Writer's Writing, or, Writers Writing

Excuse me while I meander with no real destination in mind.

Back in the day when I wanted to be a writer, I read a lot of books & stories by writers about being writers.  Friends of mine who wanted to be writers were writing stories about being writers.  I was probably writing stories about being a writer.  This is not to discount very good books & stories about writers written by writers, but thinking of this reminds me of a series of experiences I had on a school bus when I was in college.

In Austin, the University of Texas provides buses to get students from certain areas to campus.  When I arrived in 1986, the buses were actual school buses of the kind without air conditioning & windows you could open up.  They had stereo systems with cassette decks that the misfit bus drivers used to play cool music on.  It was fun in 1986 to be taken to school on a bus blasting Joy Division.

At some point they replaced those buses with air-conditioned Capitol Metro buses, & apparently there was something of an uproar by the drivers because these buses - like most city buses - did not come equipped with a stereo system.  Many of the drivers would bring boomboxes & tie them to some space & play their music that way.  Eventually the management relented & put radios in the UT buses.

Always a dodgy proposition, this radio gambit meant that, on my morning commute, I could listen to drive-time wacky pop radio.  In general, I'd have a Walkman or later an iPod to listen to (I worked at the University so still rode the buses to work after I finished school), but some mornings I'd just be too sleepy to bother, & was forced to listen to Whomever & Whomever in the morning, the crazily-named people who played fart noises & other sound effects in-between whatever hits were programmed by the corporate owners of the station.

Like some kind of bored sociologist, I would listen to these guys & realized that all they ever really talked about was stuff they saw on television, their radio show, or events they attended because they had a radio show.  I guess they had very little time to read a book, or go on vacation, or have much of a life - their show was three or four hours long, a lot of time to fill, & there was pre-recorded material.  Talking about something they went to in the capacity as "morning deejays" was of course the entirety of their lives.  But boy it made for extremely dull radio.

There was probably a bit of jealousy there, of course - I was on the radio & had only a fraction of a fraction of their listeners.  & to be honest, I wasn't living much either.

Do you remember when you & your friends started working when you were in high school?  I worked mainly at my family's convenience store & had for a long time, but suddenly I was hearing stories about fast food joints or mall stores or any number of places teens used to work.  I was astonished, really, & wondered about what we talked about when we didn't have jobs.  Did we just talk about school?

These days I roll my eyes at movies, television shows, & books which are about writers.  Some I'll give a chance, most I'll reject.  Tonight the wife & I started the third (I think) season of the show The Affair which has, as its male protagonist, a writer.

Honestly, I'm amazed I've watched it this long.