The 56th Year in Lessons Learned | Notes from an Old-ish Man
2021 was a weird fucking year.
Not that 2020 wasn't a complete shitshow. No. It was. A complete shitshow.
I spent 2020 welcoming in the pandemic within the confines of a truck-stop casino a ten-minute walk from the Las Vegas Strip. I managed to avoid getting infected by COVID, lost a nephew to Fentanyl, and closed out the year by jumping from the swing shift at the Wild Wild West Gambling Hall to working remotely for a Denver-based start-up as a Senior Copywriter (both firsts for me).
At 55, I had hit that crossroads again. Who am I in the world? Who do I wish to be? After some long navel-gazing, a one-thousand yard stare into the COVID-fueled desert, more than a few nights soaking in beer and rye whiskey, I determined what my next preoccupation/vocation would be.
Don Hall, professional writer. Oh, yeah. I also got rid of pretty much all of my social media presence mainly because I found myself hating people I didn't know and also due to the fact that if I can't make things nearly impossible for myself I don't feel the challenge.
As I've spent the year writing for money (so far, so good as my wife and I aren't living out of our Prius yet) the notion of being a paid writer in a digital landscape where everyone and their dogs (seriously, there are dogs with a larger following online than a host of human writers) are writing constantly, the torrent of words vomited forward every hour of every day is a bit of a stupid idea. Not one to avoid big and stupid, I went for it anyway.
My 56th year has been spent indoors for the most part. Sitting in front of my writing rig (iMac desktop, iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard, iPhone 13 Pro Max) and I spend a lot of time on my ass, typing things with one hand, thinking until the cartoon smoke seeps out of my ears, doing Zoom calls and Slack chats for work. Given most of my previous gigs involved A) a lot of walking/running around and B) a significant amount of customer service, this work life is a bit of a dream come true.
So I write. I write for Literate Ape, I write for my Substack, I write for the copywriting job, I write for potential anthologies, I routinely pitch articles to major publications.
I spent nine months of my 56th year writing Casino at the End of the World detailing my adventures as a casino manager during a pandemic. A friend said the book was "is dark, twisted, and (I say this respectfully) Bukowski-esque without being grating like the old and grumpy transgressive author. The stories of deranged and delightful interactions in the Wild Wild West are what I imagine a truly demented season of Cheers might be like, an environment where everyone wants to go even if no one remembers faces and names due to all the self-inflicted debauchery happening to everyone." I'm sending it out to see if I can get someone other than myself to publish it.
All of this is to say I've become a hermit in a cave typing words during any hour not filled with Netflix and HBOMax. In the scope of living through the second year of a pandemic, I recall something an old friend from Chicago, Jerry Schulman, once said about me when I landed the Millennium Park job—"One thing you can always count on with Don Hall is that he will always land on his feet. The guy is luckier than almost anyone I know." He's right about the feet and the luck.
I managed to find a sustainable job during the second historic year of the pandemic where I sat in my apartment and wrote things. No worries about co-workers being infected, no quarantines, no fear of exposure (except for when I decided to go out and gamble at a casino, go to the gym, or swing out to a microbrewery but I'm triple-vaxxed so I'm less worried about it than most, I suppose). There are certainly a few downsides with that including an almost invisible hand gently pushing me into an anti-social corner where most of my human interaction comes from my wife (in person) and a few friends and family on screens. All in all, that ain't too bad in the grand scheme of what millions of others have endured in 2021 so I have zero complaints.
For those new to this exercise, allow a moment of clarification. In eighth grade, Ms. Mayfield in our Social Studies class, required us to write down all of the lessons we had learned that school year. It was sort of like getting kids, experts at pretty much nothing, to write about the one expertise they had at the time—living as themselves in the world. More than the lessons, it forced a perspective that part of our duty as people was to learn lessons as we progressed. That stuck with me hard and I've been writing down all the things I learned each birth year ever since. Some of these missives are online and can be read independently of many not anywhere but in a box somewhere in Kansas or a file in my iCloud folders.
Some lessons repeat. I think that is common for most of us, the necessity of relearning that which we already learned to eventually set like a signature in the slowly drying concrete of a sidewalk repair. The point is to focus on what one can learn from living.
I was born on February 3, 1966. I have just completed my 56th stroll around the calendar and walking those dirt roads toward the inevitable. What have I gleaned from those 365 days that merit sharing here?
The Single Best Desk Chair is a Casino Chair
When I left the Wild Wild West, the General Manager Jeffrey Smith gifted me a spare casino chair as a parting salvo. I've had desk jobs in desks designed for ergonomic nonsense but a chair designed to keep you seated and pushing cash into the bill validator while drinking well drinks for free for hours? Best, most comfortable goddamned chair ever.
To quote my wife "No one ever came down with Roulette Butt."
Your Online Data is Being Bought and Sold to Buy and Sell You
The company I've been working for this year is in the business of collecting the data online when you visit a website for almost any reason, collect it, collate it, and package it for sale to advertisers.
For anyone with enough sense to walk and chew gum at the same time, this isn't a surprise. When you look up a jacket on Amazon and then almost immediately start seeing ads on Faceborg, Instagram, and Twitter about jackets, you know this isn't magic. It's technology and it's invasive.
My justification for participating is that I'm not in the business of selling the data but writing blog posts, white papers, and marketing collateral that explains how it all works. An ongoing piece I've researched and continually update is the number of states passing privacy legislation to combat some of this. I wrote a piece explaining how Apple's privacy actions were a serious impediment to this very practice.
I no longer use Google as a search engine because of how nefarious the data share and curation for ad gains is on Google. I now use DuckDuckGo—not the ideal solution but far better than the "Do No Evil" hypocrisy.
Spending the better part of a year researching and absorbing this doesn't cause me anxiety but it does open things up a bit. And a VPN is kind of essential these days.
I Was Born to Live in a Desert
There were many things I loved about Chicago. The transit system. The culture. The ability to walk across the street and hear an indie band or see some indie theater.
On the roadtrip from Chicago to Vegas—a drive I had anticipated breaking up with a few hotel stays but stubbornly ended up accomplishing in 36 hours—I found myself strangely nostalgic as I entered New Mexico. The desert was causing some stir in my soul.
When my grandfather, James Bowen, retired from roughneck work in the oil fields in the Midwest, he bought a camper and moved to the desert in Arizona. He loved it in a way that even my mother couldn’t fully explain. Mom moved us to Phoenix soon after and the heat was my home from the time I was nine years old until I celebrated my twelfth birthday so the Southwest was in my blood so to speak.
On the road, I called my mother. I wanted to know how old Grandpa Jay was when he trekked out here. “I think he was 53.” Ten days prior to that call and my speeding through New Mexico, I had christened my 53rd year. How odd, I thought, that the siren song of this place lured me here the same time as it had my grandpa. How extraordinary.
This feeling of belonging, of existing in an unforgiving aridness, that I am more like the cactus than the tree has only deepened in my three years here. It's something about the sunshine. It's something about the space. It's something about looking across a horizon and seeing mountains rather than buildings.
I certainly don't know if Dana and I will move someplace else in our time but I can say that I belong in the desert.
Sometime (Most Times) It's Best to Keep Your Opinion to Yourself
Social media has had a weird effect on everyone involved. It's made anyone plugged into the platforms exactly like me about ten years ago. It's made everyone online feel like their opinion about fucking everything is not only important but essential to be heard and acknowledged.
It's made everyone a complete douchebag.
I'm not suggesting that I've discarded my opinion. I'm a 56-year-old white guy in 2022. I have opinions about everything. I am suggesting that perhaps it is unnecessary for me to express those opinions at every opportunity. To simply shut the fuck about some things.
It isn't easy but isn't that point of lessons. If they were easy to see and easy to implement, what good are they?
I have opinions about what is being taught in public schools but I don't have kids or kids in school. Shut the fuck up about it.
I have opinions about wearing masks and getting vaccinated but given I'm fine wearing masks and have been vaccinated, I'll simply shut the fuck up. Those idiots don't care what I have to say about it anyway.
I have thoughts on pronouns and trans-activism run amok but I am about as heteronormative as I can be, am not terribly inconvenienced by doing my best to be polite and use requested (not demanded) pronouns when the case arises, and love JK Rowling despite their campaign against her, so I'll just shut the fuck up.
Let's be frank, aside from the readership of Literate Ape and my Substack, no one gives a flat fuck what I think about much. Equally frank, I don't care deeply about what those on the Left and Right Fringes bloviate about either so the point is moot.
The best thing I've done this year that helps with this muzzling of my unfettered opinion is to have rid myself of any social media presence as an individual. Much less tempting to respond to someone's Faceborg post about QAnon, Critical Race Theory, or Duran Duran if I don't see it.
The absence of promotional platforms makes it harder to market my writing but it opens up the possibilities of writing in my voice more thoroughly because I'm not responding in argument when I write.
At a Time When Everyone is a Writer, Your Specific Voice is All You Have
Among the odd difficulties in making writing a profession rather than an avocation is finding your voice. I never had much of a problem defining my writing style as, for decades, I've simply written.
Working as a copywriter has challenged me—I'm now much better at copy editing, proof reading, and writing in a more robust variety of voices—the strangest effect the gig has had is on my personal style.
Do I write a piece I'm pitching to The Atlantic in a manner and voice I think will fit theirs or just write in my own voice and hope for the best?
The lesson I've learned (and am continually learning) is that with a billion writers all scrambling to get published and paid, the only thing that sets me apart is my voice. Ideas I have and believe are unique suddenly pop up out of nowhere and my juice for continuing to write about those ideas seeps out like oil from a leaky gasket.
Specificity of voice. Write not what you know but how you know. Clean it up, fix the errors but keep your voice front and center. It's kind of like brand writing for myself.
The Single Best Virtue to Attain is Patience
Imagine the scene (or moment) from Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery as Powers commandeers a steamroller and drives it slowly toward the security guard. The guard can see his demise coming and holds out his hand, screaming "STOOOOOOOPPPPP!" Powers could turn the steamroller. The guard could step out of the way. Both have it in their heads to do so but that would blow the bit.
Like the steamroller, change comes very slowly in life. Our decisions to either turn the wheel away from disaster or to move out of its way is likewise a ridiculously slow process. Urgency has little to with whether or not change happens. You either agree with yourself to move out of the way or get squashed by the inevitability of your own end.
As always, the weight of the myriad examples of injustice and inequality and destruction of our planet and both objectification and marginalization of women all collude to have us all hold up our hand and scream "STOOOOOOPPPPP!" But screaming it (even with the hand up in front) doesn't actually foment any discernible change. In fact, the energy utilized to scream "STOOOOOPPPP!" several times is wasted when faced with the fact that time and perseverance takes energy. Patience is hard when it meets the fiery passion of immediate need.
I hear what you're screaming in the air. How can I not? You're screaming it in my face. What are you doing to change the steamroller's course or pull yourself out of its way? What are you doing about the collective weight of horrors we inflict upon on another? If you are doing more than making noise, have some patience. Put in the work. Less noise, more forward motion.
Change comes slowly but it comes whether you like it or not. The only difference is you. Are you standing up to see the fruits of it or are you flattened by the inertia of thinking your voice, pitched high with urgency, will actually make a difference?
The Second Best Virtue is Gratitude
Third is Emotional Control and Rational Behavior
Writing a Book is Climbing a Mountain You Keep Climbing Up Over and Over Again
I've written books filled with essays, books of poetry, and a book comprised of sound bites, but a full narrative, nonfiction memoir of an eighteen-month period at a casino? Oof. Lotsa work.
Writing. The re-writing. The looking at structure. Making sure I spelled common words exactly the same. Then finally getting to the end of a solid first draft and sending it out to trusted folks to criticize. Then back to the climb. Reformatting. Killing whole sections. Re-writing. Again with different colleagues and different problems to fix.
I went to college and received a degree in Music Education. I never went the writer direction because in life there apparently are no straight lines. I wonder sometimes what one learns to do in an MFA program beyond networking and my conclusion is that all you need to learn in that kind of educational setting can be accomplished by writing your own book for publication outside of self-publishing.
In year 56 and due almost exclusively to Casino at the End of the World I am a far better proof reader, better at spotting inconsistencies in the sentences, gaining a perspective on tenses, structure, format, and copy editing. Learning by doing. Great stuff.
The fun of the climb is that, once you're done, you're never quite done but you get to do it even better with the next book. And the next.
I've always been an Art for Art's Sake kind of idiot so the pursuit of writing for money seems to conflict with that. I'll keep climbing mountains and churning out words because I love it and if the cash comes my way, that'll be just fine.
End of the Road or Halfway There—It Makes No Difference Today
Michael K. Williams, best known for his roles in The Wire, Boardwalk Empire and Lovecraft Country, was found dead on Sept. 6. He was 54.
Peter Scolari, known for his roles in Bosom Buddies, Newhart, and Girls, died last year at age 66.
DMX died in New York on April 9, one week after suffering a heart attack. He was 50.
Dustin Diamond, best known for playing Samuel "Screech" Powers on Saved by the Bell, croaked at 44 years old.
On the other hand—
George Segal, RIP, age 87.
John Madden, RIP, age 85.
Stephen Sondheim, RIP, age 91.
Tempest Storm, RIP, age 93.
I could go to sleep tonight and be done. Finis. Dead as a stone. Mom would get a call from a distraught Dana and then they'd all have to figure out what to do with my body. My request is to be cremated, ashes placed in my trumpet and sealed. Make the DH-filled trumpet into a lamp and sell it at a yard sale for cheap. A couple of years from now, people who used to know me in Chicago will say, "What? He's dead? I thought he was in Vegas." By then, I'll be sitting on an end table in Ohio.
Or I could clock it in for another forty years.
It is the only single thing every one of us on Planet Earf has in common. An expiration date.
I've never been worried about mortality. I can't be. Too much to do. Too much to learn. Too much left.
I'm not so sure I learned this in Year 56 but the Specter of Potential Death has definitely caught my attention. With so many dying from COVID at distressingly young ages, it would be hard not to sit up and check the horizon a bit. Perhaps that's why I've decided to burn all my bridges behind me and commit to this writer's path. Late stage lunacy? Maybe. It isn't going to be boring so there's always that.
Gee. When I sat down to write this, I didn't think I'd learned anything this year.
