My Year In Writing.

I have a great idea in my head for how this piece should look. It’ll open with a nice quote in italics, a song lyric maybe, like this:

It’s been rough and rocky travelin’
But I’m finally standing upright on the ground
After takin’ several readings I’m surprised
To find my mind’s still fairly sound

Then a paragraph that’s sleek and didactic enough to justify using a damn quote in italics, like this:

Never mind the weed and the pigtails. Willie Nelson had it right. Writing is living, and you cannot succeed without doing both. All the research in the world can’t compete with going out on the road and living hard and knowing your country.

But nobody wants to read that. I just wish I could kill my self-awareness long enough to write that. It looks pretty.

I wrote a lot this year. There was a bunch of movement in my little corner. So much movement that people asked me to write things a couple times. I even had to show people a real picture of myself, which never should have happened. And I started to make a crude approximation of a living. But if you want to make a living writing, you have to write outside necessity and outside inspiration. You have to be willing to be frivolous.

So most of what I’ve written was frivolous. I’ve spent a long time figuring out how to be entertaining with frivolous subjects though, because I’d rather try and make people feel something than learn something. If I wanted people to learn something, I’d staple little instructional pamphlets about how to quit drinking to telephone poles by the library. Someday I’d like to write fiction, be honest and get all the way frivolous, but I don’t know how to make money doing that so I never get around to it.

And in absence of an excuse for fiction, I had to go and do something besides being sad at a computer. So I put probably 10,000 miles on my poor old gas murdering Ford. Saw some cities, some small old towns the interstate destroyed, some rivers, some desert. The more things you see, the more naturally writing happens. It might not be good, but you’ll do more of it.

Anyway, I’m beyond having favorite articles. I am utterly unable to go back and look at old writing or I’ll get ashamed of myself and try to erase all the proof that I exist; go into monastic seclusion with some unreadable huge boring book and a liquid diet. So this is not a list of my favorite articles, but a list of articles I remember writing the most. If you want my best articles, go snooping around. I’m not a qualified judge. I’ll just say it’s all terrible and I should go work at a warehouse if you give me any rope at all for self-evaluation.

So here are the articles I remember writing in 2015:

1. Okay, I lied. I did get to write some fiction. And it went over pretty well. This is my “spec script” for The Big Bang Theory. It’s… I don’t know what it is anymore. Really, it’s an excuse to write baroque villain dialogue and refute all that “nerds are epic” pop-science nonsense that’s poisoned the internet. It’s also sort of about MKULTRA. I’m doing a sequel. It’s more of a “moody 1970s Gene Hackman thriller.” I’ll probably finish it in a few months.

2. Then there was the big one. The Entourage review. I wrote it for gas money in the back room of my grandparents’ house, under a swamp cooler. It was a hundred and ten degrees and I was incoherent and miserable. The result seemed to be read by half the damn internet. While I was driving up the Grapevine the next afternoon, somebody told me it had been excerpted on MSNBC. This piece single-handedly got me through the rest of the year.

3. I got some legit gigs after the Entourage piece. But I feel it’s my moral obligation to get crazy and disreputable when an opportunity presents itself. I’d hate to look back on my life and know I just did a whole bunch of good normal work with good normal opinions about stuff people care about. So when Jon Stewart left the air, I hit an old rural highway and asked literally everyone I found along the way if they had even heard of Jon Stewart. I left with a bizarre meditation on alienation and loneliness under maybe the stupidest pretense imaginable.

4. And on the legitimate side of things, I wrote a piece about the existential undercurrent of Peanuts. I did it while pacing and talking to myself from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. in North Hollywood, just trying to stay awake. It was very, very cold. I think that probably made it better.

5. I talked to two of my favorite singers and guitar players, Joey Harris and Dave Alvin, about the giant honky tonk anarchist Country Dick Montana, who shuffled off the earth in 1995. I left with a nice stack of funny, smoky barroom stories. They’re so good I’ve even repeated a couple of them.

6. And of course I’d remember talking to somebody from the TV for a couple hours. It was a rewarding conversation. Mr. Fielder was very kind and charitable, and he didn’t once allude to a time limit. You don’t get to talk about big themes very often when you’re writing about the media, and I’m glad I got the opportunity.

So there you go. I’m glad I got to do some stuff anybody noticed, and I’m glad I got to beat the ephemeral content grind a few times. Hopefully I’ll write more in 2016. This is where I’d post the last verse of that song from earlier to tie it all together. But I’m not going to.