When the chips are down, it’s time to write
My stick-man secret vice. I am a closet junk-food junkie. That’s why the last 40 days have been so difficult. I’ve gone potato chip-free. Don’t laugh. It’s not as easy as it sounds.
I am a potato chip addict. I have fallen into a bad habit - one of many - especially during the cold, winter months. The second I walk into the house, before I even take off my coat, I make a beeline for the snack drawer and go up to my elbow in a large bag of chips.
Maybe it’s just loyalty to my old school buddy, Ed Herr. That’s right. As I often tell my kids, I happen to be personal friends with that smiling guy up on the billboard. We went to high school together, played football together. I’m not sure to this day that my kids believe me when I tell them I can remember when Ed’s father made chips in his garage and we could actually snag a few as they came out of the oven.
Believe me when I tell there is nothing better.
And you can believe me when I tell you the last 40 days has been pure hell.
Now in recent years I have been tempted to give up cursing for my Lenten sacrifice. That hasn’t worked out very well. I am a serial curser. It’s a bad habit, a sign of laziness, actually.
No doubt the nuns who drummed that love of grammar and the English language would be disappointed in me. Probably not so much for the profanity – although come to think of it they might not be all that thrilled about that aspect either. Who knew cussing was suddenly going to be considered chic. Maybe it’s because the nation elected a less then eloquent, shoot from the lip maverick figure belies my you named Donald Trump president that we’ve loosened the guidelines on language. Hell (there I go again) last week no less a public figure than new Democratic boss Tom Perez was dropping the ‘S word’ in talking about how Republicans don’t care for the little people. He was quickly topped by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who dropped the world’s most ubiquitous four-letter word in saying that “if we’re not helping people, we should go the f--- home.”
I never realized I was in such elite company. Yes, I am a serial F-bomb dropper. Mother of all F-bombs? That would be me. Sorry, sisters.
Actually, the nuns would likely be much more perturbed by the notion that I had stooped to such an easy avarice. Cursing is easy; writing is hard. Don’t believe me? Try it sometime.
I discovered this a few years back when the newspaper industry – in our latest thrashing about trying to save ourselves – seized upon a novel solution asking the public for their help.
User-generated content became the latest corporate buzzword. We’ll open the doors to our vaunted – and often misunderstood – mission to the public, and ask them to help us cover their towns, schools and neighborhoods.
We set up community media labs. We helped set up readers with their own blogs.
Which is when many people discovered something I first learned a long time ago in this racket. It is perhaps the best description I have ever heard of journalists. Many of us ink-stained wretches hate to write, but love “to have written.”
Read that closely. Pay attention to the tenses. Hell, even diagram the sentence if you must.
Every time I sit down in front of this keyboard it’s a little bit like giving birth, not that I would know anything about that. Then again, there are those who would claim that has never stopped me from writing about things I know nothing about.
It’s not so much that we hate to write, but that we much prefer looking back after the mission is accomplished. Writing, a bit like making sausage, is something better not witnessed. At least it is when I’m perched in front of my laptop.
I quickly learned that everyone wants to write a blog. Right up until the moment when they have to start blogging.
Then – as every writer I’ve ever known – they come face to face with their worst nightmare, that empty screen balefully staring back at you, just waiting for you to fill it up with pithy words that will thrill the reader.
That doesn’t always happen when you’re reporting on the ruling of the local zoning commission.
I often joke that I have the only job in Delaware County that every person is absolutely certain they could do better than me.
They may be right. I probably wouldn’t know much about a lot of jobs. To be perfectly honest, I’ve always harbored a secret desire when it comes to work. Don’t ask me why, but I’ve always wanted to work on a trash truck.
This business – this art of writing and reporting and telling stories, which is really all we do, tell stories – is not the business I entered four decades ago. We write at breakneck speeds, often making mistakes along the way in our furious mission to post news online, to deliver information on as many platforms as we possibly can.
There is no downtime, there is only the idea of shoveling information as fast as we can to an insatiable public that has delivered a clear message to an often cantankerous industry: Readers want their information when they want it and on the device they prefer.
It’s enough to drive a man back to potato chips.
Or, as the inveterate headline writer in me would sum up: Chip happens. I hope the good forgive me. sisters can