Coupeville Sports

“Man, Uncle David, you do jabber on, don’t you?”

I’m having a bit of an existential crisis over here.

It’s been sparked by a lot of things, probably, as I wound my way through one of the more bizarre summers of my life.

In no particular order I:

Quit my day job of three-plus years in an effort to save my typing fingers from the ravages of more battles with the dish pit.

Then drifted along, swimming with the jellyfish in Penn Cove and not accomplishing much at all, certainly not finding a new job.

Sold every single one of my 2,700 DVDs, even greatest-movie-of-all-time “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and the unfairly maligned “Bad Girls from Valley High.”

The landlord does appreciate getting his rent in a timely fashion.

Found myself in an unexpected romantic relationship that went from zero to 199 MPH before I was (metaphorically) slammed into a brick wall by my first up-close encounter with truly unfathomable mental illness.

Breakups happen. People get mad or change.

But when fear and paranoia that haunt a beautiful, intelligent, joyful person rips free and strips all that away in a blink of an eye, it scars. Badly.

Got to experience the inside of our judicial system as it was being abused for the first time.

Gave consideration to going back into the world of professional/corporate newspapers again in some manner, while actually returning to the pages of The Whidbey Examiner, for one story at least, after an absence of four years.

That last one might have been the oddest of all those moments.

It’s a good story, one that deserved to be told, but, as I posted a link to it on Facebook today and didn’t see the usual Coupeville Sports kicker, I knew, immediately, this would not work. Not at this point in my life.

After all the time and sweat poured into my own project, doing side work, even for money, left me with an eerie empty feeling I couldn’t shake.

There was a 15-year-plus streak where my writing appeared every week in the Examiner, without fail.

My movie column jumped from the Whidbey News-Times to the Examiner (when they were actual rivals and not sister publications owned by a giant conglomerate) when the upstart was on issue #2 or #3, and kept on rolling, week after week, for a surprisingly long time.

Later, I wrote a lot of sports articles (and even got paid for a few) and there was a time when, arguably, my byline had appeared in those pages, and later, online, as much or more than any other writer in the paper’s history.

And then, long story compressed into a single run-on sentence, the Examiner got sold, thousands of my bylines got erased, I got pissed, launched Coupeville Sports and went to war with the “Evil Empire,” only to find, to my surprise, the joy I got from my new endeavor mattered more than any trumped-up feud.

Being able to be my own editor, to publish whatever I choose, whenever I choose, however I choose, without concern over being impartial and detached (cause I’m not) has been liberating. It has been invigorating.

What it hasn’t been is all that profitable.

But that’s fine.

If I was writing for the money, a regular paycheck, I would go back to “real” journalism, in whatever capacity was available to me.

Which I considered.

And believe me, none of this is meant as a knock on the people currently working for the papers here on Whidbey. They’re in the job for more than money.

I know most of them very well, they are people who helped me along the way and influenced my writing, and I have great respect for long-time pros like Keven Graves, Jim Waller and Jessie Stensland.

I just can’t do what they’re doing, even if I thought, for a brief second, I might be able to do so again.

It’s mainly I just don’t want to have to go put pants on again. My shorts-clad legs crave the open air of Whidbey winters in all its ferocious glory.

And yes, you can remind me I said that two months from now when I turn blue in the time it takes to go from my car to the gym.

Ultimately, though, it comes down to one thing. I believe in Coupeville Sports.

I believe in the improbable dream that at some point, I will give every single athlete in Cow Town their very own feature story.

We’re not quite there yet, but over the course of 3,441 articles and a gazillion photos, we have created something that couldn’t happen, that wouldn’t happen, at the newspapers.

It’s why I sold my DVDs, to give myself some time where my only focus was on the blog while still being able to pay my very limited bills.

That time is about to run out, so I may need to get past my summer-long mental block and get a “real” job again, though I hope not.

In a perfect world, every one who tells me how much they enjoy what I am doing here on Coupeville Sports would want this to be my “real” job, would skip one day’s Starbucks and donate $5 to the cause.

But, as this summer has repeatedly hammered home, perfection is awfully hard to capture.

Not that I’m going to stop trying, one existential crisis at a time.

Read Full Post »