Brick

Copy­right 2005 Ben S. Pollock

Fri­day, Jan­u­ary 7, 2005. It’s impor­tant to be effi­cient. To not rein­vent the wheel is my oft-repeated goal, likely annoy­ing others.

Def­i­n­i­tion: Com­ing to know what works and what doesn’t, what is tol­er­a­ble and what dri­ves you batty. It’s a process of elim­i­na­tion, where over the years you gain knowl­edge of your­self — wish­ing it was wis­dom but it may just be lazi­ness — so as to make bet­ter choices. Learn­ing from oth­ers is even more efficient.

This wheel should give me a wider range of move­ment, to avoid fail­ures as long as pos­si­ble, and avoid the ten­dency of turn­ing the brief­case of likes and dis­likes into a bag of complaints.

Lazy, not wis­dom? There’s work and time in con­sid­er­ing new ideas: research, analy­sis, talk­ing it out, writ­ing it up. Avoid­ing that is lazy. Then again, it’s using accu­mu­lat­ing knowl­edge, which may be wis­dom — or just wise.

What I hated about being a full-time reporter is sim­ply wait­ing for peo­ple to return your phone calls. There are gaps of time in a work­day. One could say, whoa, begin a new story, a new project, dig through an old one and find some­thing to expand into a follow-up. Well, that is sound, but at some point too many projects dis­tract a reporter from what’s already fairly well devel­oped. Also you have to leave room for, say, prepar­ing for tomorrow’s coun­cil meet­ing or the spot assign­ment some edi­tor throws at you because you looked up at the wrong time.

Reporters enjoy such time restraints and excesses. I always feel guilty about goof­ing off. Oh, I do wan­der, but for me it’s not casual con­ver­sa­tion or lin­ger­ing away from the office. I read arti­cles on the Internet.

My first job was news pro­ducer at a North Dakota pub­lic radio sta­tion, far from Arkansas and far from Stan­ford. I reported and loved it, but I also did news­casts and super­vised stu­dent jour­nal­ists. My only full-time report­ing job was the next one, police reporter for the Irv­ing Daily News. It is where I per­ceived that stir-craziness. After only a few months I was pro­moted to replace the assis­tant edi­tor (there were only two edi­tors). I still was the police reporter but now also edited copy and designed pages.

The mul­ti­task­ing sur­prised me in feel­ing like that of being a radio pro­ducer. I learned what gen­eral work habits worked for me, even though a wide vari­ety of tasks could be overwhelming.

A les­son from music rein­forced acknowl­edg­ing my need to know what works for me.

My par­ents had all three of us kids in band. My sis­ter got out as high school junior, while my brother stayed through grad­u­a­tion, even being a drum major as a senior and mak­ing All-State repeat­edly. But he left music per­for­mance at that point. Nei­ther encour­aged their kids to pur­sue music.

I wasn’t as tal­ented as my brother and maybe sis­ter either, but I con­tin­ued to play in col­lege and even now, almost a quarter-century later, at least a few times a year.

Occa­sion­ally, though end­ing about 15 years ago, I would play in the orches­tra of a com­mu­nity or col­lege musi­cal. A few weeks of rehearsals then two week­ends of per­for­mances: What a delight­ful change of rou­tine. Even if it might be an Andrew Lloyd Web­ber show, the cama­raderie and sim­ply the joy and chal­lenge of blow­ing in that hammy envi­ron­ment would carry for weeks.

One time while in the Dal­las area I got to play in the pit for a col­lege pro­duc­tion of “The Music Man.” Now, there is a strong score, and not just for trom­bones. Mered­ith Will­son used a lim­ited set of melodies but mixed them up with genius. I’ll attend any ama­teur pro­duc­tion of it even now, and see the movie if I chance upon it on television.

This pro­duc­tion con­tin­ued for four weekends.

My joy of a half-dozen per­for­mances became in 12 or 16 evenings and mati­nees, work.

Race across a cou­ple of sub­urbs from the news­room, hav­ing grabbed a burger some­where. Play the same repeated rhythms night after night. Pit bands com­prise only rhyth­mic har­mony, the actors obvi­ously always have the melody, except for an occa­sional joy­ous break­out of eight or 16 mea­sures. Play­ing softly, even under ampli­fied singers, takes con­cen­tra­tion. The play­ers and the con­duc­tor must remain alert for actors to change tem­pos or skip lines if not verses then silently, unan­i­mously and instantly guess the soloist’s next choice.

The rep­e­ti­tion came to closely resem­ble the assem­bly line work I did for a cou­ple of sum­mers. Bore­dom. Bore­dom com­pounded by being effort I oth­er­wise rel­ished, a contradiction.

I’ve done other plays. At clubs I admire musi­cians for mak­ing their art sound fresh every time and appear to enjoy doing so. My wheel includes that I am not of that number.

Report­ing one or two arti­cles a day is not in my per­son­al­ity, either.

Yet, how do I explain my never-fading intent to write full time?

Because it’s dif­fer­ent, and I’ve done enough columns to know. Both essay columns and metro-column report­ing don’t have every draw­back of being a beat reporter, mainly due to the auton­omy colum­nists earn and use.

Column­ing as sole liveli­hood would have a learn­ing curve, being so dif­fer­ent from the mul­ti­ple dead­lines and var­ied tasks of edit­ing. No learn­ing curve ever is bor­ing. Good colum­nists, good writ­ers in gen­eral, always are learn­ing. Ergo: stim­u­lat­ing, not bor­ing, not rote, not rou­tine. –30–