I DID IT M-Y-Y-Y WAY

I’ve been conducting this pillar of piffle (I don’t really mean that and neither did the man who originated it in his newspaper column years ago. But I use it now and then as a salute to his memory) for three and a half years now and today I’m calling a brief halt to look back at the whole thing and ask myself what have I been doing for all that time?

Not much, you say? Well I don’t know about that. I’ve produced over two hundred thousand words, which would make four books at the minimum length of fifty thousand words each, so I’ve definitely been working, no matter what anyone may think of the results I’ve gotten.

Any such results have been purely of the psychic kind because no one has yet paid me to reprint any of my articles, but then not many bloggers get those kinds of offers. Their reward normally is limited to the sense of satisfaction they get from venting their ideas about life and its ups and downs and turning them loose on the world. If a few compliments come back to reward them, they feel they have not lived in vain.

Where do you find things to write about? A lot of bloggers don’t consider this a problem. They simply zero in on whatever subject the media is concerned with at any particular point in time and add their contribution to the pile. Right now the hot topics are General Petraeus, O.J. Simpson, Senator Craig, the disorderly mob of candidates for President cluttering the airwaves, and three or more girls named BritneySpearsLindsayLohanParisHilton who all run together in my mind and become one woman whom I’ll never forget, although I’m perfectly willing to try.

The bloggers all pour out their hearts on these subjects, but they’ve already been so heavily covered by the media it’s hard to see what they have to add. When they try to be funny they usually don’t succeed too well, so it’s a lot of wasted effort all around. For myself, I lay off the so-called hot topics of the day for the reason that I don’t have any particular knowledge concerning them that’s not known to the public at large, whose time I don’t have any wish to waste. I write what I know, and looking back over my 178 pieces since 2003 I find that I still managed to cover a fairly wide field of topics, to wit:

Reading down the list of my titles…I don’t get very far. That’s because I was cute with them, for instance in using a lot of lines from popular songs for titles. This often makes it hard to figure out what I was writing about, and the only way to fix that is to re-read the pieces. I don’t have time for that right now, so I’ll just do my best to recall them and describe them here. Hold on to your hats.

My first adventure was with a poem, “The Ballad of Dutch Schultz.” It’s about a drug dealer, but some people taught I was writing about the original Dutch, the racketeer who died (suddenly) in the Thirties. You’ll see it again. I’m always trying to push it.

Next I had a couple of original proposals “Get the FBI Out of the Justice Dept.” and “Get the Supreme Court Out of Washington.” No action on them yet, but I’ll keep trying.

After that I branched out and went into action on a number of fronts. For a while I was doing a series on county government across the U.S. There are over 3,000 counties in the country, most of them totally unnecessary. Some states, like Texas and Georgia, have so many of them that their maps look like the tiled floor of a bathroom. Most of the better known ones like Harlan County and Deaf Smith County had lots of history behind them and provided good material for my space. With others you had to winkle the history out and punch it up a bit to make it interesting. Getting information wasn’t as easy as might be expected. There are no books on the subject and not much in the way of encyclopedia entries. It’s field that’s wide open for a researcher and I may go back to it again.

I reviewed a few books and movies here and there, usually ones that I thought were ridiculous and had no relation to reality in their description of law enforcement, my former occupation. One of them was the movie “Reservoir Dogs.” Grotesque. Another was a `book by a lady named Susan Sloan called “Guilt By Association.” Its cover was plastered with raves from critics, but that’s what they were, “raves” as in sanitariums, where there’s a lot of raving. The right kind of place for those critics. In both cases then I was bucking the critical consensus, but that’s the fun part of reviewing after all.

I’ve described how things were when I started writing this blog. I traveled over the landscape, finding all kinds of subjects to write about. Lately I find it more difficult. I can always go back to my reserve of police reports done when I was a cop, but I try not to. I want to be with-it, I guess. To make this easier on myself I’m going to cut down on words by a third, going from 1200 words weekly to 800, the normal length for a newspaper column. Some people thought I went on too long anyway. We shall see.






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