ghosting

My dad was a writer too, a journalist. He told me recently that the reason he was a sports-writer for so many years was that being a real reporter in a small town ensures that you have no friends. Eventually, he said, nobody likes you. Sports are neutral, in their way. It's just a matter of what did or didn't happen at the basketball game and nobody to blame for it.

I always thought it was odd that my dad wrote sports, considering how little interest he had in them. He didn't really care to watch the football game on Sunday afternoon, nor did he relate to the kind of guy who did. He'd rather watch an episode of Star Trek or the Twilight Zone--by far. And then meditate out loud for an hour or so to his small children about what the meaning of it had been.

I guess I learned logic from him, and a love of story, and a curiosity about culture and various ways of life. I never picked up his Spock-like ability to deliver complicated sentences perfectly articulated, with no hesitations, in an emotionally neutral tone of voice. Or his steel-trap memory, a vast catalogue of names, dates, numbers, faces and facts on topics as wide-ranging as Chuck Berry's discography to Napoleon's defeat in Russia, arranged with encyclopedic sobriety and available to him at will. The only thing he can't seem to remember are the names of the people his children are dating, generally, and I suspect that's a matter of choice.

Putting your name on something you have written is hard. My dad and I agree on that. Neither of us cares much about praise, and we're too tender for blame. I used to act on stage, and thought I loved getting attention. I don't like attention anymore, positive or negative. I just like to get a job done and relax at the end of the day.

So I write out the ideas other people have in their heads, and I try to get it right. I pretend to be them, like I used to pretend to be other people on stage. I'm having a hard time today, because the book I'm supposed to be working on doesn't interest me that much.

I suppose my dad felt that way once or twice.