Other people's accomplishments

OK, I get all of that. I think that some of you are mistaking this thread for one of the many existential crisis threads that have appeared on here. And maybe it is in a way.

But this is different than, "I'm not changing the world. What am I doing with my life?"

This is a very specific thought that is tugging at me - I write about what other people accomplish every day. My prose celebrates their accomplishments. And, yes, sometimes that even feels silly for me.

But in the end, it's almost like I'm more motivated or inspired by seeing the people I cover do such things than I am depressed by it. Like, as much as I love journalism and nonfiction and think they are probably the most worthy pursuits placed into the Constitution, it's giving me an itch to go out and force the issue a little bit. Run a business. Fuck, start a business even.

 

Considering the fact that I've done three of the above jobs, I'd agree with you.

The most odious job of that list that I've had was when I was a call center rep. Answering the phone over 100 times a day is not fun. Especially when some of them are irate customers.

 

There is a depression thread? Really? And I didn't know about it?

That bums me out. ;D

 

There are absolutely times when I feel like I'm on the outside looking in. I feel like I've taken the safer route rather than being in the middle of the action.

Another element of the equation is that I sometimes think it would be more rewarding to be judged in terms of something black and white, like wins and losses, as opposed to the subjectivity that writers face.

 

I think it's one of those "five stages of death" things, Waylon. In my case it is, anyway.

First I get depressed (sort of, I guess) over the realization that while I'm chronicling the deeds of others, they're actually doing things. Then I get a little annoyed at myself for continuing to do that, out of job security (huh? what?) or a knack for cranking out the stories without breaking too much of a sweat.

But then I notice weeks, months and years going by, and see how many more are stacking up behind me than remain in front of me. That becomes motivating. I like the idea of some day saying, "I was a sportswriter AND I did (fill in the blank)" in my career. Taught, ran my own business, wrote two or three books, fought a few corporate goons from within by infiltrating their ranks, whatever. I get intrigued by the idea of having more than one role in my working years: Twenty-five years as a newspaper man, say, but then 10 more as X and another five as Y. (Then I'll have earned a lot of Zzzzzz's.)

Noticing, as you have, that we are spectators and chroniclers of life's achievements is what will propel me to end this "career" and move into the next. Bully to those who stay, from Senior Week to senior status. I just want to know what else I've got in me, work-wise, whether I chased a degree in it or not.

 

In brief defense of what we do...

It is the condition of writing, all writing, since the beginning of time, that we describe other people doing things. That's our job. That's what we do. That's what Aristotle did, and Cervantes and Shakespeare and Dickens and Joyce and Montaigne and Virginia Wolff and Red Smith. If you're a writer, it's what you do, too.

Fiction, nonfiction, journalism, poetry, cavepainting, hieroglyph or blog - it is the natural state of the writer to observe and record the glorious accomplishments and miserable failures of others in this world. And to try to wring meaning from what they've done.

In the great scheme of things it doesn't really matter whether you're observing Little Johnny Touchdown at the Apple Barrel Classic or the installation of a Pope, there is an important human story to be found in both those moments.

By disposition and training I've always had one foot in and one foot out of life. By which I mean this: There's always been a part of me removed from life as it goes on around me. A part of me that's only observing and then commenting on those observations. As a simple matter of personality and character, this would be happening in my head whether I later organized it into written form or not.

So, happily and selfishly for me, I find in writing the lucky meeting of my natural habit of dispassionate observation and the means to express myself and earn a living.

But I understand that this is not the case for everyone.

And to you, I say this: We are the only organism anywhere with the means and the need to record our common history. To make sense of ourselves. To bind the world in words and map our shared experiences.

As a writer, this is what you do. You create order out of chaos. Meaning out of nothingness. You are the engineers of our remembrance.

And your achievement, your accomplishment, lies not just in how earnestly and well you do it, but in the honor of having done it for the rest of us at all.

 

We do all that?

Damn.

We do all that, we should be getting a lot more cooter.

 

I can't quite say this with the art and grace that Mr. jgmacg did, but it helps me to look at it this way:

I never look at it like I'm filling scrapbooks. I'm chronicling life. It's not just about of the athletes who participate, but about all of us, about our pursuit of perfection, our hubris, our disappointments, our heartbreak and our glory. You can scoff or roll your eyes at that sentiment, but I think that's the way you have to look at it. We're all participating in the great experiment we call community, or society, and sports is really just a backdrop, or a stage, for life's big play. There are metaphors and deeper truths that play out every day on fields, on diamonds, and in gymnasiums, that resonate with people who will never be able to truly grasp what it feels like to turn on an inside fastball traveling 93 mph. We all feel the need to belong to something bigger than ourselves -- whether it's family, religion, community, region, country, or even something simple as the internet community of SportsJournalists.com -- and by telling people's stories, we help foster some of that understanding. We can express that, through competition, it does not matter if we are black, white, Asian, poor, rich, young, old; we have more in common, as a people, than we realize.

I don't know that anyone has ever expressed this sentiment better than Roger Angell, writing about Fisk's home run off the pole in 1975.

"It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look -- I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring -- caring deeply and passionately, really caring -- which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete -- the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball -- seems a small price to pay for such a gift."

Every person has a story that is a thread in the big tapestry of life. Some are more interesting than others, but those stories matter, and it's our job to observe, to coax them out of people, and to understand if there is some larger meaning behind them. When Gay Talese was writing about DiMaggio and Sinatra, he wasn't just writing about two famous people. He was writing about lonliness and love and the difficulty of holding onto who you are when your physical talent betrays you. Those themes exist in all of us, even the high school wide receiver or the small college 2-guard. Perhaps they're not as obvious, but then, none of us are Talese. Don't mean you can't aspire to do that kind of storytelling.

More later...

 

I don't know, Double Down. This seems pretty artfully and gracefully said to me.

 

You have your own grace and art. It's different from jgmacg's but so is everyone else's.

 

To take this literally, what we do *is* something black and white.

It stays. It's there. History.

A lot of people can't say that about what they produce.

 

I always try to remind myself that, on the order of the foodchain of life, along with political pundits and Jared from Subway, I probably have one of the most inconsequential jobs on the planet.

Would it be nice to live life a little more than just write about it? Yes, but life can not be so great at times.