Discipline

[Dave Serchuk]

New journal, new thoughts, new plans.

The goal of this journal is to write nearly every day. Not every day because that is impossible. But nearly every day. Probably not for long each day, as to write long, each day, would be nearly impossible. But simply to get into the habit of writing.

Incrementaly.

I have played the guitar for 17 years. I am okay at it. I have been in a rock band, and played well in that band. I have some ability. I have an ear, and creativity.

But this wasnt enough for the band. After a while my lines, and leads, became very stale. I had atrophied, even while playing every day.

My involvement with the band ended for many reasons, but one is that I wasn't playing particularly well. I wasn't meeting my potential. I also must blame a particularly bad sounding Marshall amp for part of my bad sound, but I digress.

The experience left me humiliated and disillusioned about my ability. This was critical. I think it is a wonderful thing to be disillusioned. It means, literally, to be stripped of illusions. And what could be better than that?

I had a friend/aquaintance--more someone I admired and found interesting than an actual friend. And he, freshman year, was always talking about this philosopher named Gerjief. Gerjief was very involved, if I remember correctly, with stripping away, or at least recognizing, the illusions we all labor under.

My friend's name was Matt Lorre. A girl gave him the nickname of Matt Nature freshman year. I still think of him as Matt Nature.

Matt Nature was a fascinating and inspiring person.

I remember climbing a rock in Papago Park, outside of Phoenix, with Matt, when we were 19. Maybe he was 20. We had heads full of acid. It was bouldering, hand over hand, no ropes.

We were climbing what seemed a steep, relatively scary pitch. It's entirely possible it might look small today. Or not. My knees aren't what they were then.

And at one point we seperated.

Later on I met Matt at the top, anyway, which, by the way, was littered with beer cans, and had an arrow graphitied to the very top of the peak.

Matt started talking about how he was climbing and then he just started to panic. "Fear!" he said, looking right at me. "It'll stop you in anything you want to do."

It was one of those statements that meant more than what it simply reads as. It felt like it meant more, his meaning meant more. I understood more of what he meant, than what it reads as. So maybe you can now understand it too.

I considered him more of a teacher than a friend. In his dormroom he was nice enough to smoke me out and put on John Coltrane's "My Favorite Things" which I'd never heard before, being a freshman. I remember best McCoy Tyner's endless, wonderful piano comp. The best musicians in the world, I thought, like to groove simply.

I also remember a startling little run Coltrane played, hear and gone. Matt said that's just a fraction of what Coltrane is famous for and can do. That kind of thing.

We also listened to King Crimson, "Three Of A Perfect Pair." He pointed out, to me, the compact drumming of Bill Bruford.

I love music!

So after having to confront the stark reality of what I lack as a musician I have decided to correct myself. I play mainly acoustic and have tried to learn some basic flatpicking--ala Doc Watson or Ramblin' Jack Elliot.

I have also started to try to learn a solo from Charlie Christian.

So to do this ... discipline. Nearly every night.

 

[Dave Serchuk]

Probably the main career goal in my life is passion. I want to feel deeply and passionately for what I've done. I've been lucky so far in that I've had jobs that offered this. Almost always, though, those jobs offered virtually no money to back up the passion. In effect I was paid in passion, and as is the case, I almost always ended up paying myself when the day's end.

But what does passion mean? To me it means a job you care deeply about, that you want to do. That you want to do the best job of it that you can.

I was a sex columnist for three years. It was called "Serchuk On Sex" and it amazes me that it's already ancient history. What I loved about it wasn't so much the subject--most of the time I wrote about how little sex I was actually having--but the column aspects of it. I loved the responsibility of putting my name on something that people would read, and that meant my reputation each month.

And I also wrote about my sex life a lot of the time. When there was one.

I was a miserable failure with women for much of my life. I would get nervous or do something stupid, or say the wrong thing at the wrong time. For much of my life I've thought of myself as unattractive, uncool, and--to top things off--possibly radioactive.

Humans need contact, just like most other mammals.

I went for long periods of my life without it, and it affected me.

So I think my column was my way of baring my soul to people, when I had few other options open. I worked very hard to reach people when I was at my loneliest. To forge a connection, somehow.

I received a fan letter once, written in purple ink from a woman who'd just moved to Denver. I wrote her back. I received another purple fan letter from her. I wrote back. We talked, and then had lunch at a diner near her.

She was very nice. I was very nice. We were very nice to eachother and then I went home. That was the closest I ever came to exploiting my miniscule fame for any sort of physical gain. Although a girl selling me a burrito once seemed quite surprised that she was selling it to Dave Serchuk of "Serchuk On Sex" fame. She knew this because I was buying the burrito with a check. That's how cash strapped I was. I used to buy things like burritos and nachos with a check.

Nothing much came of that either. But it was strange and interesting to get recognized.

 

[Dave Serchuk]

Thoughts about sketch shows ...

It's interesting how the pendulum seems to be swinging towards sketch shows as the breadwinners, even at improv theaters. High demand, for written original material. Wait, isn't improv brining 'em in? I guess not.

Which leads to the question: why doesn't improv put asses in seats? I don't know. Too much supply? Has the talent pool been watered down? I know that I personally almost never go to see improv, but that's not intentional, as if I'm sniffing my nose at it. Not at all.

In fact I used to go all the time. If you played in 2001 I saw you and your group. Possibly more than once. In fact likely. That was my year of seeing tons of shit. Since then I've calmed down.

I just don't feel like I have to see stuff with the same ferocity as before. I don't know if it's burnout or what, but it seems to be affecting more than just me.

But back to sketch shows. In showbiz, outside of music, these are my first love. My goal, still, is to be a writer for a sketch/variety TV show. I know get a number. But it is, admitting my ambition is my first step towards realization, provided I take the second and third steps, whichever those might be. They probably involve getting off my complacent ass.

I went to a show tonight, and saw some of the hallmarks of what I consider average to middling improv; angry playing, a lack of follow through on ideas. I won't name the show, but it really doesnt' matter as I've seen these same traits in many other sketch shows.

What am I a critic? What makes me qualified? As Scott Jennings once said of himself, I am the most and least qualified person there is: I am an audience member!

Often sketches just don't seem like they've been worked on enough. Every line doesn't snap! And I see no excuse for an under-edited or lazily written show. Unlike improv, where anything can happen on stage, a sketch show can be written for as long as it takes to write it. That can be weeks, but probably won't be. Possibly months, to make the sketches really crackle.

And if the lines don't jump, then they won't make the audience jump.

Another thing, and this I picked up from improv, is that sketches that are just kind of mean leave me as an audience member cold. Even if it includes a sketch character poiting out that a character is mean and/or crazy, it still doesn't mitigate the fact that we the audience are still stuck with this unappealing, possibly hostile character.

In improv if one character is just an asshole the whole time it can be harder to make a scene with them, unless they play the scene well as an asshole. I guess that applies. But if the asshole just flummoxes everyone, well, what's the point?

Possibly the smartest thing we did with "A Very Special Sketch Show" was bring in Katty Biscone to act as a sort of writing coach. See what we have, how we're doing and get us on track. We needed it. We worked with her for about a month or so, until the show's underpinnings were pretty solidly laid out. Thanks Katty!

I think the show was much stronger, for this second set of eyes. I wonder why more shows don't do it.

Of course we had disagreements. Katty very much wanted me to dump a rather effiminate male librarian from my sketch, claiming it was kind of old hat. And for a while I did. But, Donovan, the character, just needed to be in there. So I made the call, and wrote him back. Kevin Cragg breathed wonderfull life into him and he stole the sketch in many ways.

This isn't to say I am right and Katty was wrong, we just disagreed on that point. But about so many things she was dead right.

My point? Umm ... hire Katty and take more time.

 

[Dave Serchuk]

I passed blood today ...

Kind of gross to start an entry talking about my bowels, but it really freaked me out.

I went to the bathroom at about 10:00 am today at work. I work downtown on Water Street, near the former WTC.

At the bathroom, once I was done, ahem, with my movement, I looked into the bowl--as we all must--and saw what looked like a plum color in the bowl. Weird, I thought, but didn't give it more than that.

Then I wiped, and the toilet paper had a thick red on it, like, well, like blood. Then I wiped again, and it was still there. But it seemed to wipe away. After awhile it was gone, and that was that. I went to the bathroom, for, yup, movements, two more times that day and they weren't with any blood.

It kind of freaked me out, as you might understand, but it seems to have passed. I know I wasn't bleeding continuosly, it was just some blood. Or something that resembled blood, but wasn't.

I wondered: have I been eating too much fiber? It doesn't seem possible.

Ah, I guess it's just something I'll chalk up to experience.

Anyway, so I am, professionally, a financial journalist. I write about brokers, at least officially, but my real beat is broader than that.

It's a tough gig to get, as journalism as a profession is wilted. That's the thing with writing, it goes from unbelievably bad to somehow worse. The somehow worse is not being able to do it at all.

There are times when I get frustrated with brokers, and the people who deal with them. Their whole philosophy, their reason for being, is centered around money. Money, it's fucking fascinating to some people.

It doesn't fascinate me. I think of it more like oxygen: I really miss it when it's gone. But when I have some of it, I don't generally worry too much about getting that much more. I don't really give a shit about breathing more air than I am right now.

The value that whole culture, Wall St., and all the people that attend to them, place on money is hard to fathom. So many times I read stories about people who've lost all their dough because some scumbag broker ripped them off. I hear the stories so much that they're really not all that interesting, which is kind of sad.

One woman I speak to, though, her story really makes me sad. Her husband worked for a firm, and the firm not only fired him, for really no reason other than the manager wanted to give his job to someoen else, but they also snatched the money he had socked away in this quasi-401k the firm created.

The quasi-401k, by the way, exists for few other reasons, it seems, than because it can be snatched away when the moment is right.

The poor man, broken now, went home, and, possibly that day, killed himself.

His widow is a smart and tough woman, and I enjoy speaking with her. But the shadow of the deed never leaves.

Oh, and I was threatened with libel by some attorneys. I had written about a lawsuit, and apparently showed these attorneys in an unflattering light--or so I was told. But really I had just told the story of the clients who didn't feel these attorneys had represented them well at all in their suits. I didn't pontificate I didn't add my opinion.

But a lawsuit, even the threat of one, is a terrifying thing. It's the ultimate spider web, the American spyder web; it seems like sooner or later everyone in America gets sued, and it ruins their lives. Sooner or later. Court seems like death by a thousand leeches, not all of them lawyers.

I seek to avoid court at all costs, but sometimes it finds you. There's a feeling of powerlessness there. But that's exactly what the bullies who threatened me wanted me to feel, afraid.

I won't be that person. My only defense is the truth; that's not just posturing, it's really the only unasaillable defense for lible. That your story is provably true. I found that out the second I got off the phone with the attorney who threatened me. I tore open my AP Styleguide and shot right through the libel section. What you write must be provably true. Hearing it from someone isn't good enough.

I post under my own name here, which usually I think is better, but sometimes not. A public journal, unfortunately, isn't always the best place to discuss the vicitudes of my career, and my opinion on it. Which I have.

Mostly I wish I sympathized more about the money, because that way I would understand the people I speak to everyday just that much better.

 

[Dave Serchuk]

Live long enough, do enough things ...

... and someday you will get self-addressed labels mailed to you free of charge by charitable organizations.

How did I get on the list for two of these groups? Why did I get two sets of labels within days of eachother, after I'd been label-less for years?

Also I am keeping track of my amount of fake diplomas.

These are official looking documents that have virtually nothing to do with any sort of official recognition, carry no status and grant no priveledges.

I have one for skydiving when I was 19. I received another from The Bartending Academy, and just two days ago, along with my labels, I received one for my--it was assumed--quickly arriving participation in something called the "Wall of Tolerence." The diploma has a blue border, a gold seal that signifies nothing and the signatures of Morris Dees and Rosa Parks.

It says the diploma, provided it is used alongside my $25-100 fee, authorizes that the name of Mr. David Serchuk: "be placed on the Wall of Tolerence honoring those who are leading the way towards a more tolerent and just America as Founding Members of the National Campaign for Tolence."

I have no idea how bought names on a wall--which is itself a cheap imitation of the galvanizing Vietnam Veteren's Wall--will work towards a more progressive and just society.

Possibly racist, unjust people will fall asleep from boredome by the time they sift through all the last names until they get to those that begin with "S."

Freebies mystify me generally. They're hard to resist for the receiver--of course depending on their crap factor--but their, seemingly just as hard for the giver to ease up on as well.

About two months ago I joined the Sierra Club, overcome by the letter from their president who warned me about the impending ruination of a forest, whose name, I am ashamed to admit, slips my mind. Oh, the Tongas! Right, the Tongas.

In action, I brandished my checkbook, filled out their already printed petition and, along with the check for $20, mailed it in. I felt marginally better. I felt a lot better when I learned of succesfull lawsuits they've prosecuted.

But one day I got a pink post office slip in my box. I almost never get those. Could it be my tax refund? Could it be a book my friend and castmate Bill McCormick had promised to mail me?

I went to the Post Office, and eagerly handed the slip over to the slow-moving, middle-aged female clerk.

Four or five minutes later she returned with a large plastic bag, from ... The Sierra Club? What?

I tore it open and saw a brand new backpack, black with the Sierra Club logo on it. My first thought was, why are they wasting their money on this crap, when I only gave them $20. And my second thought was exactly the same. And my third thought was, I already have one backpack, three vinyl totebags, that I keep waiting to give away, and, just to top things off, a spare backpack that I gave/lent permanent to Randi.

All of them were freebies except for the first backpack I mentioned. I guess when you become an adult most freebies become really fucking boring. I mean, a totebag?

 

[Dave Serchuk]

Listening to Pink Floyd right now.

Had one of those beautiful spashes of inspiration/bits that make life worth living yesterday, and I was really looking forward to writing about it on the new "almost daily" journal. If you define almost daily as meaning about twice a week.

But that flash of inspiration is gone right now, and I know that the harder I try to pick it up the further from me it will get, kind of like chasing a feather around a massive glass acquarium with a vacuum cleaner that actually blows things away, and thus creates dust, I guess, more than anything else.

It would be the opposite of a vacuum cleaner, an atmosphere dirtier, I suppose.

I've found over the years the real answer is to try and not think of of the answer when something is on the tip of you mind. Just relax and try not to think of the thing. Then it usually returns, unbidden, some time later.

It's something to with the mind, like any muscle, working better when relaxed.

I've had to learn this however, as the natural instinct is to try and scratch the mental itch.

Which can not be done.

So I'll move onto some new thoughts which I've never recorded anywhere, but have been thinking about for several years.

How cool would it be if people turned lovely shades of orange, red and yellow when they died, like leaves?

Because that's what's happening in Autumn, we're seeing the colors that lurked beneath the green, for the brief duration of the leaf, all along. And they only could be seen when the green started to fade away during the end of the term.

I imagined brilliantly colord elderly sitting in wheel chairs, perhaps on front porches around the world. With their veins, so very like a leaf's. Their faces a rich intermingling of sunset orange, pear yellow, and fiesta red, as they slowly, gracefully, withered and fell off the tree.

But then as I completed the first thought, I had the second thought.

Which is that that those beautiful colors would soon have to mean death to all that saw them. So that you would begin to fear your final transformation into what would quite literally be your "golden years."

"Oh, look at that fossil!" mean youths would say. "He's all orange!"

So it would in turn actually ruin the most beautiful colors in the world, because it would corrupt our perception.

But could it really be worse than what we have today, which is that people as they're fading really look like they're well, fading. I imagine it couldn't really be worse. No.

Oh, where is that thought I had? My disciplined mind is finding it no more quickly than my undisciplined mind.

I just finished David Copperfield. And despite the fact that it took me possibly a month too long to read it, there were scenes in it that stayed in my mind as impossibly modern, and correct, for someone, Dickens, that had written over 150 years ago.

At one point, right near the end, Copperfield and his friend, Traddles, are invited to a prison, so they can meet up with their old school headmaster. Naturally enough of course he's a jailor of some capacity.

Everything in Dickens comes back. If a character makes an appearance on P. 1 he'll make another near page 1000. It's kind of like a montage in that way, a really, really slowly moving montage!

Could that have been my thought? About Dickens? It hardly seems to matter now.

But it's true, nothing is thrown away. Literally every loose end and relationship is tidies up, justice is perfectly executed--with alltogether appropriate endings for all. In that sense, yes, it's like the most callback filled improv I'd ever seen. True the callbacks could take hundreds of pages in some--actually most--instances, but they were earned! Although many of them hardly surprised. I came to expect them, I just didn't know when or where.

But anyway, Copperfield and Traddles are in the jail. And an impressive feat of size and engineering it is, the way Dickens describes it it sounds like all the most current British thought of social and physical engineering went into it, which have mostly antiquated.

For instance solitary confinement is seen as the most perfect at aligning a man with the British way of doing things. The best method, it is believed in the book, for correcting a man.

I mean we still use it, but now we don't think it rehabilitates a man. In fact, a sad comment on our horrible, cynical prison system, and social justice system at large, is that we don't expect jail to rehabilitate inmates at all any more. We've lost Britain's naive faith in the care and correction for its prisoners and have replaced it with literally nothing except building contracts and ever more people put in the clink.

One interesting point, in the jail scene Dickens points out how well the prisoners eat. I guess this was considered normal back then, to feed them the best food. How much that has changed, in America, where prisoners eat slop mixed with starch.

Also even though the prisoners are supposed to be in full solitary lockdown Dickens is too hip for that and Copperfield notes how they seem to all kind of communicate with eachother, even though they're not even supposed to have any means of doing so.

But this sentence I thought the most prescient: "I could not help thinking, as we approached the gate, what an uproar would have been made in the country, if any deluded man had proposed to spent one-half the money it had cost, on the erection of an industrial school for the young, or a house of refuge for the deserving old."

Yes, exactly. Still.

Somewhere we made a choice, and it's become The System, entrenched in stone 10,000 feet wedged into the ground. Invested it with our massive resources and belief. But it was wrong, the wrong choice.

 

[Dave Serchuk]

The Good news first ...

I was offered a raise!

The bad news is that it was for a dollar an hour. And as a temp I work 28 hours a week. Not exactly enough to retire on.

My recent working life has been strange. I am a full-time temp. The strange thing is that it's pretty cool. Because of budget constraints at my job they can't afford to hire me full time. As a consequence I miss every Monday, which gives me a wonderful three-day weekend every week.

My boss keeps talking to me about how he is really trying to get me on full time. And, while I would never turn that offer down, I'm secretly thinking to myself: ooh, I'd really miss having Mondays off.

In either case I'm not going to have to worry about it for a while, as the company's budget seems stalled.

Being a temp is strange in some ways. It's become such a necessity in the modern business world that some arrangements with temps, apparently, have to be made even when they don't make sense financially for the company. Some arrangements between the hiring company and the temp agency, I mean.

I work for a major publisher downtown. Manpower employs me there because--due to the bad economy--there's been a hiring freeze in numbers at my company. So they hire me through a temp agency, they don't have to pay a full time salary, or benefits to me.

So they save money, right?

No, not at fucking all.

Let's say they pay me, oh, $40,000. I'm guessing but they might pay the temp agency $50,000. Out of which the temp agency pays me. So the temp agency makes its cut.

Now if they paid me the difference they'd still save money, and they'd get me full time. So it's not only more expensive to have me as a temp, they also get less work out of me. At least in theory, about the work part, that is.

I just don't get it. I guess major firms just have to have some kind of temp people on there to make the books/hiring numbers add up. And my relative inneficiency as a temp makes some larger numbers add up.

Paradoxical modern business.

On the good tip my editor brought me corn from the Midwest. Which I thought was really nice.

I'm also trying to set up an interview/story with a man who works across the hallway from me who has been with my firm for ... 75 years! He knows everybody, and is a really nice, kind guy. I'd love to learn about his life, and what it's like.

He began working for my firm when he was 14 years old and he never stopped.

Other stuff that's been going on is I've been sad in some ways.

My country house is being sold, after it's been there my whole life. It's just a house, but I feel like I'm losing a family member. To me Summer itself in some way is being sold.

It was always something to go up there and get out of the tri-state area. Get up to the Catskills and the clean air, and the cool nights even when it's hot during the day time.

I didn't really appreciate it for most of my life. I didn't like the noisy neighbors, or the relative shoddiness of the house itself.

But over the past couple of years something changed. All of a sudden I started to define my own relationship with the house, the area, everything. and I started to realize what a treasure it is, just in time to see it sold.

Randi and I went up last year, and turned over a log and saw a salamander that had to be 4-5" long, gray with yellow spots. I picked it up and held it.

Mom and I drove on some back roads to a restaurant and saw a flock of 8-9 wild turkeys last year.

I remember catching a toad just walking along the roads of the development at night, there were so many there to catch. Now I don't see any at all, which scares me.

Just last weekend Randi, Mom and I were at a lakeside restaurant and saw not one but two bald eagles fly by the window. I was so excited I told the waitress, who'd seen them before, you could tell.

I went around an old bungalow colony when I was 10 years old with two friends, Bruce Weiss, and David Grodner, and Bruce caught a garter snake and gave it to me. I kept it, until it was clear it would rather die than live in captivity. I had bought two goldfish for it to eat, but instead let the snake go back in New Jersey and kept the fish.

Orange spotted salamanders, cray fish, all in the local streams. Large butterflies, yellow, last weekend. Hawks roosted in trees, their chests a regal color.

Randi and I went to the Monticello racetrack, and watched harness racing last weekend. The building a hollowed out hulk, maybe 100 other people watching the races, so dilapidated they don't even bother to collect the $1.50 admission.

The main action in the bookmaking room, flourescent lights, smoke, addiction, fatness, and white skin. That's where the action is.

I wish Mom never wanted to sell, as I'm not done discovering what I like about up there. Of course I took it for granted, when I didn't know any better. And now I'm ashamed. But life's like that, isn't it?

No matter how hard I try, I keep learning the same lessons over and over again about appreciating people, and places, before they go.

Parden me while I drift.

I used to work in the Municipal Building downtown by City Hall, in New York.

I would leave my NPR internship and see the Woolworth Building, once the tallest building in New York and the world, nestled between the mighty Twin Towers, once the tallest buildings in the world, and still the tallest in New York.

The angle, and the closeness of the Woolworth Building, made it look almost as tall as the Towers.

"'I've got to take that photo," I thought.

Of course I never did. And six months later I never could again.

Two days ago I called a source at Cantor Fitzgerald I had been too scared to call before. CF lost almost all its work force on Sept. 11.

But I had to know. My source was a good guy, and I couldn't put it off any longer.

And ... he was there!

No, actually he wasn't. Someone who answered the phone just had his name. The real person was no longer there, or anywhere anymore.

And hasn't been since Sept. 11.

Oh, there's more I could say, about trying to relate to a family member who may not be insane, but is dark, depressed, sadenning, madenning and sometimes terrifying, but that's a long story. Maybe tomorrow.

Thanks for reading.