Relationships in the General

Romantic relationships can be emotionally stabilizing or motivating, and can also be a great distraction, but relationships with friends and family are a must.  I’ve talked about my friend Alexandra enough that this should already be obvious.  Whereas being in the middle of a romance may inspire one to greatness, especially if you are married with a family that needs financial backing and financial wooing, properly developing friendships and family relationships water the seeds of intellectual rose petals.  Without these intellectual rose petals, you won’t be a writer and you won’t be successful.

Financial wooing is important, trust me… if there are any sugar mommas out there to support my life forever, or just some well-meaning patron, contact me immediately.  Still, a writer must be able to spend time in the fields of intellectual and artistic greatness if personality-destroying fame is ever to become a reality, and that does not happen in romantic relationships.  Romantic relationships are, as I said in my previous post, a distraction to the type of thought and work-time a writer and artist must become well-acquainted with.  Perhaps a romantic relationship feeds the right emotions needed, but the required processes of the mind need to be fed somewhere else. 

For some, a Lone Ranger fight against the world is the intellectual field that will bloom greatness; even for those some, of which I consider myself one, friends and family are still needed.  Maybe the ties with friends and family don’t need to be strong but they need to exist all the same.  Family provides, at the very least, a source of ego-stroking love that every writer wants.  Starting out is a hard business and I couldn’t imagine doing it without the knowledge that I have a family behind me.

Friends, though, are the key.  It’s not a bad thing that you can’t choose your family—our families are a lesson in life if nothing else—friends provide the opportunity to choose characters, minds, and abilities that will help you grow as a writer, an artist, or whatever the heck you want to be.  My friends Alexandra, Paul, and Ben Sloan all bring an artistically-minded confidence to our friendship along with their brilliant artistic abilities, for whom I am particularly grateful; my “other” family as I call them, the Ulmers, along with Dr. Scott Kisker, bring me a source of spiritual support and forgiveness that I’d be lost without in addition to a constant, high-level intellectual challenge to all that I think and believe, not to mention that they are great friends and great models for the life that I hope to lead; and I have a wonderful collection of friends whose faith and love will always keep my writing grounded in the realities of life as well as my dreams for what life could be.  These are the qualities that I most value in friends for the sake of our friendship but also for the sake of my hoped-for career.  It’s a lesson that we all must learn: how to choose friends that will breathe life into our soul and help us mold ourselves into the person that we want to be.   And sometimes, you just need to spend time with people that you love, friends or family, to laugh heartily.  Hopefully, though, those people that you “just simply love” also possess the qualities that you’d hope for in a close relationship or more of an acquaintance-type relationship.

Of course, we cannot forget the many people who have already shaped us as we go forth to choose our friends.  It is with their memory that we should best learn the type of person that we want close to us as we move forward in life.  Just last night, actually, I had a dream that my poetry professor who died a number of years ago was alive and that we could again share poems with one another.  That was an important relationship that will stay with me forever.  My grandmother who passed away, and my grandmother still living but that I am only now starting to greatly appreciate (I’ve been a terrible grandson, son, brother, cousin, nephew, all of the above, for most of my life); my grandfathers, my cousins, aunts, uncles, and obviously my nuclear family; my Spanish teachers, my philosophy professor, my English professors, and my seminary professors; my pastors, particularly John Wesley Taylor and Allen Merrill and Doug Robinson-Johnson; all these people have not only shaped who I am but have worked hard at protecting me, loving me, and teaching me, and just plain making sure that I’m alive, that I owe it to them to learn the valuable lessons that they have to teach me and to make something of myself.  Even if you, my reader, decide not to have close relationships with your family or any of the people who have gone before you, I urge all of us to remember those people so that we can create better relationships moving forward with people that we most want relationships with to best shape us and develop our greatness.

Greatness may come isolated but never in a vacuum.  I myself isolate myself oftentimes, sometimes accidentally but usually on purpose, but that doesn’t mean that the relationships I have with people aren’t important.  I’d still be without any life-vision or right perspective on the work required to be a writer if it weren’t for Alexandra, Paul, and Ben.  And I’d be totally without an intellectual vision if it weren’t for the Ulmers and Dr. Kisker.  Relationships, not romantic but just general relationships, are vital to creative greatness. 

I only wish that my friends and I had some cool name like the Inklings.

(P.S.  I promise to stop theorizing on life in the near future and focus more on what I’m actually doing with my life to make all of these dreams come true)

Why I Use Typewriters

Admittedly, my typewriter use of late has been lackluster.  Still, I noted in a much earlier post that I write letters and other things by hand while doing much of my typing with a typewriter.  My next post will be about why I hand-write as much as I do, but I want to talk here about why I use a typewriter.  I want to remind my precious readers that, as always, what I say here isn't really about what I think but points to the larger question of how one should go about becoming successful in a chosen career path.  What I think and do only serve as the avenues for writing about the bigger picture, though of course I do want my readers to find me incredibly flashy and impressive.  And, indeed, my choice to use a typewriter has a lot to do with how to become successful.

I'm not sure modern typewriters really count.  I mean, if you can hit the "delete" key and the typewriter deletes, is that really what we think of when we imagine typewriters?  Probably not.  As a young boy I was amazed to find out, when working for a lawyer, that typewriters are still produced except now with deleting capabilities.  Of course, even those typewriters with a delete key cannot simply delete and erase ink as if it never existed: pressing delete essentially says to the typewriter, "use white out, please."  The key on the typewriter might as well be "white out" rather than "delete."  Oh well, I suppose the people producing these typewriters can't be as precise or logical as I am.  But since these silly deleting typewriters aren't what we imagine when we think of typewriters, let's try to forget that they have ever seen the light of day.

I have two typewriters in my possession, though I really only use one.  The oldest of the two typewriters is very old indeed.  If I remember correctly, it is a pre-1900 baby.  Quite frankly I don't care if I don't remember correctly, either, because I want the typewriter to be that old--I'd be very upset if someone told me that it was made later than that.  At the same time, I'd be very upset with myself if I ever tried to seriously use this old typewriter with any regularity.  Unfortunately my other typewriter is a modern typewriter, but thankfully it lacks any delete key, at least when it's only being used as a traditional typewriter.  It actually has the ability to hook up to a screen and type onto an older type of computer to save on a floppy disk... what the heck is a floppy disk?  Anyway, needless to say, I don't and won't use the screen because I don't want any temptation to hit delete and watch the words disappear. 

You may have read before that what it means to be a writer is that I write.  I write whenever I can, not when I feel inspired or "when I feel like it."  And the key to writing is to let the words spill out unashamed of the quality.  The more one writes the better one gets at writing.  If I were constantly concerned with the quality then I'd basically not write anything and then not get any better, and then I'd be forced to worry about the quality because it wouldn't be very good, then I'd not write much of anything, and then I'd not get any better.  You see, typewriters are key because the keys tell the story.  Once you press a key the letter stays, the words stay, the sentences stay and never leave.  That's how you improve and learn, by practice.  Afterwards whatever you write with a typewriter can be edited and transformed into a much better piece of work, so you get the best of both worlds: quick improvement and advancement in the world of writing by, indeed, writing, and a good work.  Using a delete key would only produce a good work, maybe.

So there lies the key to success: if you want to be good at something, do that particular thing.  Don't worry about being good at whatever it is, just do it, as Nike would tell us.  Eventually, after lots of time and practice, you can decide whether the skill that you have exhibited is enough for you to justify continuing to seek your passion.  Granted, if it's your passion, you should do everything you can to make your dreams come true, but there are clearly situations that call for re-evaluation.  But just do it, that's the secret, and that's what typewriters facilitate.

Anyone who knows me might be disappointed that I have written a post about typewriters and have left out my penchant for tradition.  To those folk I apologize, but my love for tradition will be a big part of my next post about why I write letters by hand.  Until next time.