Clinton, South Carolina, Thursday, December 26, 2019, 11:35 a.m.

Who am I kidding? I need to write. I don’t know what, but I know I need to write something.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes in life, but I’ve never bought insurance from a gekko or an emu. Or a cartoon general driving a red Corvette, for that matter.

In fact, I tend be skeptical about anything commercial TV offers me. It seems to me that the hidden message is often:

Please do not do business with us if you have a lick of sense.

One of the great frustrations of journalism is that one often gets more criticism for what he (or she, but in my defense, I am a he) didn’t write than appreciation for what he did.

It makes the appreciation more meaningful, but that’s a rationalization of sorts.

This first made an impact on me many years ago when I was editing a weekly trade paper. Each week we ran results from race tracks across the country. Occasionally, I would get out and write a feature about what I perceived to be a unique local track. Invariably, the chief result was that all the other tracks in that area complained that it wasn’t them.

This experience attuned me such that I have since learned that it’s true for most everyone and most every thing.

My favorite all-time conversation with “the desk,” back when I worked for dinosaurs known as newspapers and there was “a desk” for my writing to be reviewed, was over grammar.

I consider myself receptive to constructive editing – Who doesn’t? Some even believe themselves – but I must also concede that I have too little patience for those who change something that is right into something that is wrong.

Me: “You changed something I wrote that was right into something that is wrong?”

Editor: “What’s that?”

Me: “You changed ‘stank’ to ‘stunk’? The past tense of ‘stink’ is ‘stank’?”

Editor: “Everybody says ‘stunk’.”

Me (slightly paraphrased with expletive deleted): “Everybody is … wrong.”

Editor rolls eyes. I wish I could have him arrested on misdemeanor assault of the language.

I definitely put too much effort into small things. I also make absentminded mistakes, a pattern of my entire life. On occasion, “the desk” has saved my ass. I would have taken them out to dinner if I’d ever made much money.

Capitalism, at least before it became as fixed as socialism ever thought about being, supposedly determines value on the basis of scarcity, not significance to society. That’s why a semiliterate athlete makes more money than a schoolteacher.

I understand the difficulty of being a writer. At this time in history, more and more people write, and less and less people read. Increasingly, the people who write are those who seldom read.

On the other hand, I can’t, for the life of me, understand how consultants became scarce.

 

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.