BLOG PLATFORM, WRITER PLATFORM, LAUNCHES MEMOIR

We’ve got a joke, or more accurately my blog efforts get ridiculed, around the keyboard. Goes like this:

“Why do you always write about yourself, or put yourself into every post?”

I answer by spelling memoir, as in memoir blogger.

“M-e … m-o-i-r. You can’t spell memoir without M and E.”

Hilarity is supposed to ensue, but my critics don’t get it, or they stopped getting it after the first thousand times.

It’s still funny.

I’ve been a writer, called myself a writer, since I was in grade school. I don’t remember but an Aunt told me about a conversation we once had. Did we? I don’t think so but I like the idea.

In the future, if I have a conversation with someone who doubts they’re a writer, but who writes like they’re on fire, I’ll tell them the same thing, they they’ve been a writer all along but didn’t know.

My first big effort to write earned me a drama class Oscar. My second gave me a prized slot in a local paper.

The big money started when I ghost blogged for a world class financial analyst. His sources gave him stories two days before they hit the news. It felt wrong, like the next knock on the door might be the wrong trick or treater.

Script Writer

After a visit to Los Angeles, or Culver City to be exact, I bought Final Draft and started writing screenplays. Even took a class promising a completed script at the end.

Unfortunately the class time was Saturday morning during high school football season and I had a kid on starting varsity.

They were winners, which meant me and a few dads spent the after game hours in my garage drinking beer and talking football shit. It was a great time, but hard to focus on the early Saturday class. I think it started at ten o’clock, which is two in the afternoon on hangover time.

The story that came out of the class was my fourth completed screenplay, a WWII drama. Think Good Will Hunting meets Dick Cheney when a sharp MIT engineering student makes a tremendous breakthrough for the war effort but his profiteering father keeps it under wraps to drive up the cost.

It got some eyes from the Bluecat Screenplay Competition.

I sent a couple to the Nichols Fellowship.

It’s solid work with the proper formatting and story.

Before turning them into books so Hollywood could look smarter by adapting my stories from a more reputable source than me, I had a visit that produced an entirely different sort of book.

A memoir. About ME.

Like all writers of any stripe know, the work is never about the writer unless they don’t finish on deadline. Or don’t have a deadline and spend fifteen years ‘getting it right.’

It’s about the reader, don’t you know? It’s always about the reader and trying to earn their trust.

My story, my book, is a timely piece about love and despair and the sort of faith and trust that keep relationships together.

I came down with sex cancer of the tongue, which sounded weird until it jumped and became a neck lump, which felt more normal than a tongue tumor. I mean, it’s head and neck cancer stuff, not tongue. Besides, I’ve always been tongue-proud.

Before Michael Jordan started waving his tongue on the basketball court and not biting it off on accident, we had family contests to see who could touch their tongue to their nose.

I always won then, and still do.

Side note: Part of cancer treatment for neck stuff included speech therapy because of the location. I needed to do tongue exercises to prevent muscle atrophy and a shrunken neck.

The workout included sitting across from the therapist and following their instructions.

“Stick your tongue out as far as you can.”

“Try and touch your nose.”

The first response was, “That’s some tongue.”

The second response: “You touched your nose?”

I decided to write a memoir of my time in cancer land after the sequence of therapy sessions left me laughing, but cancer is not laughing matter. Everyone knows that. But it’s funny when a Kim Bassinger look-alike leads the tongue exercises and makes compliments.

“Now push your tongue against the inside of your cheek until it pooches out.”

No one wants to miss that.

Adding to the fun of cancer treatment was the hospital social worker, one of the nicest women I’ve met. Part of the deal was regular appointment with the professionals to make sure no one was going off the tracks in the depression swamp, or anxiety canyon.

She was smart and pretty and wanted to do good work, but I wasn’t a very good patient. No complaints, no downside, no problems. At least none I wanted to share. The truth is I saw myself as a dead man walking, going through the motions until someone could confirm my suspicions. If I said that, it might be a problem.

I wanted to be a good patient with her so I made stuff up.

“Oh, I can’t believe how bad this is. The worst. Every breath, every sneeze. Nothing could be worse,” I said.

I tried to be convincing because the hard part hadn’t started yet, the part where I’d fear every breath, every sip of liquid down my scorched gullet. And she wasn’t fooled for a second. Saw right through me.

“Well, actually, it could be worse,” she said.

Which broke me out of my whine.

“Worse? This could be worse? How can the worst thing in the world be worse?” I said.

“The cancer that presented in your neck also presents on the penis and rectum,” she said.

I hadn’t done any homework on hpv16 so I took her word for it. My focus was on staying on the treatments track.

“Let me get this straight. I’m supposed to feel better because I don’t have cancer on my penis and rectum?” I said.

“That’s one way of looking at it,” she said.

“My take away is I don’t have ass cancer?”

“You could take that away, yes.”

“Great. I’m feeling better already. That’s my take away.”

Besides letting readers get to know the people I hope they never have to meet, I think it’s important to lift the curtain and show the world the hard working people behind the scenes.

See, they do regular administrative stuff, but each of them is screened for what I like to call LIFE FORCE.

One more time: they get screened for LIFE FORCE.

If you’ve never heard of LIFE FORCE, don’t worry, I just made it up. Once you get down to the nitty gritty of dying or not dying, of feeling dead but not quite there, some people can actually pull you through the muck.

They do it with their LIFE FORCE. That’s what I saw when I met with staff and therapists on a regular schedule. Some had more than others, but none had more than the intervention my own squad did for me when I was failing so miserably.

They didn’t exude life force as much as they exuded menace. I was happy being ready to croak; they weren’t having it.

I eventually saw it their way. I want the memoir in progress to help others see what they saw: A need to step up and kick some fucking cancer ass along with everything else in the way.

I was in the way and got the boot, got my shit kicked into gear by loved ones. It doesn’t get any better than that.