No appreciation for brilliance

Here’s my brilliant idea, I say. I run across the country, 10 miles a day, doing feature profiles of ordinary people, a la Charles Kuralt. Charles, my journalistic hero, last of the great video poets, remembered now for having a chick on the side. Yes, that Charles Kuralt.

This brilliant idea is merely one of many. I suffer self-realization syndrome, contracted from shelves of books that say I can create my life through the power of my imagination. Unfortunately, no where do these tomes tell me what do to with an imagination that darts around like a Vivarin-saturated whippet. Several months ago, I was absolutely set on writing a manifesto on America’s dire need for economic revolution. After that, I was going to take over Saucony, because they closed the last of their U.S. plants, and now their running shoes, which I wear, will become Like Nike.

True to my pattern of being a font of brilliant ideas that sputter upon hitting atmosphere, I come up with yet another brilliant idea to put the first two in motion. As any ideaist can tell you, coming up with brilliant ideas is infinitely easier than actually doing something, like writing a manifesto or raising $30 million.

Maybe I could run across the country, ostensibly to do profiles of ordinary Americans but surreptitiously campaigning to reinstate the Saucony plant in Bangor, Maine, and to encourage my fellow ordinary Americans to patronize local businesses instead of corporations that shed human beings like so much flotsam.

There was just the one tiny hitch. I would need to get paid. The financial sector of corporate America has me by the short hairs.

Eureka! What about TV? There are shows about paint drying, so surely I could sell this idea to someone; perhaps even my friend, the cable network executive, with whom I had a lunch date.

Here’s my idea, I say. I run across the country, 10 miles a day, doing feature profiles of ordinary people, a la Charles Kuralt. How can I make this work, I ask. My friend looks at the condiments and grins a little to one side. He wants to gossip, not be pitched, but I’ve already polluted the conversation, so he indulges me.

Take this with a grain of salt, he tells me, but it won’t work. Poetic journalism died when Rupert Murdoch bought his way into television and slapped up “A Current Affair.” I need a gimmick, he says, suddenly brightening. “Maybe you could do it topless!”

I would resent the insult to my journalistic integrity if not for being flattered by the notion that someone considers my 40-year old boobs a viable advertising platform. I am instantly self-realized as to why he is the network executive and I am the unemployed journalist.

As I drive away after lunch, cogitating gimmickry, I slowly become aware of the talk radio program I happen to have on in the car. It’s an interview with Robert Olen Butler, a Pulitzer-prize winning author who is writing live in front of a webcam so the world can witness his “process.” Writing is agony, he says, but the only way to do it is to face the page every day.

Self-realization No. 2 hits. I would rather run across the continent than face the page every day. Earth to Deborah. Get on with the brilliant idea you had three years ago. It was a Web site called Breathe, a repository of essays that would one day be published in small newspapers across the country.

All I have to do is face the page. Accouterments are optional.

Friday, August 23, 2002

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