this is how it is.

hi. so here is my story:

When I was seven, I started a newspaper on my block in small town America. I was the editor and publisher, and I made my friends (my sister and the kid across the street) work for me. We put out one issue and I wrote the cover story. It was about finding a dead bird in the Dakes’ backyard. I priced it at 5 cents and all the old people on the block bought it like hot cakes. This was the beginning of my journalism career.

Approximately 10 years later, a crow was found dead in the next town over. It was the first bird in the area confirmed to have died of West Nile Virus. Then a lot of journalists were writing about dead birds. Dead birds; it was a hot beat. Someone was ahead of the curve. I couldn’t have known to get forensics on that bird in the early 90’s. I mean, I was seven. I didn’t deal in knowledge, I dealt in nickels.

Then, there was this one time, I guess it was more like 4 years in the course of history, that revolved around an academic calendar, where I learned about magazine journalism and political science for a while. After it was over, I got a piece of paper valued at approximately $170,000, and I’m still trying to figure out what to do with that. This was the end of my writing career.

Until now.

I edit articles for my friends. I looked over a friend’s first book manuscript. I give them story ideas. Every year, all my parents’ closest Jewish friends come over for Christmas and they ask me if I have written a book. I have not. Whenever I go to this one bar, and see this one friend I haven’t seen in a while, he asks me what I am writing, and I always tell him I am not. Everyone has these ideas about me and writing, but the irony of it all is that I never write anymore. I have a bookshelf of empty journals. I work at three national consumer magazines in marketing. I know. I know. But this is how it has been until this minute.

Now I have written a blog post which I can reference in social situations just like these. Have I been writing? Yes, in fact, I wrote in my blog about how I never write anymore. It was on a Friday. November 28th. And I hopefully will keep writing things down so I don’t forget them, because I think that is one of the saddest things. To forget the things that make you the way you are. Especially if you find yourself constantly wondering how the hell you got this way. Which I do quite often, in fact.

I’ve heard it said that a journey of a thousand comments begins with a single post, and that what lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within our blogs, so the way I see it, from now on every post will be the first post of the rest of my blog-posting life.

But this, this is the first of the first.

Tags: beginnings, dead bird