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William Lobb

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Blackwing Pencils And The Greatness

There are gifted people who walk among us mortals who are just better. They walk a step ahead and above the rest of us. This isn’t good or bad, it simply is how it is. I read somewhere that a hundred and twenty billion people have lived on earth since day one. The greats, the legends, are a hair thick slice of that number.

I remember being introduced to the great writers in high school. Hemingway and Faulkner and Steinbeck. Books like Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird and Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye… The Grapes Of Wrath and East Of Eden—a book whose central theme was the word ‘timshel,’ a Hebrew word that translates to—with regard to god or man’s triumph over sin—thou shalt, or thou mayest. The battle between the will of God versus the will of man. Do we live by preordained fate or free will… that one word was the core of that work. Steinbeck’s genius was expressed in longhand.

Somewhere buried between the words of these men I uncovered my desire to write. Not to just write long strings of words, but strive to write with the power men like these men possessed.

I remember taking some harsh and well-earned criticism for the opening words of one of my books. I took it because the critic was right. My opening words didn’t, in his words, ‘grab the reader by the balls…’ I went to a place quiet and alone and re-read the first paragraph of Grapes, where Steinbeck wrote of the red Oklahoma clay and the rivulets of rainwater that cut through that dirt and found its way to the planted seeds and, in time, sparked the growth from seed to cornstalk. His words didn’t grab me by the balls, but they were the words of the gifted, and they were well crafted and perfect.

At the end of the same book, a book whose overarching theme owned a Dickensian bent: hunger and want and starvation and greed; Rosaharn, having just lost her baby by miscarriage, her breasts still full of milk, opens her blouse and feeds a man dying of starvation in the boxcar of a train.

I put down that book and said to myself I’ll never be fit to even sharpen Mr. Steinbeck’s famous Blackwing pencils. I still hold on to that belief fiercely today. The true greats are a bridge too far, a mountain too high.

A friend, a reader friend, asked me for my address a few weeks ago. I didn’t think much of it. I know her pretty well. This week, unintentionally arriving on my birthday, was a package for me at my P.O. Box. I opened it to find three Blackwing pencils.

I have been staring at them since they arrived. I don’t know if many people would be moved to tears by a gift of a couple of pencils.

I’ll put them in a box I need to find. A box built with wooden dowels and dovetail joints, not nails and glue. The maple or oak will be stained gently and rubbed deep into the grain with some sealing oils. It will have a glass cover and the pencils will rest on that fancy foam stuff where they will lie in an impression and the three will be kept there, at least as long as I live. I’ll never sharpen them. I will never see it as my place to sharpen them. They are not a tool to use to put words on paper, they are an aspiration.

I’ll put them on a shelf with some of my dad’s wrenches and I’ll look at them frequently. I will be reminded of what true greatness is and Mr. Steinbeck’s mastery of the art.

When I ponder them, I’ll know how it feels like to be less than great, but how it feels to look to greatness. Left un-sharpened they will never allow me to become consumed with myself and my work. And in the best moment on my best day I will strive for the simple good, and if that is ever attained I’ll be quite content.

Thank you, Eveline J Soelberg. Your gift means more than you could possibly ever know.

Talking To A Writer Friend

I’m talking to a writer friend last night. We’ve never met face-to-face, but I’ve read her work and it’s very good. Often raw and real. She is a poet, and a genuine poet. She was expressing to me her disappointment, and possible disillusionment, at this whole writing and storytelling world some of us find ourselves in, almost a quarter way into the twenty-first century.

I think many of us start writing to express an inner voice and to tackle some social issues, to talk about and examine the human condition, to tell stories and examine a talent we’ve been told we possess. I don’t know how many of us expected our first book to sell 10 million copies, and we’d end up writing in an oak lined den, wearing a corduroy jacket with leather patches on the elbows, but I’m sure some of us did.

The reality is nothing like that, not even close. This writer friend of mine is a fiction writer, and she works in science fiction. Braver than me, I think I’d get lost writing science fiction and my work would be really bad. We discussed the fact that there’s so much absolute garbage fiction out there flooding the market today. There must be a million books published yearly about rabid, werewolf-zombie-vampires with bare chests. Male and or female nipples exposed for sales purposes. It’s embarrassing, and it’s disheartening. I’ve got no issue with nipples. Hell, I might even be a fan, but I don’t find zombie nipples attractive or thought provoking.

I think my biggest takeaway from my years in this writing business has been that you just have to write from your gut and if somebody likes it and they connect to it, then that’s good and if you sell a couple hundred books your book was a success by today’s standards. We’re drowning in a world of bad stuff being written and rehashed. Like things from 1960 and ‘70s TV shows. They just dug up and re-warmed Magnum PI, for Christ’s sake. Couldn’t anyone in the past fifty years do anything newer and more original than a marginally entertaining TV detective show from fifty years ago? They re-hashed Hawaii Five 0 a while back too. Book ‘em, Dano… Jesus, shoot me.

 

I’m going to continue to write about a recovering addict’s struggle with the third step, and the perceived need to subscribe to and handover your life to a God that you may or may not believe in. I’m going to continue to write about old mobsters, looking back on their lives with some remorse and regret, and maybe a little amusement, and con-men and racism and hate and fear and the real things I think we need to talk about. I’m going to continue to write about things that matter to me.

It is my hope my friend Lauren takes a step away and catches her breath and then keeps writing her truth. I think she was has thrown up her hands on marketing, and I get that completely. The creativity and imagination that’s called to write fiction is an entirely different form of creativity that’s required to write marketing hype. The publishing world has transformed over the past twenty-five years. It’s made being traditional published a nearly impossible goal—and if you get a traditional publisher to show an interest in your work they often ask: A) how big is your current subscriber list (10,000 subscribers seems to be their sweet spot) and B) what is your marketing plan… huh? I thought the publisher was my marketing plan…

Stressing sales figures and marketing is to me, anti-art, anti-creativity. It makes me sad. I think a lot of truly talented people have just stopped writing or stop publishing and producing because we’re becoming over washed with nonsense and in 2023 nonsense seems to be what sells. Then we have to figure out Twitter and Facebook ads, and how many hashtags to use on Instagram, and how to attract readers to our blog and email list, and is Pinterest worth the effort and who the Hell even knows how to use Pinterest anyway, and seriously, Snapchat?! WTF even is that? Then the soul searching to decide if we want to give all our personal information to China and TikTok. To be honest, I worry less about what the Chineses government knows about me than I do what the US Government knows about me, but I digress. For the record, I’d market to a Mexican cartel if it would sell some books and get some reviews…

I read a lot of Hemingway and Steinbeck and Faulkner, and those words that were penned a hundred years ago are as poignant and purposeful as anything that could be written today because we really don’t change. People, the problems and the foibles all stay the same and the human condition stays the same. I’m going to let somebody else write about the big titted rabid werewolf-zombie-vampires, and not think about it anymore. I hope my friend Lauren does the same.

And now we have AI generated books popping up on Amazon, like those persistent little flowers that would suddenly appear when we cleaned the barn and spread fresh shit on the fields.

I’m kind of looking forward to competing with AI. AI writing is soulless and shallow. There is no poetry in the prose, but maybe, just maybe, it will come up with something original.

Anyway, I hope my friend Lauren and the other good craftswomen—and craftsmen—and storytellers keep plugging along, working their art, and stop feeling defeated by book sales. Some days it’s like trying to nail jello to a tree, but every now and then you get an email or a message from a reader you realize you’ve made that connection and it’s a bit like magic.

 

We Were Good

Because Of The Song Bob Wrote

Feet planted on the same ground where we’ve stood since our time began. The beginning of time, in a sense. Before our time, the world was a black and white and grainy four-inch by four-inch square with sculpted borders and pasted in a book. This was a place our fathers knew, and in their passing, it is bestowed a holiness of sorts. But, we are not and do not come from holy men.

Born, not far in distance or time apart, this is our starting point. And perhaps it will be our final stand.

From this place and spot and dirt we came, our roots grow strong and deep. Fed by the nutrients of this place and all that grew from its minerals and salts and water.

Here and upright and connected to this ground, every bit as much from this soil as the trees that now tower over our heads, and creek with age and fatigue and branches and twigs and big clumps of oak leaves fall. Here, in this moment, we are afforded a fascinating and terrifying vantage point to look back and past and through time itself, to another time and back to this time.

If you are quiet and still on this spot, you can hear the laughter and rage and tears of the ghosts who have left this place and left us alone to this place.

Here today, a fascinating and frightening realization that as we have gone our separate ways and lived out the lives we were dealt and assembled and committed and survived our collective crimes, we’ve always somehow managed to find our way back to here, to our common dirt.

From the memory of the sting and the terror of the first kiss and falling in love with a girl, her name is long forgotten to the fog and the wind, to the bloody nose and sore bones of the first fist-fight. The sting of bees and the trampled runs across the high field grasses from deadly vipers, and the swollen, broken knuckle of the first slipped wrench. Then without intent or effort we moved into a life the of broken words and commitments and lies of adulthood, a million-million things have come and gone and come and changed. But, in a way, nothing at all has changed.

On this haunted plain, on this north-windswept, stark, gray day, you ask a truth I always feared….

“Were we good?”

Were we good sons and grandsons and mechanics, were we good and true to our chosen profession, fearful for so many years to be discovered the frauds we know ourselves to be. Were we good guitar pickers and story writers and boxers and cyclists and pick and shovel and socket and wrench and hammer and nail men?

Were we good in our souls and kind and honorable? Were we good to ourselves and each other? Did we feed the hungry?

Were we good in the eyes of a god who confused us and scared us and demanded the slaughter of sons and lambs and asses to prove a faith I cannot find, let alone abide by?

Were we loyal and good friends? Did I step up every time I could have to defend you, or did I run and hide in my cowardice?

Were we good at protecting our own lies and crimes from the prying eyes of daylight’s truth?

Were we simply good because we were not intentionally bad?

Were we good and loyal and did we grow strong as boys in the summer streams and ponds and meadows, comfort and amused by throaty frogs?

Were we good as young men, finding our way in our discomfort and angst, trying to understand and define what it is to be a man? And are we now good as we become old men still trying to figure it all out? So many things went wrong and haywire along the way.

Today you said to me, “We were good!” I can only hope, with a waning confidence, your words never betray the underlying truth.

We were good.

Truck Shop Boys…

One of my clients is a trucking company. I stop in the shop and bullshit with the wrenches every time I’m there. They break my balls about working on the easy shit, computers and stuff, and ask questions about why Pornhub is blocked in the shop managers PC, but they know I’m one of them, and not one of the ones from the office who give them shit and assignments all day without a clue what life is like in the shop, under or in the cab of a truck.

I just got out, but I never left…This is my turf and my troops. Me, and some of the old guys were talking about ‘real cold’ winters. Zero is pretty cold. A handful of us did some winters up north on the TransCanada Highway. Twenty-Thirty-Forty below zero. Steel is a fluid, truckers and welders know all about this. It’s as fluid as water, it just freezes at 2500 fahrenheit.

“Zero is cold,” this one old guy stated, like it was news, “but it ain’t that cold.”

He was right. Metal seems to be pretty happy from zero to the low hundreds. Under zero, stuff gets weird. You can bang on a piece of iron with a sledge hammer all day at forty above and nothing will happen but some surface dents, hit that same metal with a sledge at forty under zero it will shatter like glass.

We spent a half-hour talking about frozen engine blocks and bad fuel at twenty-below and that waitress I knew up in Saskatoon and how we met; when I asked her for ‘a hard roll with anything hot’ and she slapped me across the face and made my nose bleed. I learned later in Saskatoon they are called ‘Kaisers.’

Yesterday afternoon I’d just come off an aggravating conference call with a room full of suits and ties and people ‘reaching out’ to each other and a woman named Debbie, and I am still baffled why she was even on the call, a position in sales I’m quite sure. Technical sales people are a special breed. They literally sell things with no idea whatsoever they are selling, but I guess she was there to ‘keep things civil,’ when the tie wearing boys started blaming everyone and everything but themselves for the project delays.

Yeah, after an hour with these assholes I need to be around some guys who smell like ninty-weight and know how to shift a duplex Mack and ‘real cold…’

Poverty

Kiss me with your dry and cracked lips; your mouth full of crooked and broken teeth; your breath the sweetness of sour milk and once again, call me your good boy. No one else ever called me that. No one else ever would call me that again. But you found your goodness what was missing in all things, even me.

Sit me down one more time at your old and rickety kitchen table. It seems this piece of furniture discarded from someone else’s life is the centerpiece of my life with you. That and your asparagus patch over on the neighbor’s property.

Offer me coffee and apologize for your poverty once again, as if your poverty was a choice, you regret making a long time ago. Apologize you only have canned milk and not much of that.

It’s cold in your kitchen unless it’s summer and then it’s sweltering. I comment I should go steal something and get you some money to fill up your propane tank. Without turning or even raising your head you reply, “I’m cold, I’m always cold in the winter, but I ain’t no thief…” and she walked over to the counter next to the sink and rinsed out a dirty coffee cup for me.

Her’s was a profound poverty, more than generational, or a relic of the Great Depression; it was personal, it demanded ownership. It was as if she poked a stake in the ground and on it, she raised the flag of her poverty for all to see.

She held an honor in her poverty, a strange pride I could never connect to. Like her ability to see the value in anything. I’d not bend down to pick up a dime. A penny she found on the ground was to her a fortune of good luck and cause for a celebration of gratitude.

Everything she owned was old and worn and threadbare. Her dresses were clean, but stained, and she wore an apron, and that too was stained, but clean and she was happy in the work that left the stain.

Pride and reverence and an abiding gratitude for the next to nothing she could call hers—a respect born of fear of everything being taken away—again—that everything must be used and reused and repurposed, and never-ever wasted. Her’s was a world of sin and salvation, and it could be, had to be, the greatest sin was gluttony and waste.

Aluminum foil, folded and creased in a drawer. The madness of watching her unwrap a Christmas gift, working loose each piece of tape. Slowly removing each bow, and gently removing the paper, again, folding it neatly, perhaps to be stashed by the foil.

Her son would buy her cans of food and gently dent them, a crafty move. Presented and challenged with the dented cans—she could not accept them as charity—but she could not let them go to waste. A moral conundrum. She took the cans, and often looked for ‘poor people’ to share them with.

She came from another time. Her daddy was the son of a Civil War soldier. In my sad and broken world of excess, I see now, long too late, the lessons of her time and her earnest depravation

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Recent Posts

  • Blackwing Pencils And The Greatness
  • Talking To A Writer Friend
  • We Were Good
  • Truck Shop Boys…
  • Poverty
  • First Chapter—The Three Lives Of Richie O’Malley
  • It Wasn’t Always Like This
  • It’s been the same dream since my first dream.

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