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!

Van Palin & The Monsters of Crock Tour

I thought on Saturday about getting up and dashing off an blog entry about McCain VP pick Sarah Palin. I was going to write about a slim silver lining of McCain winning would be the eventual commercial fisherman-out-of-water reality show that would soon feature her regular guy husband Todd awkwardly mingling with Washington muckety-mucks.

I was going to note that policy-wise, she’s a Dick in a dress (Cheney, that is). She’s just like him. Coincidentally, one of my all-time very favorite songs is “Lola,” by the Kinks, a catchy tune that addresses that very scenario so anytime I can use a line like “a dick in a dress,” count on it, I’ll not shy from the task.

And I was going to note that Alaskans must spend those dreadful months where the daily sun shines for about the length of your standard NFL commercial break procreating and dreaming up offbeat names for their many children. The Palin’s have Track, Bristol, Willow, Piper and Trig Paxon Van.

Serious journalists have many questions for the Palins these days, but the one I’d most like to ask is why they gave their 5-month-old son a second unnecessary middle name -- and can a second “middle” name even be considered middle? -- when they’d given him a perfectly useless one already.

I suspect the husband grew up rocking out to Van Halen and thought it would be cool to call their kid Van Palin in rocking tribute to a great band (and I’m talking about the Sammy Hagar years). I like it, but I sense the wife put the kibosh on it and let him add it as his three-quarter name.

I was going to write about all that, but my laziness got the better of me. And, besides, I thought, “nothing newsworthy’s going to happen over the next two days.”

That turned out to be a slight miscalculation on my part. Sure, I’ve made more consequential ones.

For instance, years ago I should have declared myself to be a staunch religious right conservative. Had I done that I’d be skating through life with essentially a get-out-of-jail free card. As long as you say you believe in the absolute right to life, guns and God, the reliably religious conservatives will forgive any number of your sins.

That became evident when it was revealed that the Palin’s 17-year-old daughter Bristol is 5-months pregnant with a child they’ll probably name Mesa Glacier Dokken Palin. Conservatives said this was great, galvanizing news. I wonder if the newly famous father of the baby feels the same.

Now the same crowd that went apoplectic with predictable scolds when 16-year-old Jamie Lynn Spears announced she was pregnant is saying this is a wonderful family situation. The movement that gave us Ken Starr and Linda Tripp says personal lives should be off limits.

This was typical of the wrong-headed thinking we’ve come to know from the political movement that was founded in America by Benedict Arnold.

It’s true. America’s most famous traitor was a religious conservative who thought America should remain a British colony and was hanged in devotion to that far-right cause. He was bitterly opposed to the Massachusetts liberals he and his hero King George considered radical extremists.

Go through the entire history of the United States, find the side the most conservative people favor and watch it be proven a complete failure. A sampler:

* Conservatives who favored everlasting slavery for 20 percent of the population left the Union and instigated the bloody Civil War because they were furious that radical liberals wanted to abolish slavery. Ditto for female suffragettes and civil rights.

* Conservatives like the disgraced Charles Lindbergh thought opposing Nazi Germany was bad for business while liberals like Franklin Delano Roosevelt recognized fascism as a tyrannical threat to the entire world.

* Sen. Joe McCarthy, a man many staunch conservatives wanted to see become president, used baseless innuendo to ruin the lives of thousands of men and women he wrongly suspected were Communist sympathizers. He died at the age of 48, a lonely, maligned alcoholic who was already beginning to sense that history would claim his name for anytime flag-waving “patriots” trample the rights of Americans who disagree with their First Amendment opinions.

* Conservatives thought escalating the war in Vietnam was a swell idea while radical liberals died at places like Kent State saying, no, it’s not.

* They thought Richard Nixon was a great president who should not have resigned in spite of mounting evidence of criminal activity, but that Bill Clinton should go because of a private indiscretion with a consenting female adult.

* Conservatives were bitterly opposed to the man they now hail as their greatest leader ever, Ronald Reagan. It was in 1987 when Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus called Reagan “a useful idiot for Soviet propaganda” for initiating Glasnost with Mikhail Gorbachev.

* They thought that George H.W. Bush was a war wimp while still supporting his clueless son though two calamitous terms as a historically failed president. And just think for a minute of what a bloodless, weeks-long cakewalk the conservatives ensured you the invasion of Iraq would be.

* They think the stuff that you’ve just read is stupid liberal nonsense that contains not a shred of intelligent fact.

Wrong again.