Clinton, South Carolina, Wednesday, October 23, 2019, 9:22 a.m.

It’s going to be one of those days, crashing down on another one like white water over rocks.

Seldom is it good when one notices that the answering machine is beeping at the crack of dawn. I seldom was called a moron before Trump got elected president. Last night I got accused of taking part in a vast conspiracy of raising the reputation of one teen-aged athlete at the expense of another.

As I used to say when traveling to the great race tracks of the land, if my words really carry that much influence, I should be paid considerably more.

Isn’t that the way capitalism works?

Maybe it’s because everyone fancies himself (or herself) a writer. They do it easily, so it must be easy to do. For some reason, people feel perfectly reasonable insulting my chosen profession, which I consider an honorable one. Like all other media, mine is apparently fake any time I write what people do not already prefer to hear. If I point out that insulting my profession is insulting me, they retreat to “I didn’t mean you.”

Oh, no. Just everyone else. They only mean me if I’m not around.

I asked a fellow scribe last week if he had received a call from a man of local prominence complaining about me. He said no, and I explained that this fellow had called me complaining about him, and I just figured the reverse had been true when he talked to him. He said he hadn’t talked to him.

I used to know a guy in the NASCAR media who often raked all our colleagues over the coals when he talked to me. I guess it never occurred to the other fellow that I might feel fortunate he was talking to me because, otherwise, I would’ve been one of the ones being hilariously lampooned.

Writers have many dysfunctions. They are, however, fairly clever, or else they wouldn’t have risen to whatever modest level of honor in which they reside.

It’s an honest life. Thick skin helps.

While responding to the morning emergency, with bedroom slippers on and nature calling, a Jerry Reed song was on Willie’s Roadhouse. The song was “She Got the Gold Mine (I Got the Shaft),” but the lines of another Reed ditty, “Lord, Mr. Ford, What Have You Done?” came to mind.

If I’m not out of gas in the pouring rain, I’m changing a flat in a hurricane …

For some reason, most people think writers don’t really work. At the very least, we can immediately drop whatever we are doing in order to take care of whatever disaster is afoot.

We keep on writing because it is all in this world we are fit to do.

 

If you become a patron of mine, you’re supporting writing like this as well as my mostly NASCAR blogs at montedutton.com. If you’ve got a few bucks a month to spare, click here.

Another way I cobble out a living is with my books, a wide variety of which is available for sale here.

 

My eighth novel is called Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

Lightning in a Bottle is now available in an audio version, narrated by Jay Harper.