The middle finger will join us later…
I have one talent, and it is being chipped away.
I write. I write well. I can flat out write most people under the table, out of the room and into traffic, where they will be dodging semi trucks for the next several hours.
If I am confident about anything, it is this — I can beat you in a war of words.
You may get confused halfway through reading what I wrote — how exactly did we end up in traffic in the first place? — but I will carry you someplace special.
Most times. Not every time. Michael Jordan missed a basket or two.
Which is fine, cause Larry Bird never, ever missed a shot when he had to make one. Ever. And I’ve always been more of a Bird man than a Jordan guy.
Call it cockiness. Call it confidence. I have skills.
Of course, I have spent the last 24 years refusing to listen to editors, jousting with those who would tweak my words and basically telling anyone who doubts that it goes from God’s lips to my fingertips to suck eggs.
Which, surprisingly, hasn’t always gone over well.
So, now, instead of making a comfortable living writing pap for The (Canadian) Man, I pound out my prose in a way that makes me happy.
Coupeville Sports has been more, much more, than I anticipated.
It has given me freedom, a chance to continue to fight for independent journalism after The Whidbey Examiner committed ritual suicide and was forever branded as just another punk sell-out.
It has given me a chance to make direct contact with my audience in a way that never existed before.
To build the legend of Cow Town in a way frowned on by the snot-nosed blue bloods who sneer that their papers are superior, while secretly sweating bullets because they’ve lost their readers and they’re not coming back.
But, while I get all hopped up on (probably misguided) moral outrage and fire exclamation points all over the joint (at least two guaranteed in every story!!), the reality is, I still have to do stuff to pay the bills.
And that stuff is killing me, day by day. Or, my fingers, at least.
The fingers that are my one gift are being abused and used, torn apart, ground down, mashed, cut, shredded and beaten to the point where they are a mix of pain, stiffness and soreness filled with an aching buzz.
Being in the dish pit at 18 wasn’t great. Being a few years further down the road now, it’s a lot less enticing to have made a return trip.
I look at my fingers, the things that allow me to tell my stories, and I see a open, puffy slash down one of them, in a place where the water and the steel wool abuses it further with each dish.
I see nicks, bumps and bruises. They stretch across all ten fingers, the cuticles hammered and chipped.
There are mornings when I flex my hands and the middle finger on one hand stays locked down, refusing to pop back up and join its brothers without some real coaxing.
Excedrin is my travelin’ companion in the morning, and the day job is killing me. Physically, and, far more often, mentally and emotionally.
Maybe I should have just shut up and let them mangle my words in the early days, so I wouldn’t be getting my fingers mangled today. Taken the 401K and sold my soul…
Nah.
Better to go into that good night forever flippin’ the middle digits at The Man, even if you sometimes have to smack one of them to get it to stand up at full attention.
Coupeville Sports 