Pledge Week results!

(485 words)

The people have spoken! 

And they said, “Ehhh …”

My earnest, ballyhooed, passionate blog pledge drive landed with a thud. Total haul from 10 enthusiasts: $547.

That was four $100 donations, one $52, two $25, one $20, a $15 and a $10. Each donor will receive equal prominence on the acknowledgements page of my new “Use All The Crayons! II,” which I hope to have available for sale by September. And each will receive a free signed copy.

So what do I do with my “windfall?” What’s the splurge? I hadn’t seen my sunglasses in about a month. I’d had them about six years and was eager to update with something stylish. I’d planned on going to The Eyeglass Shoppe on Route 30  today to shoppe, er, shop.

But I found the old ones rattling around beneath the driver’s seat Sunday morning on my way to church.

Nothing’s going right!

Now I’m conflicted about the blog’s future. Certainly, it must change.

I don’t doubt that many people really enjoy it and consider it a welcome distraction. For the first time, I had three months in a row with more than 10,000 unique views from all over the world. That’s not insignificant.

We’re talking Trump inauguration numbers.

And I really enjoy keeping it lively and fresh. It indulges a swampy part of my mind where offbeat ideas stew and seek release.

But, geez, there’s another part of my mind, the minuscule stump where cold logic dwells, that shouts the blog is a tremendous waste of time and energy.

I’d hoped to show that part of my mind a great, big bag of money to refute all its shrill protests. Take that, brain!

Alas, it is not meant to be. 

I’ve started a new novel and I think it’s time to really inhabit it, to divert all the time and thought I use for the blog and apply it to a new novel. I intend it to be fast and funny. My goal is write about 60,000 words by Labor Day and have some version of the story on Amazon in time for the holidays.

What’s the book about? It’s a satire about the upheaval the introduction social media wreaks on the afterlife. It centers on a star-crossed Romeo and Juliet couple only instead of Juliet being on a balcony, she’s in heaven and instead of Romeo being on a plaza, he is in hell.

It’s a match made in heaven.

And hell!

And it’s all thanks to Facebook.

Maybe this will be the project that leads to some sort of authorial stability.

Maybe not.

I now know this after nine years: no stability will come from blogging four or five times each week.

It’s like what Branch Rickey told future Pirate Hall of Famer Ralph Kiner when Kiner said he was too valuable to be traded.

“Ralph,” Rickey said, “we finished last with you, we can finish last without you.”

Related …

My career advice: Don’t be like me!

Telling the truth to writers about writing

My business plan: Keep feeding the unicorn

How to review “Last Baby Boomer” and praise from those who have

The 12th post: a blog on bloggin’

Friends sayin' I'm lazy. Am I?

(803 words)

We were enjoying a splendid little evening idle of office cigars, beers and the new Stones album when one of my friends dive bombed my buzz.

“You know,” he said, “some of our friends think you’re just lazy.”

Huh?

It was incredibly rude, almost as if I’d blurted out I think some of our friends are just stupid.

They’re not, of course. They’re all super smart. You have to be highly intelligent to be friends with me. 

How else could you convince a suspicious spouse you were going to spend the night out drinking with a guy whose deadbeat blog brags he hasn’t had a real job since 1992?

On second thought, maybe ALL my friends are stupid.

Am I lazy?

No.

I’m unproductive.

I’ve spent the last 22 years whimsically chasing activities I’ve mistakenly believed would lead to tangible profit.

We live in a world where it’s easy to mistake a man digging a hole is working much harder than any man or woman who's simply staring out a window while engaged in soulful thought.

We confuse motion with productivity.

I contend I’m doing exactly what I should be doing and that, yes, it’ll one day lead to an obvious kind of success.

A lazy person doesn’t write and sell books. Heck, a lazy person doesn’t read books.

I’ve written two books that have earned exactly the kinds of reactions far more successful authors than I would cherish.

I’m particularly proud of the book I wrote that urges all who struggle to cheerfully persevere in spite of life’s relentless ass kicking.

Even better, I took that message and from a dead stop became a credible public speaking. I in two years went from speaking for free to church groups to being offered several thousand dollars to keynote state-wide conventions.

Sure, those lucrative gigs are for now rare, but I just last month agreed to be represented by a prestigious talent agent who’s convinced he can make them a staple of my schedule.

This blog is rebuttal testimony to anyone who contends I’m lazy.

What’s it earn? Absolutely nothing.

Or does it?

It’s the fertile grassroots base for everything I do. Blog readership — and I’ve had more than 25,000 hits in the last three months — has led to speaking engagements, free vacations and more book sales than I can count.

Plus, the “Crayons!” book couldn’t have been written had the blog never existed. 

And think for a moment about that: During a time of both personal and national hardship, I didn’t succumb to addiction, tawdry infidelity or the temptations of Pokemon Go. I instead wrote a cheerleader book saying, c’mon, times are tough, but we’re going to be fine.

I’m doing all this in the midst of publishing industry tumult when the very best minds in the business are daily failing at figuring how they can make an on-line dime. 

Then there’s this: Lots and lots of people really love this blog. Reading it makes them happy.

That’s exactly what one emcee told the audience when he introduced me last fall. “If I’m having a bad day, I know I can go to Chris’s blog and I’ll feel better,” he said. “It makes me happy.”

It doesn’t pay, but no one can tell me there’s no value in creating something that earns that kind of reaction from strangers.

I guess I’m audacious to think like that.

I’ve had some advise me I should take a job waiting tables, tending bar or brewing coffee.

I decline this well-intended advice because I’m altruistic. I know me taking a job like that or some low-paying news reporting jobs would rob someone who may need it more.

Plus, I’m realistic. I’m far too much of a smart ass to ever work in customer service ever again. Too many people are armed these days for sass like mine to proliferate in public.

I used to be what I considered unconventional, but now have to admit I’m eccentric.

Next stop: Nut job!

But I’m not lazy.

I guess one of my problems is I’ve always wrestled with earning a living is because  I’ve always believed being born entitled me to living. And, by God, I intend to live my ass off.

I intend to laugh, love, think and revel in this world and one day puzzle out a way to make it somehow pay.

So go ahead and call me a cheerfully unproductive, optimistic, persevering, audacious, altruistic, realistic, unconventionally eccentric nut job.

And because I’ve got a darling wife who for the time being still puts up with it all, call me blessed.

Just don’t call me lazy.

I’m just a guy standing on the shore believing his ship is about to come in and hoping when it does it’s not some leaky one-seat rowboat with a busted oar.

If it does happen like that then please just call me a cab.

Related …

My compliments: My day with the PR&LA

Summarizing my fall season of public yapping

My career advice: Don’t be like me!

“Use All The Crayons!” A 10-star review

Non-worker takes daughter to work

Blog tourists coming to Youngstown!

Too damn busy to blog

My back aches. My knees are sore. I haven’t had a hangover in 10 days. It’s a world gone mad.

What gives?

I’m immersed in rehabbing my mother’s South Hills condo with my buddy Mark. He’s a marvel. He does flooring, masonry, drywall, plumbing, electric. I tell you, he does it all.

Me? I try not to get busted checking Facebook while Mark’s doing all the work. 

The progress is already impressive and I’m confident we’re adding thousands of dollars in value to the eventual sales price. But it’s a lot of hard work, especially for a guy who’s idea of hard work is writing a blog that runs 800 words instead of 700.

And I miss near-daily blogging.

• Josie, 15, is out-earning her father. She’s working the Dippin’ Dots stand at Idlewild. She’s enjoying the job and I’m happy for her, but the situation underscores how I’ve made some really, really bad decisions about my career. 

• I’d like to see the reaction of the conservative media if after last night Hillary dumped Tim Kaine and nominated Michelle Obama for VP.

• It’d be fun for future historians if Hillary became president and became embroiled in a sex scandal with a young male intern. 

• I had the car AC fixed last week. I just couldn’t endure another day of parkway traffic with the windows down. Really, the heat was (barely) tolerable, but the highway noise drove me crazy. I love listening to satellite radio in the car and no AC made that impossible. 

• My favorite Sirius stations are (not in any order) Willie’s Roadhouse, E Street Radio, Tom Petty Radio, Outlaw Country, Elvis, and Bluesville. But I jump around to jazz, Broadway and all the decade stations. But the first thing I check is always Radio Classics. Val, too. We just love those campy old radio shows. I in particular love the Westerns and Dragnet. So entertaining. To us, at least. Our kids threaten to jump out of the moving vehicle the instant they hear it on.

• Unless every reader abandons me all at once, sometime in the next two days this blog will have had its busiest month. It’s conceivable this month will be the first 10,000-view month. I know, it’s hardly Khardashian, but it seems substantial to me. Thanks for reading. Please share with friends whenever you deem it worthy.

• My nominee for stupid Trump tweet of the month goes to the one that argued our enemies must be drooling because neither Clinton nor Kaine “look” like leaders. Our WWII enemies thought the same thing about a fat old drunken Englishman and a hobbled Yankee who was confined to a wheelchair. It makes it seem surprising that Trump picked Mike Pence instead of Dwayne Johnson. 

• Part of the big blog month is due to an unlikely surge in Russian readers. So many throngs of old Soviets have taken to the blog, it almost feels like a prank. But I figure a country that has yet to master the technologies of the flush toilet has better things to do so I take it at face value.

• Equally odd and just as welcome was the news that more than 150 readers from the Indian Ocean island paradise of Mauritius flocked in to read the blog. How this happens when I’ve never in my life typed much less visited Mauritius is baffling. I intend to write about this again in hopes island official invite me and my family to visit March 12 for Mauritius Independence Day to be the parade grand marshall.

• The blog in the last month has enjoyed heavy readership from people in Germany, France, China, Canada, Ireland, Ukraine and Slovenia. Most unusual? A couple people from the tiny landlocked principality of Andorra in France. I have no idea how any of these internationals find the blog. Heck, I’m surprised when people from Altoona find it.

• I haven’t had time to tweet much this month, but this is one of my favorites: “Did your Mom ever write your name on your undershirt tag? She was years ahead of her time. Mom: inventor of the original Collar ID!”

• After a great run of summer presentations to financiers, library patrons, retired teachers and other groups, I’m now facing an empty calendar. It’s confounding. I was in the running for keynoting the Women In Trucking convention in San Antonio in October and just found out the picked someone else. How can that be? This is bound to sound immodest, but wouldn’t I be perfect for WIT?

• To put the blog numbers in perspective, a month where I’ll get more than 9,000 readers still pays less than a day working at the Dippin’ Dots shack.

• Back to work! And I only wish that meant more blogging.

Related …

4 days, 3 talks, 3 results

8,180

Happy Birthday to Bob Dylan & my blog!

200 nations have read this blog!

Trump vs. Fiorina & who’s our ugliest president?

This is, gulp, my 1,500th blog post

(651 words)

When I click the “publish” button above this draft, this will become my milestone 1,500th blog post in seven years.

Of course, that may never happen.

I still have about 90 minutes to decide whether or not to climb out on the fire escape and throw myself from the roof of the 3-story Tin Lizzy, Youngstown’s tallest structure and for the past two months home of my on-going blog futility.

Seven years, 1,499 blog posts.

Time flies when you’re feeling irrelevant. 

Turning 50 bothered me much less than my blog turning 1,500.

I worry the blog is going to go through some mid-life crisis, go out and buy a 'vette and stick me with the bill.

Maybe I’ll feel different in the year 3463 A.D. when I turn 1,500 — and you can bet I’ll be using Throwback Thursday profile pictures exclusively if that happens.

Blogging for so long with so little tangible success is either a form of insanity or an invitation for insanity to barge in through an ear and build a spacious home.

It’s all so untenable.

I’d quit but I’m aware of at least two people who love the blog.

That’d be me and you.

I do love blogging. I think it’s made me the writer I’ve always wanted to be; sharp, fast, incisive with an instinctive humorous bent on every topic.

There are many writers I admire, but there are no writers with whom I’d swap abilities.

I think most writers think that way, egotists that we are.

And I think you do love it. Not in the way you love your dog, your TV or ice cream, but you do enjoy the blog. You must. Getting anyone to read anything any more is a real accomplishment.

Getting them to read an enigmatically-named and highly personal blog aimed at thought-provoking humor is a real challenge.

Yet, read you do.

And many people use these exact words — “I love your blog” — to encourage me. Many people come up to me and just crack up over some lines I’ve written. And I hear from people all over the world for whom the blog is near-daily must-read.

It’s very gratifying.

They say they can’t believe I’m not famous.

Me, I’d settle for solvent.

And, oh, boy, so would my wife.

I don’t think Val believes the blog is a happy little diversion to so many people and that many would be deeply disappointed if I just up and quit and took a job tending bar — the only thing I remain qualified to do anymore.

I ask top writers whose opinions I respect what I should do to become successful, to make some dough. They all say the same thing.

“Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

Meaning what?

Being gloomy? Feeling forlorn? Waking up in the middle of the night in fear a tiny gust of wind will blow my little house of cards to smithereens? 

Yet, I persevere with cheer and faith my friends are correct. I believe success will come if I just keep doing what I’m doing.

I sometimes feel a kinship to the Biblical Job, an odd analogy I admit for a man who for 23 years hasn’t had a job.

See, I do believe in this blog. I do believe people love it and it will one day prosper as they foresee.

And that will make the eventual success all the more sweet.

But until that happens I ask one favor:

Don’t tell me you think it will. Don’t say, man, some day the whole world is going to find out about www.EightDaysToAmish.com and you’ll be a huge sensation.

Don’t tell me to just be patient, that I’m on the right track.

Don’t say these struggles are temporary and will eventually be an interesting footnote in the bigger story about the importance of persistence in the face of daunting setbacks.

Do not tell me it’s all going to pay off.

Do not, please, tell me I am great.

Tell my wife!

Related . . .

May 23, 2008: Blog origins (my second post)

Happy Birthday to Bob Dylan (& this blog)!

And on the 7th day he blogged

An exercise in ironic education

My new office!

Binge reading my blog in a tree stand

To err is humon: blogs and typos

(662 words)

I contend the gracious maxim, “To err is human,” should always include at least one deliberate typo.

“To err is humon.”

It’d be a handy reminder that even in simple sentences intended to forgive human carelessness mistakes are bound to happen.

My life is full of these handy reminders. Some of them read my blog.

I go to great lengths to ensure my blog is error-free. These prudent safeguards are not enough. Many posts remain rife with sloppy errors.

And I’m always grateful whenever anyone points them out. I invariably thank these people and go straight to the computer to make the fix.

I guess there are writers who become angry when readers point out mistakes in their blogs. They are embarrassed.

I’m not like that at all and have trouble understanding the reaction.

Do they think people expect from them perfection?

That’s hard to believe. I’m pretty sure most people who read blogs do so with the understanding that people like me who blog are in some way defective or else we wouldn’t have enough free time to blog.

So my primary goal is to four or five times a week write something either compelling or funny. People will find that satisfying even during the times when I mistakenly use the same same word twice.

But I aspire to more. I want to give readers a typo-free blog.

So once I’ve done the first draft I usually go for a walk and come back and re-read the damn thing five or six times again with an eye on catching typos, redundancies or flabby wording that takes some of the giddy yap out of the flow.

Then I dash home to post and begin weighing when it’d be a socially acceptable time for me to start boozing.

Ideally, that’s when I’d hear from readers about any errors they detect.

This sometimes happens with Dave, an eagle-eyed reader and avid follower of my blog.

In the interests of descriptive clarity, I should point out this isn’t the Dave who (still for now) owns The Pond, but not a computer. The only time that Dave reads my blog is when I print it out and show it to him, which I’ve done maybe twice in the past year. 

This is the Dave who so enjoys the blog he stops reading it cold turkey every August so he can then for two weeks non-stop binge read it while in his central Illinois tree stand.

I just love that (link below).

More description: This is the eagle-eyed Dave who years ago succumbed to hereditary hair loss and surrendered his thin remainders to a daily shave.

So let’s say he’s bald eagle-eyed Dave.

He said I should have a daily “Find-The-Typo!” contest where the first reader to notify me about a deliberate or careless typo would win a free book.

“It’d be like the cover of Playboy which has tiny Playboy logo hidden somewhere in the picture,” he said.

I find the idea charming for reasons that have nothing to do with cleavage. It’d be like outsourcing tedious editing obligations. But the last thing I need to do is find yet another reason to give my book — the one that on Page 1 says “THIS BOOK IS FREE” — away at no charge.

Plus, Dave would wind up with something like 80 free copies and might just be savvy enough to find a way to make a better profit from them than I ever have.

So, in short, I ask for your friendly understanding.

This is a recreational blog. It’s free. If you see a mistake, I’ll be grateful if you point it out, even more so if you do it without resorting to that sing-song school yard nyah-nyah-nyah taunt that still stings my soul.

To err is endemic to casual blogging.

And if you’re having fun and I’m having fun, really, who gives a puck?

Related . . .

Binge reading my blog in a tree stand

The vanishing stigma of typpos

Reading my sh!t on the crapper

Random thoughts on race, Ferguson & Three Dog Night

Shiny new homepage for “Eight Days ToAmish!”