Last night I saw Big Head Todd and the Monsters perform. Great live band playing with special guest guitarist Ronnie Baker Brooks who lit up the stage every time he played, outdoor amphitheater on a warm evening in late June, over two and a half hours of music. A really enjoyable night. I went with my cousin’s wife who agreed to go on a whim, just looking for a fun night out and came away from the show liking a lot of what she’d heard. On our way home afterward, she commented how interesting the people-watching always is at concerts. I had noticed the same thing for most of the night, and as I thought more about it I realized there are certain types of people I’ve seen at just about every concert I’ve ever attended (and we’re talking about a lot more than two or three of them here). In acknowledgement of the current Internet trend of certain sites like Buzzfeed that make unusually specific and randomly numbered lists, I’ve decided to compile these categories of the concert-goers I’ve encountered over the years:
1 - The Dancing Queen. No matter where you sit in the venue, there is always one girl or woman within sight who gets up and dances like the band is only playing for her. She usually makes a big scene about this so everyone else in her section, especially the unfortunate souls in the row behind her, understand what a good dancer she is (or at least thinks she is after her second or third drink).
2 - Captain Air Guitar. The male counterpart of the Dancing Queen.
3 - Mr. Three Beers. This is the guy you always see carrying three plastic cups filled to the brim in some tight-fingered triangular grip. Somehow he miraculously doesn’t spill a drop, until he gets back to his seat and passes the drinks to his friends, after which wet seats, laughter, and token apologies ensue. Probably even more common at sporting events.
4 - Employer of the Babysitter’s Club. This thirtysomething person, usually but not always female, is very obviously enjoying a rare night out away from the kids. They’re usually dressed a little nicer than the rest of the crowd and accompanied by a large group of friends, and will get up and dance and scream often enough you know they have a lot of stress to unload.
5 & 6 - The Handsy Couple. You know who they are, and you don’t want to look their way during the slower songs.
7 - The Documentarian. This person holds their phone up as often as not, shooting video of what I can only assume are their favorite moments. I’ll admit to having been this guy before, until I realized I had a phone full of concert video that I never, ever watched.
8 - The Flash. This person you usually notice at a distance, because regardless of the number of signs posted saying that flash photography is prohibited, someone always decides that sign isn’t meant for them. A second way of earning this title was demonstrated by a woman at a U2 show several years ago, who, while sitting a number of rows in front of my cousin and me, peeled off her shirt and waved it around like a flag in some kind of drunken display of political theater during “Sunday Bloody Sunday.”
9 - The Perpetual Requester. There are several acts who will entertain requests from the audience during the show. I’ve seen both Bruce Hornsby and Bruce Springsteen collect notes and signs with requests from the audience and go straight into those songs. But it doesn’t happen often. Not everyone in the crowd understands this though, especially the one person who hopes to hear their favorite song and will cup their hands around their mouth and scream the title at least thirty times, regardless of how far they are from the performers and ignoring the monitors everyone on stage has in their ears.
10 - The Frequent Flier. Drinks, bathroom visits, t-shirts, snacks, next round of drinks. This is the person you have to keep leaning back or standing up for during the show because they have so many other important places to be. They always apologize to everyone they pass, which does little to minimize my frustration with them. Seriously people, you paid a lot of money for those seats. Use them.
11 - The One Hit Wonder. You encounter this person on the way out, after the show has ended. Regardless of how long the show was, or how deep into their library of music the performers went, or how effective and moving any unexpected live arrangements were, or how transcendent the overall concert experience was, this person won’t stop talking about how great it was to hear that one big radio song the band is so associated with they’re probably tired of playing it.
I’ll stop at eleven, but as anyone who has been to enough concerts to recognize these people knows, I could go on and on....
Saturday, June 28, 2014
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
My Second Job
A couple of years ago I read an interview with one of my favorite writers, Justin Cronin, just as his most recent novel THE TWELVE was being released. When he was asked about his writing habits, his answer resonated with me so I wrote it down to remember it: “I’m a workmanlike writer. I show up every day and treat it like a job. The old rule that writing is like any other job, the first rule is that you must show up. I’m at the keyboard from 9 to 4 every day.”
As recent as a few months back when writing was just an obsessive hobby for me, it could come and go in waves. If I had a story that owned me, every available moment would be devoted to bringing it out. If I had a book to read or a game to play or some ridiculous time-sucking project related to school going on instead, the writing was something I could pause. I’d take care of the other thing knowing full well the story would be waiting for me where I’d left off.
When the people around me would first find out I was a writer, they’d react with the surprise you’d expect from someone discovering an amusing novelty. Eventually the natural question of whether or not I’d published anything would come up, and I’d always feel myself getting protectively defensive when it did. How was I supposed to justify the amount of time I spent on this hobby, or the decades I had invested in it without anything tangible to show for my efforts? I’d try to explain away the absence of published material by describing the process as successfully jumping through a series of increasingly smaller hoops while sparing the details: Actually writing a book is no small feat; accounting for rare exceptions, you really need an agent representing you to be taken seriously at a professional level; having an agent doesn’t get you published overnight, or even guarantee it; the number of rewrites and edits that happen along the way only end once the manuscript gets locked down as a book, which can take months or years after the initial deal is made. More often than not I’d just say how I kept working at it because I thought someday it would be nice to walk into a bookstore and see something I’d written sitting on the shelves. That would usually satisfy their curiosity.
During those times when the story I was working on demanded my attention, I’d feel a strange self-aware emotional mixture of feigned arrogance and subsequent guilt if I told someone I was busy writing or I had to work things around the writing time I had scheduled; I’d imagine their internal monologue responding with, “Oh, really.... You have to make time to WRITE, then, do you? Whatever you say, Artist Boy.” I know most people wouldn’t really think that way, but it was hard not to imagine it from beneath the landslide of rejected query letters and manuscript passes pouring from my inbox.
But everything changed this spring when my agent (a two-word phrase that still feels surreal to use) tapped me on the shoulder, and it didn’t take me long to start calling writing My Second Job. At first it was just my attempt at something clever to say, reminding people how excited I was to have an agent when it came up in conversation (or -- if we’re being honest -- if I saw an opportunity to wedge it into the conversation). But I'd think back to that Justin Cronin interview and the idea of a Second Job became more serious. This wasn’t just me playing around at the keyboard anymore, amusing myself by making up little stories and hoping I could convince my friends and family to indulge me and read them before I worked up the humility to throw myself at the mercy of the querying universe. This was next level stuff going on. This was someone in the industry putting faith in me and my work, and I desperately wanted to prove that faith was deserved.
Even with the demands of the school year, I still made time each day to work on edits and revisions. Progress was gradual when I could only get in an hour or two of work during early mornings or weeknights, with more concentrated work on weekends. And I won’t sugar coat it: Knowing I was working with a new level of accountability and the potential of reaching an actual audience someday was a bit intimidating at first. Eventually I got past that by telling myself enough times to put it out of my head and just keep doing the same things that got me where I was. Soon the effort became habit and I saw tangible progress being made, and the story began evolving into its newest and most drastically different (and fully realized) version. When that happened, the sense of excitement that would always capture me when everything clicked into place came back. And when it did, it came back huge.
I’m just shy of two weeks into my summer break now, and I’m already so embedded into my summertime writer life that when I see the names of people from school appear on my Facebook news feed, it literally feels like it’s been months since I’ve spoken to any of them. I have to force myself to maintain some kind of summer routine to make sure I still work out in the morning, and buy groceries, and keep the house clean, and pay bills, and all of those other things that during any other summer I would’ve addressed without a second thought. Right now life is most definitely first and foremost about the writing. One evening last week I was winding down in front of the TV, and it occurred to me I’d had a great day. I thought back over what happened to make me feel that way and realized I had spent something like nine hours in front of the computer working on edits and revisions and outlining. And I’d barely noticed it had been the whole day. Is every day like that? No. But it's great to have that kind of time for the days when I need it.
My writing life has been going on for a long, long time, but my writing career is still pretty new. I’m not in a position to show up every day and treat it like a job for the whole year, but I'm fortunate enough to get a couple of months of living like that. And as for being able to work like that rest of the year, and have writing go from being The Second Job to The Job? I’m not holding my breath. But if I had been asked in the summer of 2013 if I thought I’d be working with revision notes from my agent in the summer of 2014? I wouldn’t have been holding my breath back then, either. So who knows what the future has in store? Life happens the way it does.
But for now, break time's over, and I only have so much time before that day job starts intruding again. Time for me to get back to work.
As recent as a few months back when writing was just an obsessive hobby for me, it could come and go in waves. If I had a story that owned me, every available moment would be devoted to bringing it out. If I had a book to read or a game to play or some ridiculous time-sucking project related to school going on instead, the writing was something I could pause. I’d take care of the other thing knowing full well the story would be waiting for me where I’d left off.
When the people around me would first find out I was a writer, they’d react with the surprise you’d expect from someone discovering an amusing novelty. Eventually the natural question of whether or not I’d published anything would come up, and I’d always feel myself getting protectively defensive when it did. How was I supposed to justify the amount of time I spent on this hobby, or the decades I had invested in it without anything tangible to show for my efforts? I’d try to explain away the absence of published material by describing the process as successfully jumping through a series of increasingly smaller hoops while sparing the details: Actually writing a book is no small feat; accounting for rare exceptions, you really need an agent representing you to be taken seriously at a professional level; having an agent doesn’t get you published overnight, or even guarantee it; the number of rewrites and edits that happen along the way only end once the manuscript gets locked down as a book, which can take months or years after the initial deal is made. More often than not I’d just say how I kept working at it because I thought someday it would be nice to walk into a bookstore and see something I’d written sitting on the shelves. That would usually satisfy their curiosity.
During those times when the story I was working on demanded my attention, I’d feel a strange self-aware emotional mixture of feigned arrogance and subsequent guilt if I told someone I was busy writing or I had to work things around the writing time I had scheduled; I’d imagine their internal monologue responding with, “Oh, really.... You have to make time to WRITE, then, do you? Whatever you say, Artist Boy.” I know most people wouldn’t really think that way, but it was hard not to imagine it from beneath the landslide of rejected query letters and manuscript passes pouring from my inbox.
But everything changed this spring when my agent (a two-word phrase that still feels surreal to use) tapped me on the shoulder, and it didn’t take me long to start calling writing My Second Job. At first it was just my attempt at something clever to say, reminding people how excited I was to have an agent when it came up in conversation (or -- if we’re being honest -- if I saw an opportunity to wedge it into the conversation). But I'd think back to that Justin Cronin interview and the idea of a Second Job became more serious. This wasn’t just me playing around at the keyboard anymore, amusing myself by making up little stories and hoping I could convince my friends and family to indulge me and read them before I worked up the humility to throw myself at the mercy of the querying universe. This was next level stuff going on. This was someone in the industry putting faith in me and my work, and I desperately wanted to prove that faith was deserved.
Even with the demands of the school year, I still made time each day to work on edits and revisions. Progress was gradual when I could only get in an hour or two of work during early mornings or weeknights, with more concentrated work on weekends. And I won’t sugar coat it: Knowing I was working with a new level of accountability and the potential of reaching an actual audience someday was a bit intimidating at first. Eventually I got past that by telling myself enough times to put it out of my head and just keep doing the same things that got me where I was. Soon the effort became habit and I saw tangible progress being made, and the story began evolving into its newest and most drastically different (and fully realized) version. When that happened, the sense of excitement that would always capture me when everything clicked into place came back. And when it did, it came back huge.
I’m just shy of two weeks into my summer break now, and I’m already so embedded into my summertime writer life that when I see the names of people from school appear on my Facebook news feed, it literally feels like it’s been months since I’ve spoken to any of them. I have to force myself to maintain some kind of summer routine to make sure I still work out in the morning, and buy groceries, and keep the house clean, and pay bills, and all of those other things that during any other summer I would’ve addressed without a second thought. Right now life is most definitely first and foremost about the writing. One evening last week I was winding down in front of the TV, and it occurred to me I’d had a great day. I thought back over what happened to make me feel that way and realized I had spent something like nine hours in front of the computer working on edits and revisions and outlining. And I’d barely noticed it had been the whole day. Is every day like that? No. But it's great to have that kind of time for the days when I need it.
My writing life has been going on for a long, long time, but my writing career is still pretty new. I’m not in a position to show up every day and treat it like a job for the whole year, but I'm fortunate enough to get a couple of months of living like that. And as for being able to work like that rest of the year, and have writing go from being The Second Job to The Job? I’m not holding my breath. But if I had been asked in the summer of 2013 if I thought I’d be working with revision notes from my agent in the summer of 2014? I wouldn’t have been holding my breath back then, either. So who knows what the future has in store? Life happens the way it does.
But for now, break time's over, and I only have so much time before that day job starts intruding again. Time for me to get back to work.
Sunday, June 15, 2014
A Father's Influence
I wasn’t a bad kid when I was young but I was a hyperactive little snot, and I had a couple of fights in elementary school. Back then that kind of thing only got me a stern talking to in the principal’s office, even though today shenanigans like that would easily earn me a few days of suspension. It’s fair to say that growing up in the 70s worked in my favor more than once.
One of my two fights happened on the school bus. I usually shared a seat on the way home with one of my best friends, and for whatever reason we both decided one day -- pretty adamantly in fact -- that we both wanted to sit on the aisle. He was in the seat first and wouldn’t slide over when I got on (which, in my defense, was standard school bus etiquette and still is today) and instead turned sideways to direct me in toward the window. I wasn’t having any of this, and started leaning on him to nudge him over. He leaned back and soon the leaning became pushing, which then became angry pushing, which soon became me pinning him to the seat and him clawing at my face until the bus driver pulled us off of each other and hauled us out to the sidewalk, where our teacher was on bus duty. She expressed her grave disappointment and ominously promised that phone calls home would be made that evening. Our regret was so instantly palpable that we’d repaired our friendship and agreed on a seating arrangement before getting back on the bus, much to the surprise of all the other kids who’d witnessed us going after each other.
As promised, our teacher called our parents that night, and mine were none too happy. Whenever I got in trouble, I knew one of two things was going to happen: If I did something stupid, my dad was going to yell. If I did something historically stupid, my dad was going to sit me down in my bedroom and we were going to have A Long Talk. A call from my teacher merited A Long Talk.
I really didn’t mind the Long Talks so much. They weren’t always pleasant since they usually happened after I screwed up, but they weren’t a punishment themselves. Punishments would typically follow Long Talks and they were almost always deserved, but by the time we reached that point he and I had discussed the problem thoroughly, so I had a new perspective on what I had done wrong and was more prepared to handle similar situations differently.
One Long Talk that stuck with me came after that school bus fight. My dad was shocked and angry it had happened, because the other kid was one of my best friends: We played together at recess daily, we’d shared tents on Cub Scout camping trips, we played soccer together in the summers, and we’d been to each others' birthday parties. When I tried to explain how our back-and-forth pushing had escalated into a full-blown smackdown, I couldn’t.
“What if you had a big heavy chain at the bottom of a hill, and you needed to get it to the top?” my dad asked. “Would you push it?” No, I answered. That wouldn’t make any sense. “No, it wouldn’t,” he said. “If you want to get that chain up the hill, you have to pull it.”
Two things crossed my mind as he said this: (1) Why is my dad talking about chains? And then it hit me: (2) This isn’t really about chains or about me pushing another kid. This is a life lesson. When I finally connected those dots, it was perfectly clear what he was saying: You can’t force people to do what you want. You have to convince them to agree with you. If you want to lead, you have to give people a reason to follow.
Any skill I have now as a teacher when it comes to helping students process their behavior issues, I can attribute to when my father recognized he needed to invest the time in straightening me out. Whatever reason I’ve ever given people to see me as any kind of a leader didn’t come from some miraculous staff development experience, or some generic educational leadership book, or any particularly resonating professional examples, or any number of redundant inspirational platitudes. For me, it’s always come back to finding the best way to get that chain up to the top of the hill.
So thanks for that, Dad. And Happy Father’s Day.
One of my two fights happened on the school bus. I usually shared a seat on the way home with one of my best friends, and for whatever reason we both decided one day -- pretty adamantly in fact -- that we both wanted to sit on the aisle. He was in the seat first and wouldn’t slide over when I got on (which, in my defense, was standard school bus etiquette and still is today) and instead turned sideways to direct me in toward the window. I wasn’t having any of this, and started leaning on him to nudge him over. He leaned back and soon the leaning became pushing, which then became angry pushing, which soon became me pinning him to the seat and him clawing at my face until the bus driver pulled us off of each other and hauled us out to the sidewalk, where our teacher was on bus duty. She expressed her grave disappointment and ominously promised that phone calls home would be made that evening. Our regret was so instantly palpable that we’d repaired our friendship and agreed on a seating arrangement before getting back on the bus, much to the surprise of all the other kids who’d witnessed us going after each other.
As promised, our teacher called our parents that night, and mine were none too happy. Whenever I got in trouble, I knew one of two things was going to happen: If I did something stupid, my dad was going to yell. If I did something historically stupid, my dad was going to sit me down in my bedroom and we were going to have A Long Talk. A call from my teacher merited A Long Talk.
I really didn’t mind the Long Talks so much. They weren’t always pleasant since they usually happened after I screwed up, but they weren’t a punishment themselves. Punishments would typically follow Long Talks and they were almost always deserved, but by the time we reached that point he and I had discussed the problem thoroughly, so I had a new perspective on what I had done wrong and was more prepared to handle similar situations differently.
One Long Talk that stuck with me came after that school bus fight. My dad was shocked and angry it had happened, because the other kid was one of my best friends: We played together at recess daily, we’d shared tents on Cub Scout camping trips, we played soccer together in the summers, and we’d been to each others' birthday parties. When I tried to explain how our back-and-forth pushing had escalated into a full-blown smackdown, I couldn’t.
“What if you had a big heavy chain at the bottom of a hill, and you needed to get it to the top?” my dad asked. “Would you push it?” No, I answered. That wouldn’t make any sense. “No, it wouldn’t,” he said. “If you want to get that chain up the hill, you have to pull it.”
Two things crossed my mind as he said this: (1) Why is my dad talking about chains? And then it hit me: (2) This isn’t really about chains or about me pushing another kid. This is a life lesson. When I finally connected those dots, it was perfectly clear what he was saying: You can’t force people to do what you want. You have to convince them to agree with you. If you want to lead, you have to give people a reason to follow.
Any skill I have now as a teacher when it comes to helping students process their behavior issues, I can attribute to when my father recognized he needed to invest the time in straightening me out. Whatever reason I’ve ever given people to see me as any kind of a leader didn’t come from some miraculous staff development experience, or some generic educational leadership book, or any particularly resonating professional examples, or any number of redundant inspirational platitudes. For me, it’s always come back to finding the best way to get that chain up to the top of the hill.
So thanks for that, Dad. And Happy Father’s Day.
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