Attention Crash

highs and lows, ups and downs.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this post and this podcast (transcript). Obsessing over it. Going back and re-reading and re-listening to it. And it made me realize that I’m Doing It Wrong(c).

I’m obsessed with fiction. Reading it, writing it. I make people up and I let them live in my head. I put them in weird situations and I’m delighted when they react in ways that I didn’t expect.

I grew up reading. My parents are not big TV people. There were some years where we were too poor to afford cable and some years where we didn’t have it because of a lack of interest. Their interest, not mine. I was much more interested in TV than they were. And my mom, if she caught me wasting away in front of the TV would yell, “Go read a book.” Go. Read. A. Book. I heard that refrain daily. It was the sound track to my childhood.

And the result was that I fell in love with books. I read all the time. I was the only one of my friends growing up who read fiction. They had video games and MTV. I had an endless stream novels. I’d spend hours and hours and hours in my room, lost in worlds that others had created for me.

I haven’t been doing so well since Jeff and I left Panama. I’ve spent a lot of time, more time than I like to admit, wondering what the fuck I’m doing with myself. Part of my life is easy. I love what I do. And I’m not saying that for boss points. I find what’s probably an unhealthy amount of validation and happiness in working with my authors. Helping someone find their obsession times voice and giving them the tools to express that is incredibly rewarding. Rewarding enough that I happily let it overrun other parts of my life without complaint.

But another part of my life is hard. And I make it harder than it has to be. It’s the bencorman.com part. It’s the part where I think that I have something to say and I want to put it out there to see if it connects with the world. Since Panama I’ve been struggling to find something to say and let’s face it, my life is fucking boring. I wake up at noon. Some days I work until two in the morning and some days I work for two hours and then call it quits. Believe me when I say it’s not worth writing about.

bencorman.com was supposed to be a way for me to get my fiction out to the world. Because that’s what I’m obsessed with. But I let the medium overrun what I had to say. I thought ‘blog’ instead of ‘writing’ and when I looked around at those who were ‘blogging’ I simply tried to copy their success. Which is stupid because I’m not obsessed with the same things that they’re obsessed with. I was trying to push a writing peg into a blogging hole.

I know I’m not alone in this. I see the submissions we get from people who want to work with. Every. Single. One. And I’ve got to tell you, a lot of you out there are Doing It Wrong(c). You’re writing what you think we want to read or you’re writing about a topic that you don’t understand because you think that’s what you’re supposed to do.

I understand the urge. I did it. When I first discovered TuckerMax.com and Philalawyer.net (long before Philalawyer was with Rudius) I thought that I had to be writing crazy stories about my life. And I did that for about six months. And it sucked. The writing sucked and the stories sucked and writing the stories sucked. It’s not that I don’t have my own slightly irresponsible nights, I do but I’m not a comedy writer. Consequently, while I can occasionally write something funny, it’s not what I obsess over.

What people seem to miss is not that Tucker is obsessed with his own life, it’s that he’s obsessed with comedy. He’s obsessed with being an entertainer, with being the center of attention. To the point where it can get annoying and I’ve wanted to tell him to just shut up about it already. But that’s exactly the type of obsession that you have to have in order to create something amazing. You have to live and breath it, whatever your “it” happens to be. If you’re not annoying the people around you with it, you might not love it enough.

I think we as people have a deep need to create. That’s what so exciting about the internet. It gives everyone a printing press and an art gallery and a music label and a TV station. It allows the creator to connect directly with the consumer. It gives us a chance to be obsessed with something other than celebrity gossip or what car we’re driving. It gives us a chance to be obsessed with what we’re accomplishing. But all that promise and excitement is perverted and ruined if we’re just running around copying each other’s art, and doing it poorly because we assume that we’re supposed to follow in the footsteps of those who came before us.

I know that’s what a lot of you are doing. Your submissions tell me even if you don’t know if yourself. Because I’m not seeing a lot of original work. I’m seeing copies of copies of copies. And none are as good as the original.

It’s all right though. In a lot of way we’re all in this together. We’re all figuring it out together. I know the internet feels old and mature and boring and that blogging is passé and that twitter is even a little ‘OMG NPR is totally on twitter’ and so we’re all onto the next thing but the act of creation is timeless. And so no matter what new technology is almost here, it shouldn’t affect what you’re doing. Technology only ever changes the distribution.

As I’ve been to figure all this out for myself, I reached out to a few people I admire and look up to. One of them sent me this

What you’re feeling is a pretty normal thing that any artist who sacrifices in order to work feels from time to time. Sacrifice is fucking hard. Being broke is fucking hard. Frustration is a wicked bitch who’ll whisper in your ear every chance she gets.

So take a break. Stop writing for a minute, and don’t worry about it. Read. Read a lot, all your favorite shit, remember why you fell in love with writing in the first place. Relax and allow a little time to give you something you really want to say.

I took his advice and the first thing I picked up was my copy of Lonesome Dove. And that’s when it hit me. I’m a fucking idiot. When I went to back to what I love, I didn’t go to some fucking blog post or website. I went for my favorite book. Novel. Fictional account of people who don’t exist and who delight me when they react in ways that I’m surprised at.

I think we can all do better. I think if we all stop and we’re a little more honest with ourselves we’ll see that sometimes we just write bullshit for the sake of writing bullshit. That sometimes our motivations suck and we want the ad revenue or X number of readers or respect when really, we should be doing it out of love. We stir up conflict where there really isn’t any. We stand on our soapbox because we want the attention that yelling brings even if we’re not yelling about something we care deeply about. I think if we try, we can get back to doing this for the right reasons.

Nate called it traveler’s disease. It was that headspace you got to after a while on the road, where it was hard to stay in one place. When you’d come to expect something new and novel and surprising out of every day.

I met Nate the week before classes started freshman year. We were both recent transplants to Tucson and since we didn’t really know what we were supposed to be doing with our time until classes started we spent our days talking to girls, hanging out with a couple of punk rock kids who were juniors and wandering around campus, bored out of our minds. That first week we’d end up spending a lot of time in the laundry mat, only because it was one of the few places open all night, and debating the relative hotness of the girl who worked third shift at 7-11.

Classes started and while I was busy failing my way through a calculus class that I had no business being in, Nate decided that he wasn’t really about school and bounced for Seattle.

The first time he was back to visit, I didn’t really get where his head was at. And he wasn’t the type to try and explain it. He was one of those annoying people who was more interested in getting out and living life than talking about. So while the rest of us were content to do the college freshman thing, hanging around the dorms and bullshitting, he was itching to do something. He knew things, like what freight trains you could ride safely and which ones you could die on because of the length of the tunnels they went through. This was not the kind of wisdom that a middle class upbringing imparted and we loved him for it. Not that any of us would go on to become hobos and ride the rails but just being able to recite that information made us edgy and cool to the kids we parroted it to.

He did say one thing to me that stuck with me during that trip. I was asking him how it was in Seattle. He was living out of his car while trying to pull enough money together to get an apartment. What he said was “Seattle is whatever, but for the first time in my life I have something to say. Instead of just going through the ‘what’s your major / where are you from’ bullshit, I finally have something worth talking about.”

Then he was back in Seattle and I was busy failing out of college so things sort of just bumped along for a while. He found a place to live. I found myself at a community college.

One night I got in my car and drove from Tucson to San Diego. I don’t remember how I ended up in the car that night but I found myself driving north on the highway when I saw a sign for I8 West to San Diego and took the exit. I told myself that it was an adventure, that I’d watch the sun rise over the ocean. It wasn’t until the sun actually came up, behind me, that I realized I was on the wrong coast.

And the adventure part sucked. I slept on the beach that night and when I woke up I was sandy and damp and tired. I wasn’t looking forward to the drive back and whatever clarity I’d hoped to find had eluded me.

There was no one in my life I could even talk to about it. The semester had just ended and I was splitting my time between working the counter at Jack in the Box and hanging out with some kids who talked incessantly about starting a band, even though none of us ever bothered to pick up an instrument.

It was an awesome time to be alive. I was hopelessly twisted over a girl with whom things never worked out, a bunch of friends I didn’t really like and a job in fast food. I’d just managed to fail my way into community college and even my adventures left me cold, damp and wishing I’d stayed in bed.

A wiser person would have taken a step back, reevaluated their life, chosen a direction and starting working towards something positive. I stronger person would have taken responsibility for where their life was and known they could have fixed it. I packed up a weeks worth of clothing, called Nate and drove to Seattle. In the face of great adversity, I took the path of least resistance and ran.

That summer I caught traveler’s disease bad and I finally understood where Nate’s head was at. It wasn’t about the miles traveled, I spent most of my time walking around Seattle just getting a feel for the city and the freedom of doing something on my own for the first time in my life. I had no job, I wasn’t in school, I had cool roommates and enough money to afford a 40oz now and again. I fell in love with a girl who worked in a coffee shop and had white ink tattoos and kept a hedgehog in her apartment. It was the first time in my life that my future was uncertain, without a clean, time-lined road map laid out in front of me on letterhead that read “What You Should Be Doing.”

I’m not sure what I was looking for in Seattle or even if I was running away from my problems or towards an adventure. I do know that Seattle was good for me. It was the first time in my life I did something on my own and while my parents were horrified that I was throwing my future away, it seemed to me that the future held nothing but promise. It was an awesome time to be alive.

Just recently a friend asked if I thought all the traveling I’m doing this year was me running from my problems. I don’t know that I have an answer to that. In the eleven years since I left Seattle I don’t know that I’ve figured out if travel is a hobby, an escape or if it’s me running toward an adventure. It’s probably a bit of all three. My own private pathology and I’m sure that one day I’ll make a therapist very rich figuring out why I do the things I do. I know I’m happiest when I’m traveling and when I’m writing. And so disease or not, I’ll take the travel when and where I can get it.

I wish I knew what happened to Nate. After a few months in Seattle the urge to go caught up with me and I left. At 19 I wasn’t the letter writing type and after a year or so we weren’t in contact any longer. If you know a kid named Nate who lived in Renton Washington right off of Martin Luther King about 11 years ago, tell him to email me. I probably owe him a beer or two.

I leave for Panama this week and I’ll be gone through the New Year. I hope to have internet access, so look for an update or two in this space. And of course, lots and lots of pictures when I’m back in the US.

In ninth grade I sat next to a kid named Andrew who, had his interests run in a different direction, could have probably played varsity football but really only loved the beat up black notebook he carried everywhere with him.

That first period biology class was my introduction to the world of graffiti. For forty-five minutes a day I watched Andrew tag everything he could reach. He’d work something through in his book, then pull a paint marker out of his bag and go to town on the black-topped tables we sat at. I’d watch him pour himself into a tag that would take up half the table, only to get called in for detention later that day to clean the desk. I watched him tag the table legs, the floor tiles, the textbooks. I’m pretty sure that, had I fallen asleep in class, he’d have dropped a quick stylized “drew” on the back of my neck, just for the fuck of it.

I liked Andrew because he knew who he was. Graffiti for him was a lifestyle, an identity. While the rest of us were sweating memorizing the male and female reproductive systems, Andrew had a singularity of focus that most of us wouldn’t find for years, if ever. It would take me ten years to find something I loved like Andrew loved writing graffiti.

For a kid like me, a recent transfer from a private Jewish middle school to a public high school, identity was a big deal. Caught between those two worlds and not fitting into either, I did the only thing I thought I could do. I spent hours trying to write graf. I bought a black notebook and a bunch of markers and tried to come up with some ill shit that would give me entry into that world. But no matter how long I spent, or how nice Andrew was about my vestigial art skills, it was clear that I was never going to run with the kids Andrew ran with. And they weren’t nice about it. I was a joke, a toy, a failure, a loser.

As much as their disdain hurt, for forty five minutes a day I got to watch Andrew work his magic across whatever surface he could lay his paint markers on. I don’t know why Andrew liked me, maybe I was funny, maybe simply because I sat next to him and he knew I wasn’t about to sell him out. Whatever it was, it didn’t matter to me. I learned more from watching him then I ever could have from those biology lectures.

As the year went on, things only got crazier. Some mornings he’d show up at school with bloodshot eyes and paint on his hands. He’d tell me about some billboard or bridge or building he’d hit the night before. Then, with a sort of self-satisfied smile on his lips, he’d fall asleep on the desk. Some mornings he’d show up with bruises on his face talking about getting jumped by rival crews.

This wasn’t just captivating to me. Half the class would be turned in their desks listening to him talk. On the days that he was early to biology, he’d get peppered with questions about what had gone down the night before. Or if he was going to cut that day. Or, or, or. We’d ask him anything, just to keep him talking.

Of course, as the year went on, shit only escalated. Whatever vandalism happened in the school, it was Andrew and the friends that got called for it. Whether it was someone spray painting a burner across the lockers in the two hundred hall (obviously them) to someone popping a canister of pepper spray in the eight hundred hall (obviously not them) they were the ones who got called into the deans office first. And the more they got called into the office the more we loved them for it. Andrew was someone. In a school of three thousand plus students, people knew who he was. Say “Andrew” and no one had to ask who you were talking about.

I wish I knew what happened to that kid. I wish I could say that he was headed to art school but honestly, I don’t even know if he was interested in art school. Freshman year of high school doesn’t inspire a lot of “so, what are you thinking of doing when you graduate?” It wouldn’t be until four years later, my freshman year of college, when I’d stand around like an asshole in training hitting people with the “so, what’s your major, what do you want to do when you graduate?” combo.

And by my tenth grade year, my mom had moved us to a new neighborhood and that meant a new high school. Once we moved, I didn’t really think a lot about Andrew. I had entirely new social circles to navigate, new friends to make, new trouble to get into. Removed from his influence my interest in writing graffiti faded to be replaced with music, girls, computers and the occasional joint or 40oz when I could get my hands on it.

But even though I didn’t think a whole lot about Andrew the lesson had already wormed it’s way into my brain. Find one thing you love, be brilliant at it and nothing else will really matter.

And I still have a soft spot in my heart for graffiti.

This is has been a hell of a year. Weird enough that whenever I try and write about it I don’t really have the words, which as a writer, is an epic fail.

This has been, by far, the most traveling I’ve ever done in one calendar year unless you count the year I moved from east coast to west. A move that took five months and found me sleeping on the couch of a very understanding Mormon family. I think most would label me NSFW, so it’s really to their credit that I had a place to stay when I needed it.

And the traveling isn’t over. There’s still fifteen days in Panama at the end of this month. It says something I think that I’ve become more comfortable sleeping in tents, hotels, hostels, couches and guest rooms than I am sleeping in my own bed. I just prefer to not examine too closely what that something is. And if we’re all being honest here, internets, ever since I went to Hawaii to sleep on beaches and eat ramen at 21 I’ve been more comfortable on the road than at home.

This is also the year that Jeff and I took over the publishing aspects of Rudius. Creative Director. It’s a pretty cool title.

When I was 19, I quit school knowing that I could do the job I wanted in IT without the degree. I had this overwhelming, unshakable belief in myself and I said fuck it and worked my ass off until I realized that, while I liked IT as a fun hobby, as a career I couldn’t handle it.

I thought I’d experience the same thing when we took the helm here. But something’s changed. I’ve lost that hyper-energetic confluence of arrogance and anger that made me want to take on the world face first, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. In the balance that’s probably a good thing, even in my rose colored recollection I was pretty intolerable as a person so the truth has to be that much worse. I’d be lying though if I said I didn’t miss those days where I couldn’t have put the words self and doubt next to each other in a sentence.

Maybe it means I’m growing up. Maybe it means that I’m slowing down or maybe it doesn’t mean anything at all. I do know that I’m still more comfortable on the road than I am at home. I know that I’m doing something I love and I know that it’s been a hell of year. Now all I need is the perspective to be able to write about it.