One thing at a time...

I have nothing but respect for people who know how to do one thing, and do it well. People who pick a career in college and decide to stick with it, even if it's not THE career they will hold for all their born days. People who change careers at "mid-life" (be that 35 or 40 or 50) and then stick with that newly chosen calling. People who specialize in an area and become experts at what they do, and have all the world coming to them, asking for their input and guidance. People without whose contributions we would be sunk, lost, listing to port or starboard, or spinning wildly out of control, the engines in one wing of our plane spewing smoke and shrieking with distress.

I am not one of those people. For better or for worse, there's a whole lot more to me, than one career, one discipline, one area of expertise. I'm a generalist, with the kind of mind that is not content to revel in its expertness in one single area, while there are other areas to be explored. And my mind is not happy to achieve transcendance at the expense of diversity. I have a hungry mind, a greedy mind, a gluttonous lust for information and experience. And no matter how highly I esteem the focus of others who are less intellectually promiscuous, but more materially accomplished, I cannot seem to compel myself to stick with just one thing for long. Not when there are other interests out there to explore.

And explore, I have. Geographically, professionally, intellectually.

Geographically:
Throughout the USA, on East Coast and West. Across the nation, back and forth twice. Across the Atlantic, throughout Europe (the Western part, that is, at the time I was there -- the Wall was still up in Berlin, the Cold War was still on, and I couldn't see why I should have to fill out all the paperwork and be chapperoned in order to see the dingy Eastern Bloc, which struck me as being an uninterrupted mass of depressing grey reminders of What Once Was, What Might Have Been, and What Will Never Be). Back and forth across southern England, mostly in Cornwall.

Professionally:
I began earning money working for others when I was 12 and started doing half-hearted (and admittedly half-assed) yard work for the funeral home next door. Babysitting didn't work out. Just ask the parents of the infant I stopped watching just long enough for him to roll down the hill and towards the street, while I was comforting his 4-year-old sister who had just fallen flat on her face and left some skin on the pavement. The paper route was... well, a paper route. And getting up early before church each Sunday to roll and deliver papers was... character building, I guess. In high school, I washed dishes at The Big A, the Akron Restaurant, where all the most promising youngsters put in their diligent stints and you could hook up with the older staff to score a fifth of "JD" (your friend and mine at the time, Jack Daniels). Then it was on to college, where I paid my way by tutoring middle-aged women who were finishing their degrees in fin-de-ciecle Viennese art history, monitoring computer users, tutoring a local kid in German, and doing yet more food service and catering work. After a few years Stateside, I decided to head to Germany, where I picked up work typing translations for an American translator who specialized in automotive technologies. Couldn't stay there forever... so I moved back to the States and found a job with a little business-to-business publishing company. I've always had a soft spot in my heart for publishing (being a writer and all), but for some reason, I really excelled at marketing, not the writing end of things, and I kicked ass coordinating cardpack mailings in the US and Canada. From there, it was a several-month stint as an office manager for a traveling salesman with a lot of dark secrets, and then I moved to Philadelphia, where I did legal secretarial work whilst taking in odd freelance writing/editing/typing jobs and working on my novel. The novel didn't work out, but I did earn a handy living with those lawyers. But all good things must come to an end. Out to California -- got into high tech, and writing software documentation, got dot-bombed ten years before everyone else, did some freelance tech writing, took up human resources support work, and realized that, job-wise, things were not going to happen for me in California... Then back to the East Coast, where I've temped, managed a word processing department for a mid-sized law firm, and finally landed in web development with Fidelity Investments, where I was destined to stay until, oh, about two days ago.

Intellectually:
I've been roaming the intellectual landscape all my life. In books, in ideas, in discussions... My parents are both very heady, intellectual creatures, and they love to "dialogue", so I had plenty of practice exploring ideas from a very early age. I've been in and out of books, be they fiction or non-fiction. Favorite fiction authors of my youth: Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck and Louis Lamour. Favorite non-fiction subjects: American Indians, botany, inventions. Favorite fiction authors of my adult life: None that I can think of, though I enjoy Barbara Kingsolver and Louise Erdrich... most current fiction writers bore the shit outa me. Favorite poets of my youth: Adrienne Rich, Marge Piercy, Robert Bly. Favorite poets of now: classical poets, can't think of any off the top of my head. I've been reading, and writing, since I can remember. And my first collection of short stories at the age of eight (even then, I couldn't constrain myself to just one thing -- why write just one short story, when you can write four?). I wrote my first novella when I was nine. Or maybe ten. I've written scores of poems, reams of journal entries, and I have a bunch of unpublished books behind me. To date, I've written... oh, let me see... three or four novels, several collections of essays, an impassioned and quite muddled memoir of a very traumatic time in my life, and several short story collections, none of which have yet seen the light of day in print. Some of it I've posted on websites, others I've tried to get published, and got accepted -- then turned down (thanks, but no thanks, sorry for the inconvenience) -- most of it, I've just had stashed in boxes of files, and they've followed me around as I've moved from place to place. I've always been more interested in the experience of writing, than having the final product to show for it. Plus, it's a lot less dangerous, if you never risk showing your work to anyone. Remember, I'm intellectually promiscuous. Showing my work to someone might actually establish a relationship of ideas with them. Oh, and let's not forget the online world. What better place to be an intellectual slut? I've been online since, oh, 1992, when I discovered the University of Minnesota at All The Gopher Servers In The World, and I haven't looked back since. Especially since the Web took off in the mid 90's.

But all this catting around, gets a little wearing. I just turned 40 -- okay, okay, so I turned 40 six months ago, but I'm a lot closer to 39 than 49, so I get to say I "just turned" -- and at some point one needs to STOP and take stock of the situation. This is what I'm doing for the next three weeks. I'm taking stock and finishing up a mountain of side projects I've had going, over the years. I'm not telling my parents that I've quit my job without another solid prospect -- they'll worry, and they'll expect me to spend even more time traveling and spending time with my family over Christmas. This holiday season is about me, it's about my life, it's about figuring out not only where I want to go, but where I've been, and properly producing evidence that, yes, I have been really, really, really busy on my own time, lo these many years.

Now I'm cut loose from my moorings till the end of the year, when I'll resume my search for a respectable, lucrative job in the greater Boston area (no North or South Shore, please -- I'm on 495, but I don't want to start each day looking at taillights for an hour). I'm on my own for the time being, and I've resolved to make a go of sticking to one thing, and one thing only until the beginning of 2006. I've been writing since I was eight years old -- 32 years, no less -- and what do I have to show for it, other than the memory of rejection slips, a few poems and essays published in little magazines, and a hodge-podge collection of personal websites? What indeed, do I have to show for all my work, all my passion, all my secret commitment to a writing way of life that sets me apart as distinctly different from most of the folks I know?

Not a hell of a lot. But that's about to change. I'm on a three-week mission to publish my poetry and other projects in book form, generate some buzz, put the creations of my mind and heart out there in front of all the world. I've got a whole lot of knowledge about how you generate buzz, about how you catch people's attention online, about how you get yourself seen and heard over the internet, and I'm about to put all that to good use. That's what the next three weeks are about -- PEAPOD - Print, Electronic, Audio Publishing On Demand. Building up a body of work in print, web and sound, that is an accurate representation of my work, my passions, my commitments, my beliefs.

It might sound like a tall order, to get this underway in three weeks, but y'know what? I've been thinking about this and planning this and mapping this all out, for years. It's taken me that long, between my full-time job and my full-time domestic relationship, to get to a point where I can say, "Yes, I'm good to go." I've got enough of a nest egg to see me through the next couple of years before I completely run out of money (tho' I'd rather start earning enough in '06 that I don't need to completely drain the nest egg). I'm very clear on what needs to happen for my work to get out there and be properly represented in the world. I've got the resolve and the critical mass of being fed up with having nothing to show for all my work over the years. And I've got three weeks to set the wheels in motion.

Let the wheels start turning outside my head, as well as inside it. For once in my life, I'm going to do one thing consistently for three weeks -- live like a writer, act like a writer, BE a writer.