And so begins a NEW chapter in The Book of Lenslinger, in which our elusive news shooter sheds his street cred for a peek at the bigger picture…
When last I left you, my head was in a fog. Some days, it still is. But if eighteen months of lurching uncertainty have taught me anything, it’s that ‘Living in the Past’ is a better Jethro Tull album than recipe for glee. Ya feel me? Probably not. Doesn’t matter. I’m writing for myself these days. When I’m writing at all. Once upon a time, frothy blather dripped from my every pore and formed unsettled puddles of snark.
No more. Now, I struggle with where to begin and how to end. What gives? I use to dry-fart shiny passages while waiting for stoplights to change. Hell, I once sneezed an entire thesis while ordering take-out! These days, I can’t so much as scribble a grocery list without struggling over tone. What gives? Why can a guy who used to churn out words at a dizzying clip find himself unable to jot down a web address without hours of soul-searching? It’s simple, really….
Heartbreak.
If you can’t understand how such a thing can affect one’s literary output, you’ve obviously never had your soul stepped on. I have – the day my beautiful wife announced she didn’t want to be my beautiful wife anymore. To say it shook me to the core is underselling it. I curled up into a fetal ball and wept for the better part of a year. After a great deal of wallowing, I got up off that floor and followed some of the smartest people I knew straight down the interstate. That’s right, if the collapse of a twenty-three year marriage wasn’t enough personal upheaval, I decided to leave a job I truly loved. Which is why you’ll find me ninety minutes south of the Piedmont, thrusting lenses into the hands of Millennials and pleading for a little sequencing. You guessed it…
I turned house-cat.
Officially, my title is ‘News Operations Manager’. It’s a lofty appellation, alright, but after seven months of equipping young journalists with all the tools of television, it’s one I’m comfortable with. And now that I’m seemingly secure in my new surroundings, I’d like to get back to writing again. ‘About what?’ you ask. TV News, of course. It’s what I’ve always written about and for the past half year I’ve been preaching my prose to a collection of twenty-somethings – most of whom have never even heard of ‘Lenslinger’. I’d like to change that and this long-delayed blog post is the first wobbly step in that direction…
So join me, won’t you, in my renewed efforts to get my mojo back. I greatly appreciate all the reader e-mail I’ve received – even the ones calling me a coward for staying quiet so long. I have no idea where this blog will go next, but I can assure you, it’s going somewhere. The tone may change, the bitterness will surely fade – but I promise you I’ll call it like I see it (at least as much as I can I can while staying employed). Whether or not you’ll join me remains to be seen, but in the end it doesn’t matter. A writer’s gotta write, a bird’s gotta sing and this bruised news shooter simply has to run his mouth on-line.
Stay tuned…