Write that down. You’re writing your column out loud.”  She’s right about that, too, because I write the way I talk…or I talk the way I write…I don’t know which is which.  It will sometimes happen in the car, too.  We’ll be listening to NPR, or I’ll be telling her about something I saw on MSNBC, and she’ll say, “Pull over.  You’re writing your column,” and I’ll pull the car off the road and grab the notebook I keep in the glove compartment and write down what I was saying to her.

I keep a notebook next to the bed, too, and there have been more nights than I can remember when I woke up in the middle of the night and wrote down stuff that just popped into my head. 

Here are some notes from the notebook next to my bed: “9-ll and the birth of the big lie.  Quote from book about Sect’y Treas. Price…we make our own reality.”

“Shock and awe was a lie.  That we were ‘winning’ was a lie.  That we had created democracies and trained armies was a lie.”

“Seeing Muslims on Jersey City rooftops cheering on 9/11 was another lie.”

“We’ve made a lot of mistakes, but the biggest was underestimating the cynicism of Republican politicians.”

“Tate Reeves, Abbott, DeSantis…you want them as your gov’s?  You want to believe their lies, then you live, and die, with the consequences.  I’m finished with sympathy for people who vote these fools into office and support their mask and vacc. bans.”

“The crack you peek through and find only darkness.”

“Shooting story – 5 days later disappeared from the headlines.”

“All of these new wrinkles are proving to us something we already knew.  Trump did it.”

“Where is the truth?  It’s not in all these words.  It’s inside you, in the perception of what you are reading.  It’s not in the space he occupies on the planet.  It’s in the metaphor, the word picture of who he is and why he is the way he is.  It’s how the truth gets through.”

“There were all these things that were going to save us, or at least save the world:  rock and roll, drugs, back to the land communes, EST, leftist politics like SDS or liberal politics like McGovern.”

“We were addicted to youth, addicted to love, addicted to excess, addicted to loss.  What we weren’t addicted to was life on its own terms.  We had to have it on ours. It was all about getting and losing. Life wasn’t as pretty as we were, so we changed it, and we paid a price.”

So stay tuned.  There’s some unexplored wisdom in the old columnist yet.

Which brings up a subject I wish wasn’t necessary, but it is:  keeping this column going.  This is the first time in my life when I have depended directly on my readers to make a living.  In the “old days,” I worked for magazines and newspapers and publishers and they did it all for me.  They found the readers, they collected the money, and they gave me a paycheck.  Now it’s up to me, and the first thing I’d like to do is thank all my paid subscribers for pitching in to make this column possible.  I can’t tell you what it means to me to have your support.

To those of you who have been receiving my Newsletter for free, this is my appeal for your help.  I haven’t counted the number of columns I’ve written since I started this Newsletter in January, but it’s in the hundreds.  I love doing it.  I love hearing Tracy tell me to pick up my notebook and “write it down.”  And I love writing it down.  I don’t know what I’m going to write tomorrow, but I’ll think of something.  But I need your support to keep this up.  Please consider subscribing.  It’s only $60 a year or $5 a month.  You’ll become a part of our community, and you’ll be able to comment, which I have reserved for paid subscribers only, and you’ll have access to the full archive of my columns.

So thank you to those who have already subscribed!  Everybody else, come on in and subscribe!  There’s a lot left for us to do, and a lot for me to write about in the days to come.  Trust me, I’m on it.