Gimme That Internet

For awhile, I was planning on trying to tote up all the words I wrote during the week before the Super Bowl. Why I was going to do this was a question that didn't occur to me until later than it probably should've, but it did occur to me. Not only would it not be much of a conversation starter -- especially when I'd have to later allow that, averaged out, I got something like seven cents per word -- but it would also probably be something of a bummer. More so to me than to the poor human stuck listening to me talk about it, but probably to both of us.

Luckily for me, though, some of those words were kind of a big deal for me. Over the last half of the week, I crashed through a story for the Wall Street Journal that was pretty easily the biggest thing I've yet done for them, and definitely the biggest journalistic "get" of a career essentially devoid of them. Which is fine, since that's not really what I do -- I compare athletes to deli meats, first and foremost. But I can see what's cool about this sort of thing, now. The piece is about the rediscovery -- after 44 years of being presumed lost -- of the network broadcast of the first Super Bowl. That one's here, and I'm pretty proud of it.

I also wrote what will probably be my last Kicked Off column for The Awl, and it is -- spoiler alert -- about the Super Bowl, and also has some more description of Super Bowl I (and more profanity, and more adjectives) than I was allowed at the Journal. I'm probably prouder of it, because my affection for my own voice overshadows my desire to be a scoopy newspaper dude. I also think I came closer to saying what I've been trying to say all year in this one than I previously have.

It's not a failure of taste that leads NFL owners—all of them owners of profitable teams, all of them beneficiaries of a television deal that pays the league $4 billion per annum—to boldly demand massive concessions from the players union because Of These Difficult Economic Times. Or that leads Sports Illustrated's NFL hagiographist/coffee-critic Peter King to write a tone-deaf piece fretting over the prospect that commissioner Roger Goodell—"sandy-haired and fit at 51," recipient of nearly $10 million in annual pay, point man on the owners' plan to extract those concessions and add two regular season games (which fans don't necessarily want) to the NFL's already brutal schedule—might be working too hard, according to friends. Or, at the most distant pole, that led Chuck Klosterman to get up at the Varsity Letters reading series on Thursday night and extemporize to the effect that the prospect of a NFL player dying on the field is something he likes most about the game. "Think about it," Klosterman said, tipsy off his own contrarianism, "they're putting their lives on the line out there." Klosterman seemed, beneath his grin and that beard and at the distance from which I regarded him, to be moved by how moved he was at the prospect, and amused at how amusing he found it.

That is all rotten, of course. But while the above are not in good taste, they are failures of perspective first and foremost. They reflect an inability or unwillingness to see beyond the self-flattery of dumb comforts and acknowledge complicated circumstances and context. Or, if you prefer, those distinct idiocies are different symptomatic presentations of the same disorder—a terminal inability to give a shit. The NFL, as it presently exists, is built to elicit this response in people—it makes emotion cheaper and easier to digest, it takes the laziest arms-length cruelties and ignorance and processes them until they are rich and filling. But the bigger the NFL makes itself—the more it gorges on synergies and succumbs to the distorting, obliterating appetites of irresponsible wealth—the more obese it becomes. The reason why the long march to the Super Bowl is exhausting—and why the entire NFL experience is increasingly obscene in an increasing number of ways—is that the NFL is not presently in shape to make a journey this long. It is too big, and getting bigger.

So, after what was certainly the busiest week of my professional life -- I even did a Sunday Daily Fix this morning -- I feel mostly physical sensations. I fell on the ice in New Haven this morning, so I've got this shame/ache cocktail going on there, and I've some of the expected carpal tunnel/brain issues. But feeling even a little bit of pride is nice, and sort of a surprise. I look forward to resting, whenever I'll get to do that, but I didn't expect all this to feel as worth-it as it currently does. This could all be undone by another slip on the ice, though. Young septuagenarian over here. Jeez.

The Tired Sounds Of...

When I write, I write a lot. This is also true of when I talk or eat, but it's especially pronounced when it comes to This Writing Shit. I'm a really fast typist, and if I'm going to be honest also pretty well enamored by the sound of my own voice, and so writing 1,000 words to me doesn't always feel like a big deal. (Doing the Daily Fix -- which used to be an inexplicable 1300 words, and is still over a thousand most days -- on the regular has also conditioned me to think of 1,000 words as an hour-and-change/no-big-deal deal)

Obviously this isn't always the case -- when I'm trying to write in my inside/professional voice, for instance, it's obviously more difficult. But I don't need to tell you that this, say, is different from this. All you have to do is read them to see as much. The former's a third as long as the latter, but took several more drafts and several more hours to do. Some of that is the nature of working with newspaper editors -- good ones, in this case, but still people who most definitely will redline a draft and send it back to you -- but a lot of it is just me working the way I work. When it's happening for me, it happens in these big loud tumults of words and long, parenthetical-rich sentences -- for instance, there'd be a parenthetical here, were I making this sentence an example -- and things of that nature. You get some alliteration and some jokes and whatever, but it's basically an exploded drawing of my brain, hopefully with some connection to whatever the topic in question is. The struggle is to give it some shape, or to edit out the more egregious jokes or -- and I have some work to do on this part, I know -- limiting the parentheticals and finding some focus.

And maybe that's all that went on this week with my two pieces for The Awl, and I'm reading too much into it. So, as per usual, I did two football-related pieces for The Awl this week. The first one was this chat with Jeff Johnson which, once again, was fun as hell and -- because making jokes about Brett Favre's fantastically wise cock-shot gambit comes almost as easily to me as does writing long parentheticals -- about as easy as could be. It came out pretty funny, got a nice response, and I hope you'll read it. It's also almost 2,000 words and took about an hour or so to do. As long as NFL people keep doing silly/objectionable/easily-riffed-upon things, we could continue doing these every week, and it'll never be difficult or less fun. That's not the problem.

The problem was the weekly Kicked Off column, which -- and this is the doesn't-usually-happen part -- wound up being an intense struggle for me. Part of the problem was that I didn't totally know what I was going to be writing about. I was going to write about Favre and his photogenic peen, before realizing that it had actually apparently been covered fairly well in the sports press. Then I was going to write about embattled 49ers head coach, crucifix aficionado and objectively crazy human Mike Singletary, and coaches in general. And then, finally, I settled on the eventual topic -- Ben Roethlisberger and the dual, duelling uglinesses of his personal behavior and the NFL's institutional arbitrariness.

It wasn't that easy, though. For most of Thursday, I sat in front of my computer (yes, I do write on a computer, ladies) with nothing happening at all. I wrote a paragraph and tweaked it, then deleted it. I wrote some jokes about what Andy Reid's office must smell like, which is obviously kind of evergreen (the writing, not the smell of the office -- I'm getting a pretty strong "old fried" vibe, there). But the engine wasn't really turning over. I don't know what the cause of this was, and still kind of don't -- I think there was probably some anxiety about writing something too serious and not having people enjoy it as much as my cavalcade of dick jokes, and definitely some anxiety over wanting to have each Awl NFL column be the best thing written about football in that, or any, week. Which sounds okay, I guess, in a hard-driving perfectionist sense (and another way in which I'm like Tom Coughlin, I suppose), but which is also a pretty goofy way to address an unpaid online column I'm doing for yuks, even if I hope that the column could become a book or something someday. So I'm doubly proud of the mini-essay that resulted, both because I think it's pretty good in its own right and because it was something I did under duress late at night on Thursday and then in double-time on Friday. Mostly, though, I'm happy that it got done.

Which, you know, probably isn't the highest standard, necessarily. But while I've stressed over stuff like this before, this was the first time I'd really been in doubt about whether something was going to get done in time in a long while. With a lot of what I write for money, I simply don't worry about it enough to experience this sort of anxiety. I'm not tearing the Daily Fix out of my soul, and the Four Lessons things I'm writing for the WSJ's Metropolis section (and am supposed to be writing right now) aren't things I agonize over. (Although I did work hard on my Dan Dierdorf imitation in this one) The Awl columns mean a bit more to me, which makes a perverse type of sense given that I'm doing them for free. The relative editorial latitude, the ability to pick my subjects and write in my own voice and with the words I like best -- that should make it more fun. Ditto the reliable ego-feedback of a couple of weekly bylines and a generally kind response from the Awl's commenters (the rare internet commenters whose opinion I actually value). As usual with me, though, I tend to forget that having fun is even an option -- writing's my favorite thing, more or less, but because it's also my work, I kind of fall back on my default mood, which is self-lacerating anxiety/scotch-wanting. File that under the Mental Beatdown of Freelancing, I guess. Anyway, the good news: I still enjoy this stuff. The unsurprising news: I need to remind myself of that, sometimes.

Building With The Older Gods: Empire State Building, "Ground Zero" "Mosque" and Etc.

It has been quiet around the blog of late, I know. Just a few goofy videos and that one long What's It All Mean post from a few days back. I hear my public asking: David, where is the legendary fire in the belly? Where are the overlong and too-fervent exegeses on the myriad awfulnesses of Papa John and The Giant Rum-Glazed Pork Butt Known As Guy Fieri? Whither the searching examinations of your own random one-off writing goofs?

To all of this I can only say: calm down, America. The fire is still in the belly. It's just that the belly has been spending a ton of time on Metro North of late, helping the belly-owner's wife move into a new apartment in New Haven, CT. And also building some Ikea furniture. For this, the belly has been rewarded with a trip to lunch at Blue Hill at Stone Barns -- wedding gift certificate in effect, there, which made the cost a bit less ridiculous -- and a brief vacation from freelance-related anxiety. But the fire is there. The pride is back!



What an unbelievable American!

So, yeah: I have been doing husband things, and also briefly did some going-to-New-Hampshire-and-jumping-in-a-lake things, which was incredibly nice. But I've also done some writing stuff of late that -- because that is what this blog is supposed to be for -- I should mention here.

The first of these -- in that I started it first, and submitted my first draft like three and a half weeks ago -- is a piece in the Wall Street Journal about the greening of the windows in the Empire State Building. It was fun to report, although I keep bumping up against the fact that, despite all my years writing for (some) money, I have never really mastered the arid/informative news article style. This is not to say that my prose is just too vibrant and unforgettable for this sort of thing, so much as it is to say that I just lack confidence in my ability to write that sort of piece, and thus make it a lot harder than it probably is. Also that my prose is too vibrant and unforgettable for the strictures of the form. Anyway, this is why the good lord made editors, I suppose. At any rate, it's here, and has a neat video attached by Maya Pope-Chappell.

Of course, part of the fun of this stuff is being your own editor. Which is another way of saying "essentially writing without an editor." That's what I'm more or less able to do at GreenbuildingsNYC, where I'm both managing editor and head writer and (because why not) also shop steward and ombudsman and headwaiter. It's a great gig, in that regard. It's also great because I periodically get to pop off with 1,500-word pieces about Park51, the not-at-Ground-Zero non-mosque that every out-of-town clown and fame-humping media-bigot feels entitled to criticize. It's a non-story, in the end -- an opportunity for more un-reporting and corny SEO-ed link-whoring from a media that's essentially taking August off. But even though this whole dumb kerfuffle doesn't really matter -- doesn't matter relative to disaster in Pakistan, for instance, or really matter to many of us who actually live here in New York City -- it still has a certain importance as another chapter in New York's blessedly endless process of becoming itself. For many words on that -- almost all of which I'm proud of, despite my suspicion that an editor may have helped somewhat -- check out my piece on Park51 at gbNYC.

Spice Network/Stay Hungry: My Non-Sports Wall Street Journal Debut Is About Curry

You don't have to be a freelance writer to be the sort of person who moves personal goalposts to ensure a sort of Zeno's Paradoxical state of permanent unfulfillment -- plenty of people I know do this, and I assume it's one of the Seven Habits of Highly Effective But Permanently Scowling People. But man, does freelancing ever make it easy for those of us who choose to make things hard for ourselves. This post is going to get really Emo LiveJournal and squirmy, I should warn. All you really need to know is in the next paragraph; everything after that is blurt.

I'm not really able to detect the pitch of my own writing in this post thus far, but if it's coming off as a high whine, I apologize for it. I'm aware of how lucky I am to get as much work as I do, and of how fortunate I am to have been in the venues in which I've been (this would be a great place for a hilarious link to Dermatology Business Management Magazine, one of my first steady gigs, but that magazine has been out of business since like 2003 and the website was pretty Jukt Micronics when it actually existed). And, more to the point, a happy thing occasioned the writing of this post in the first place -- my piece about the nightmarish and inexplicably popular phaal curry at Brick Lane Curry House, and how that dish and its appearance on (nightmarish and inexplicably popular) Man Vs. Food helped rescue the restaurant, was on the front page of the Wall Street Journal's Greater New York Section on Thursday. (And was even in Gawker, which I'm sure my WSJ editors appreciated) It's a good thing! Not the curry, though: that tastes like scalding-hot sand, with bits of meat and a sad little devil's peen of dried chile floating in it.

I'm very proud of all those good things I just mentioned, of course, and I had a great time writing and reporting the piece; I'm excited to do another one for the GNY section, and to work with my editor there again, and all the rest. And yet here I am, knowing all this stuff a lot more than I'm actually feeling it, and thus missing the point of what is -- despite being a silly-ish and resolutely minor piece -- inarguably something of a career highlight. Or not that: I'm missing the point emotionally, which is made that much more poignant and unpleasant because I am fully aware of and pleased by the thing that is the point itself. That really cleared it up, didn't it.

The question, then, is what the true point here is -- the work or the pay for the work; the pride and the achievement or the reification and objectification of same. And this is where the self-defeating shittiness of the goalpost-moving tendency makes itself felt -- a couple of darlings got killed in edits, but by just about every metric the curry piece is a success, and so is this one and this one and this one and so on. And yet in terms of actually feeling accomplishment or pride or happiness about any of that, I'm honestly going to have to take your word for it.

Because... well, because my wife's getting ready to go to graduate school, which is going to double my financial responsibility, and because I can't possibly make enough money for the two of us to live writing fun articles I'm proud of as a freelancer. That's mostly it. It doesn't diminish my (abstract) pride in them, but stack all these lovely successes atop one another and you barely have a year's rent and utilities and Metrocards and periodic meals out. Unless we start going to one of those harbingers-of-The-Fall all-you-can-eat chains that I've seen advertising with ever greater frequency on TV. And I know Kate don't trust the sushi at CiCi's, you know? It's like, how long as that hamachi been under the heat lamps? And why is it even under the heat lamps in the first place? Sometimes I honestly think CiCi's doesn't even know what a tartare trio is.


Anyway, by the time I reached the old one, the goal line is in a different place. It was once my ambition to write a novel -- and I finally did that, and it's in the hands of my very awesome and very qualified agent, and I'm waiting to see what happens. But then it was my ambition to write pieces I want to write for magazines and websites that I respect and read myself -- and that's happening now, and has been happening for a couple years. But both those accomplishments have been superseded by another thing I haven't managed to accomplish yet -- which is making ends meet in a way that allows for something other than constant financial anxiety. And that last bit colors everything else I do. There is a way that this has always worked for me -- anxiety before a piece comes out, excitement immediately after, and then a crash of sorts accompanied by a taunting internal voice saying something like, "Don't spend all $250 of those dollars in one place, Diddy." And for whatever reason, the first stage is more intense, the second is briefer, and the voice is louder in the third.

This isn't all on me and my neuroses, of course -- living in New York City is both difficult and expensive, and circumstances in my life have changed and are changing still. But man would it ever be nice to be able to feel as proud of these things as I ought. For all the thrills of being a figure in the Elite Liberal Media apparatus that controls our nation (and keeps the bile ducts on pump in your more loathsome/paranoid monsterfaces) -- and I'm joking about the "thrills" part, there, but I'm also not -- sometimes all I really want is to relax. Someday, I suppose, I'll be able to rejoice in the coming-true of minorish but actual-not-making-fun dreams. That's my hope, at least. For now it's still kind of abstract. Being in the Wall Street Journal does seem pretty cool, when I think about it. I would love to better know what it feels like.

(And this is where I had a low-quality video of The Talking Heads play "Stay Hungry," because this much better video can't be embedded. But go here and watch it instead, please)