Earth Matters: Scribble

I have a hard time calling myself a victim because I know I am very lucky. I am lucky because I got what I wanted. I live in a place I wanted to make my home since I was a kid. I try to be a good citizen in the natural community that surrounds me, and I engage a human community that is as much a part of me as the air I breathe and the snow I ski. Such is the nature of my place and my home.

One affordance of my place is its isolation. While isolation is not necessarily a good thing for our growing tourist industry, it is mother’s milk to those of us who walk the trails and climb the ridges. Living at the head of the draw in the fastness of the Rocky Mountains offers peace and refuge we can walk to. Isolation insulates us from the vicissitudes of life in that big world out there…most of the time.

But this time, those vicissitudes are so severe they have finally trickled down to places like Crested Butte. Resorts are places where visitors have a good time and spend money if only to escape their everyday troubles at home. We will always host visitors, but now perhaps not so many. And that hurts.

Thus, I am not a victim of a trashed economy, but merely a participant. I participated by getting laid off one writing job—hopefully only seasonal—and laid back at the other. I’d rather be laid back than laid off because I consider myself a pretty easy-going guy and have a lot of practice at being laid back. It’s in my temperament.

Given that, I anticipated relief from a weekly deadline I’d met for some thirty years. I actually like that deadline, though, because it requires sitting down and writing, actually chasing the cursor and getting words down on a page. Sometimes that is no easy task, yet it is one that has become a part of me and my routine. Routine is also part of my temperment.

So I faced my deadline day with ambivalence…and succumbed to routine. I sat down to write knowing this week’s offering wouldn’t appear in this week’s paper. With luck it would run in a couple of weeks. The pressure is off, but instead I labor under a different master, one of my own contrivance; one more easily duped but less easily appeased. Scribble on.

Thirty years is a long time to scribble and I’m an old dog who looks askance at new tricks. But if I want to scribble at all, if I can’t adopt new tricks, at least I can adapt to a new way of scribbling. What that means is coming up with a new formula, foregoing the old as too dense, too involved and, well…too much.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with your art,” said my boss, trying to hide a grin, “but with reductions in advertising because of the economy. We don’t have as much room for words. You have to cut it down.”

“But how will I develop complex ideas?” I asked. “How can I generate and hold interest? How can I use sources to make a point without all those words.”

“Did you ever hear of a sound bite?” he looked at me, the matter closed. That’s why he’s the boss.

That’s what a new formula is: short, fast and to the point. Think attention deficit.Bite my tongue.

Furthermore, it is no secret that newspapers—print media in general—are in trouble. They’re going broke, and apparently even our resort newspapers are feeling the crunch. Is there any guarantee that when the economy rebounds newspapers will bounce too? Not necessarily. So where are we getting our information?

Information is flowing across the internet. Even television relies on the internet to decide what is on the public radar, what news is fit to air. And many of those radar blips come from blogs, comments and commentary, diaries, journaling and vanity publishing, all freely available online. Anyone can blog; it’s Darwinian.

I have been trying for some months to successfully enter the blogosphere, but that environment is different than writing for a local weekly newspaper. The blogosphere hosts a broader audience. Readers are interested in more diverse topics than we can perhaps generate up here in our high-altitude isolation. Writers have to earn readership and it isn’t easy to place even well-crafted sound bites where readers can find them.

But I’m not letting any of that discourage me. I figured out how to blog, where to publish my (extended) sound bites, and now I can feed my need to keep scribbling. Write on. Now if only I had a deadline.