The Daily News
1 I took a couple of days off from the babies this weekend chiefly because I felt I hovered a little too much, and I thought I'd give Josh and Caitlin a little space.
2 Helene left for San Jose to visit and stuff, but I found myself too exhausted to make the trip down.
3 The highways and byways, especially up here in Sacramento, are fierce. I think they are just as fierce as in San Jose, but in San Jose I know which areas are the most fierce. I'm pretty sure right around 10th street on 280-680 are some scary roads, and the immortal Highway 17/880 terrifies even the bravest hearts.
4 I prefer back roading any time I can. It's fun to find back roads rather than freeways to travel around town. Plus you see more ranches and horses and cows.
5 I also think lack of sleep kept happening, especially after Caitlin's water broke several weeks ago. You shouldn't be driving if you are exhausted, and we were all exhausted. We kept a lot quiet because the twins wanted to stay in there, which was probably a good thing. Still, K.T. held up like the proverbial trooper, and maintained confidence as well as a marvelous sense of humor the entire time.
6 Both she and Josh learned stuff too, much more than I. Those two have towering brains that put my idiocy to shame.
7 I can teach people about writing, but I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' no babies.
8 I lean on that. But as my friend Marie Duarte put it in much better words than I can recall, I probably should leave my man card at the door and pick up my G-Pa card.
9 That was an exchange when she suggested in an email that I start brushing up on my Disney movies. I admitted to her that I had already started with Mulan. I then asked if I needed to turn in my man card. I could look up the exact exchange but frankly, I'm too lazy.
10 But yeah. It's yesterday, which means it's Sunday noon and I don't even have an NFL game on.
11 The joint is quiet, save for the creaking hissing of the air conditioner.
12 The most excitement all day consisted of a terrifying ride to Fry's Electronics so that I could get a new mouse for my laptop.
13 A back road takes you to Fry's. No evident danger on a Sunday morning, right?
14
15 <basketball buzzer> One guy turned left right into my lane, head on. He did it on purpose so he could cut over and scream down the rode.
16 I watched him, realizing one thing that Sac has WAY more of than San Jo: rednecks. I am convinced that this moron built his small Dodge Dart to go eight hundred miles an hour.
17 Don't get me wrong. There are rednecks, and then there are rednecks. Those rascals drive monster trucks, and if they had any schooling in them, they probably majored in tailgating.
18 Look Sannozay, you might THINK you have tailgaters, but son...
19 Nah.
20 Moving On, Part One: I think I'll put a football game on <clicks remote> <keep in mind this is coming to you live yesterday afternoon.>
21 Whaaaaaat? The Niners are losing 29-3 to the Steelers???????
22 Why/How was I under the impression that game was going to be Monday night?
23 Okay.
24 Man card officially gone.
25
26 That's officially funny.
27 The Niners defense is trying to tackle guys using hand slaps and hankies.
28 Looks like my confusion saved me a ton of grief.
29 If I wanted to watch a car wreck I'd have gone to the store for a few groceries. I lead you back to the aforementioned rednecks. They are angry, stupid white guys, and there are thousands of them. They sell steer skulls and wagon wheels at yard sales. And they tank cheap beer.
30 Moving On, Part Two: Okay. Niners. Still love you, because I am your son. But DUDES.
31 Humbling, I suppose but I'm back into the sport.
32 I LOVED the Raiders yesterday.
33 Hey, they're Bay Area.
34 Who knows, who knows. I also loved the Packers last night.
35 I did get to spend the entire afternoon yesterday hanging with Josh, Caitlin, and the goils.
36 Ol' G-Pa kept admiring once more.
37 Good times.
38 Lonnnnnnng day.
39 Moving On, Part the Thoid: In a way, I hate like hell to keep the writing lessons going, but I also know that they probably have lots of good tips. I keep coming back to Stephen King. The guy is the best. Last night I found a gem, not so much about writing, but about teaching. Am I allowed to share?
40 Of course.
41 Thanks.
42 So here is Stephen King on surviving his first year as an English teacher in Hampden, Maine. Tabby is his wife. This is again from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft:
By the time I started Carrie. I had landed a job teaching English in the nearby town of Hampden. I would be paid sixty-four hundred dollars a year, which seemed an unthinkable sum after earning a dollar-sixty an hour at the laundry. If I'd done the math, being careful to add in all the time spent in after-school conferences and correcting papers at home, I might have seen it was a very thinkable sum indeed, and that our situation was worse than ever. By the late winter of 1973 we were living in a doublewide trailer in Hermon, a little town west of Bangor. (Much later, when asked to do the Playboy Interview, I called Hermon "The asshole of the world." Hermonites were infuriated by that, and I hereby apologize. Hermon is really no more than the armpit of the world.) I was driving a Buick with transmission problems we couldn't afford to fix, Tabby was still working at Dunkin' Donuts, and we had no telephone. We simply couldn't afford the monthly charge. Tabby tried her hand at confession stories ("Too Pretty to be a Virgin"---stuff like that), and got personal responses of the this-isn't-quite-for-us-but-try-again type immediately. She would have broken through if given an extra hour or two in every day, but she was stuck with the usual twenty-four. Besides, any amusement value the confession-mag formula (it's called the three R's---Rebellion, Ruin and Redemption) might have had for her at the start wore off quickly.
I wasn't having much success with my own writing, either. Horror, science fiction, and crime stories in the men's magazines were being replaced by increasingly graphic tales of sex. That was part of the trouble, but not all of it. The bigger deal was that, for the first time in my life, writing was hard. The problem was the teaching. I liked my co-workers and loved the kids---even the Beavis and Butt-head types in Living with English could be interesting---but by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I'd spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain. If I ever came close to despairing about my future as a writer, it was then. I could see myself thirty years on, wearing the same shabby tweed coats with patches on the elbows, potbelly rolling over my Gap khakis from too much beer. I'd have a cigarette cough from too many Pall Malls, thicker glasses, more dandruff, and in my desk drawer, six or seven unfinished manuscripts which I would take out and tinker with from time to time, usually when drunk. If asked what I did in my spare time, I'd tell people I was writing a book---what else does any self-respecting creative-writing teacher do with his or her spare time? And of course, I'd lie to myself, telling myself there was still time, it wasn't too late, there were novelists who didn't get started until they were fifty, hell, even sixty. Probably plenty of them.
My wife made a crucial difference during those two years I spent teaching at Hampden (and washing sheets at New Franklin Laundry during the summer vacation). If she had suggested that the time I spent writing stories on the front porch of the rented house on Pond Street or in the laundry room of our rented trailer on Klatt Road in Hermon was wasted time, I think a lot of the heart would have gone out of me. Tabby never voiced a single doubt, however. Her support was a constant, one of the few good things I could take as a given. And whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife (or a husband), I smile and think,There's someone who knows. Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don't have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.
43 I don't even pretend to be a writer, even though I write all the time. I never got interested, probably because most novels bore me. I'm more a non-fiction reader. I enjoy bios and conspiracy theories, or stories of ghosts from different areas I have visited.
44 What strikes me about the passage is how King nails a teacher's life, particularly the conferences and especially the grading of papers.
45 Television distorts teaching beyond words. The class size of a typical television classroom is around fifteen, and the teacher seems to have fifteen the entire day.
46 I shake my head at most television classrooms, or most films centered on the profession, or what we might call our craft. I always joked with Ponch about how easy we had it. When people would ask us how anyone could put up with those kids, we would respond with this: "Beats workin'!"
47 Looking back, it did beat workin' because we loved doing it. Maybe it was the performing arts, but we got to have a job doing what we grew up loving. So yes, it IS as grueling as King makes it, and his wonderful analogy of Friday afternoons feeling as though he spent the week with jumper cables clamped to his brain was pretty accurate.
48 I laughed when I re-read that, and laughed once more when I put it in this piece.
49 Teaching is not for the faint of heart, I'll tell you that much. But I saw an eighteen wheeler fly past me a few weeks ago. It had a minimum of twenty smashed vehicles on it, probably headed for a recycle place. It was around a bazillion degrees outside and all I thought was how lucky I am to have had a career teaching.
50 Beats workin'.
51 I gottago; I do more work in retirement than I ever did teaching, and that's the Gods' Truth.
52 This was lofty. See you again.
53 Peace.
31 Humbling, I suppose but I'm back into the sport.
32 I LOVED the Raiders yesterday.
33 Hey, they're Bay Area.
34 Who knows, who knows. I also loved the Packers last night.
35 I did get to spend the entire afternoon yesterday hanging with Josh, Caitlin, and the goils.
36 Ol' G-Pa kept admiring once more.
37 Good times.
38 Lonnnnnnng day.
39 Moving On, Part the Thoid: In a way, I hate like hell to keep the writing lessons going, but I also know that they probably have lots of good tips. I keep coming back to Stephen King. The guy is the best. Last night I found a gem, not so much about writing, but about teaching. Am I allowed to share?
40 Of course.
41 Thanks.
42 So here is Stephen King on surviving his first year as an English teacher in Hampden, Maine. Tabby is his wife. This is again from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft:
By the time I started Carrie. I had landed a job teaching English in the nearby town of Hampden. I would be paid sixty-four hundred dollars a year, which seemed an unthinkable sum after earning a dollar-sixty an hour at the laundry. If I'd done the math, being careful to add in all the time spent in after-school conferences and correcting papers at home, I might have seen it was a very thinkable sum indeed, and that our situation was worse than ever. By the late winter of 1973 we were living in a doublewide trailer in Hermon, a little town west of Bangor. (Much later, when asked to do the Playboy Interview, I called Hermon "The asshole of the world." Hermonites were infuriated by that, and I hereby apologize. Hermon is really no more than the armpit of the world.) I was driving a Buick with transmission problems we couldn't afford to fix, Tabby was still working at Dunkin' Donuts, and we had no telephone. We simply couldn't afford the monthly charge. Tabby tried her hand at confession stories ("Too Pretty to be a Virgin"---stuff like that), and got personal responses of the this-isn't-quite-for-us-but-try-again type immediately. She would have broken through if given an extra hour or two in every day, but she was stuck with the usual twenty-four. Besides, any amusement value the confession-mag formula (it's called the three R's---Rebellion, Ruin and Redemption) might have had for her at the start wore off quickly.
I wasn't having much success with my own writing, either. Horror, science fiction, and crime stories in the men's magazines were being replaced by increasingly graphic tales of sex. That was part of the trouble, but not all of it. The bigger deal was that, for the first time in my life, writing was hard. The problem was the teaching. I liked my co-workers and loved the kids---even the Beavis and Butt-head types in Living with English could be interesting---but by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I'd spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain. If I ever came close to despairing about my future as a writer, it was then. I could see myself thirty years on, wearing the same shabby tweed coats with patches on the elbows, potbelly rolling over my Gap khakis from too much beer. I'd have a cigarette cough from too many Pall Malls, thicker glasses, more dandruff, and in my desk drawer, six or seven unfinished manuscripts which I would take out and tinker with from time to time, usually when drunk. If asked what I did in my spare time, I'd tell people I was writing a book---what else does any self-respecting creative-writing teacher do with his or her spare time? And of course, I'd lie to myself, telling myself there was still time, it wasn't too late, there were novelists who didn't get started until they were fifty, hell, even sixty. Probably plenty of them.
My wife made a crucial difference during those two years I spent teaching at Hampden (and washing sheets at New Franklin Laundry during the summer vacation). If she had suggested that the time I spent writing stories on the front porch of the rented house on Pond Street or in the laundry room of our rented trailer on Klatt Road in Hermon was wasted time, I think a lot of the heart would have gone out of me. Tabby never voiced a single doubt, however. Her support was a constant, one of the few good things I could take as a given. And whenever I see a first novel dedicated to a wife (or a husband), I smile and think,There's someone who knows. Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don't have to make speeches. Just believing is usually enough.
43 I don't even pretend to be a writer, even though I write all the time. I never got interested, probably because most novels bore me. I'm more a non-fiction reader. I enjoy bios and conspiracy theories, or stories of ghosts from different areas I have visited.
44 What strikes me about the passage is how King nails a teacher's life, particularly the conferences and especially the grading of papers.
45 Television distorts teaching beyond words. The class size of a typical television classroom is around fifteen, and the teacher seems to have fifteen the entire day.
46 I shake my head at most television classrooms, or most films centered on the profession, or what we might call our craft. I always joked with Ponch about how easy we had it. When people would ask us how anyone could put up with those kids, we would respond with this: "Beats workin'!"
47 Looking back, it did beat workin' because we loved doing it. Maybe it was the performing arts, but we got to have a job doing what we grew up loving. So yes, it IS as grueling as King makes it, and his wonderful analogy of Friday afternoons feeling as though he spent the week with jumper cables clamped to his brain was pretty accurate.
48 I laughed when I re-read that, and laughed once more when I put it in this piece.
49 Teaching is not for the faint of heart, I'll tell you that much. But I saw an eighteen wheeler fly past me a few weeks ago. It had a minimum of twenty smashed vehicles on it, probably headed for a recycle place. It was around a bazillion degrees outside and all I thought was how lucky I am to have had a career teaching.
50 Beats workin'.
51 I gottago; I do more work in retirement than I ever did teaching, and that's the Gods' Truth.
52 This was lofty. See you again.
53 Peace.
~H~
fin.
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