Luck is a very thin wire between survival and disaster, and not many people can keep their balance on it. - Hunter S. Thompson
I have always regarded writing columns about writing columns as a bad idea.
Readers don’t want to hear about that sort of thing.
I mean, what if your plumber showed up at your house and started complaining about what happened while he was working in your neighbor’s bathroom?
“I couldn’t find my pipe wrench and then wee little Johnny kept coming in the loo to shoot at me with his toy shotgun,” your plumber says. “He kept calling me a mackerel snapper for some reason!”
Pretty soon you’re ready to shout, “Will you fix the leak in my kitchen already?”
(I decided to make your plumber Irish since I’m writing this column on St. Patrick’s Day.)
Still, plumbers and columnists share at least one constant challenge: both are tasked with making sure a flow of crap continues unimpeded.
But as Mr. Scott said in “Star Trek III”: “The more they overthink the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.”
My drain is pretty stopped up.
I have three unfinished columns on my desktop right now: one about love, another about death, and another about treacherous car insurance companies.
Yesterday, I put them all aside and started writing a column about the wives of Zelensky and Putin.
I hated it, but I hit save and heard myself say something any writer worth his salt never says.
“Near enough for jazz,” which, of course, means: decent but could be better.
At which point I had to holler calf-rope, ditch everything I had been doing, and start fresh.
I have always been an inveterate tinkerer, but that column was unsalvageable.
Executive Editor Josh Lurie can attest to my habit of tinkering.
When I was promoted to associate editor several years ago, I started writing columns on Tuesday evenings just ahead of the deadline.
I might email Josh what I believed to be a completed column at 8:30 p.m. and then realize I wanted to change the word “shorts” to “slacks,” or something equally silly. Josh would then get an updated version at 8:47 p.m. I might then have an adult beverage and send another version at 9:22 p.m., another one at 9:45 p.m., and yet another at 10:36 p.m.
Then I would wake up in the middle of the night with another idea and send an updated version at 8:02 a.m. I can’t be sure, but I’m almost certain Josh ignored the first five emails he got from me.
I still tinker endlessly, but now I start earlier and give myself time to sort out all the mistakes I made in initial versions.
Which is why God chose to make me a writer in the first place. Disasters have plagued the human race since recorded history began, and God was just trying to trim the number of them by making sure all I could screw up was a sentence.
Had I been a house painter, I would have realized at midnight that I painted your house the wrong color, and you would have found me repainting it at 1 a.m. using my headlights to avoid painting over your windows.
Had I been a landscape professional, I might have cut your grass one afternoon and realized I had the blade height set too high and come back the next day to cut it again. Then I’d probably run out of gas.
Had I been an orthopedic surgeon, a nurse might interrupt a knee replacement procedure to tell me that I was supposed to be replacing my patient’s hip.
If I had made my living as a virologist, I might have one day forgotten to put a container of coronavirus back where I got it, engendering a worldwide pandemic and getting a delirious Delawarean elected president, which may be why I harbor a certain amount of sympathy for Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Things happen, you know.
But like I said, God knows who to put where, so he gave me, and those like me, keyboards and about 300,000 words to play with.
Otherwise, bridges and skyscrapers would collapse daily. Dams would burst for no good reason. CNN would create an ongoing feature program called “Plane Crash of the Week.”
And the Atlanta Braves would lose five All-Stars to injuries.
Wait! That happened anyway.
Selah.