We All Struggle with Something

We name things to help us understand them, and to create a shared knowledge with our fellow human beings. I sometimes get fascinated by language, and trying to figure out how even the simplest of words -- dog, cat, dodecahedron -- came to be. Naming things, however, can put people on a slippery slope. Nobody wants to be defined too narrowly by elements of their character or physical presentation.

Look at me and you might think, "White nerd with glasses." You would be right about that, but there's so much more going on. I play guitar, I love the Red Sox and Bruins, I make terrible "dad jokes," I love Public Enemy and Funkadelic, I love to wander around in strange places taking photos, I have arthritic big toes and a bad hip.

One label I don't mind tagging myself with, though, is person with Attention Deficit Disorder.

More than three years ago, I diagnosed myself with ADD (see November 28, 2018, "ADD Me to the List"). Read the linked post to get the full story on it. I want to reiterate one point, though: realizing there was a name for the collective struggles I had battled my whole life gave me some freedom. I no longer worried that I was crazy or stupid or lazy. Finding the right "tag" for myself was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

In my new memoir, Great/Dismal: My Four-Month Tour of Duty on the Battleship Patchouli, amid the highway hijinks and visits to Graceland, New Orleans and Memphis, the exploration of Albuquerque, the punk rock shows, the flashbacks to college, there is self-analysis. I didn't have as much fun during my adventure as I thought I would, and for years I had no idea why.

During the course of writing the book, I began to put together a better picture of why I struggled, with the light finally shining when I realized I had both ADD and executive function issues. Those two things combined make it difficult for me to plan ahead and stay on task, take things as they come and be more spontanous.

We all struggle with something: hearing loss, flat feet, bipolar disorder, taking care of a sick relative, narcissism, a love of REO Speedwagon. I hope my book will show readers that it's never too late to figure yourself out, and that discovering the name for what you struggle against can be incredibly empowering.

Below is "Cross Bones Style," the only song I know by Cat Power, aka Chan Marshall. She has struggled with mental health issues, so I feel it's appropriate to share her song here.

Please Buy My Book! (Does This Headline Make Me Look Desperate?)

For nigh on a thousand years, I have been working on and talking about my just-released road-trip memoir, Great/Dismal: My Four-Month Tour of Duty on the Battleship Patchouli (see May 5, 2016, "Here's An Excerpt from My Road-Trip Memoir").

I hit the road with three friends in February 1988, traveling in a converted handyman's van. From Connecticut we traveled down the eastern seaboard, and then on through Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, before entering the southwest. We ended up in New Mexico, where we lived for a few months. In 2008, I wrote about this journey on a predecessor blog; in 2011, I began expanding my story into a book. That book has now been published.

Why did it take me 10 years to finish the book? That's par for the course for me. My first book, (C)rock Stories: Million-Dollar Tales of Music, Mayhem and Immaturity, also spent a decade in development. I'm not the most disciplined writer, that's for sure. But, as I discovered part-way through the process of writing my new memoir, I have ADD (see November 28, 2018, "ADD Me to the List"). That means I struggle to stay on task and organize my thoughts on paper, and I can get easily frustrated when I find things to be difficult.

Great/Dismal underwent a lot of changes from the initial draft all those years ago, to the one I hope you'll consider buying today. Because of my ADD (and executive function issues), I also procrastinate like a true professional. So it's not like I spent 10 straight years working on this book. I would leave it alone for weeks, sometimes even months. And even when I worked on it, sometimes progress was painfully slow. Also, I took my hands off it for a while, sending it to friends and family, seeking their input (see May 15, 2013, "Out of My Hands...for Now").

"What's the book about?" you might ask. It's equal parts Jack Kerouac's On the Road, detailing the adventures my three friends and I had while running amok in America (and also the boring parts), and Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor, with its nod to classic-era disco as well as new millennium club music.

Wait, that last part's not quite right.

It's a mash-up of Kerouac's famous book; John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley; the Rough Guide series of travelogues; the very tamest of Charles Bukowski; and a mid-life journey to self-discovery. I write not only about the four-month odyssey I took with my friends, but also about the various inspirations for the trip (National Lampoon magazine, the aforementioned Kerouac, a few free-form trips I took at the end of my college years, etc.). Additionally, I flash back to college and spend a chapter analyzing why I struggled to let my hair down during my adventure.

It's the most intimate thing I've ever written, which is another reason that I took so long to publish it. I don't like to talk about myself and my struggles, so this is a big step for me. I hope that if you buy it (and actually read it) you will connect with some part of it, whether the stupid stuff my friends and I did on our journey, or the struggles I had during the trip. And please let me know what you think, whether by posting a comment here, sending me a text or email or a Facebook message, or writing a review on Amazon, where the book is also available (along with other online retailers. You can also order one via your favorite indie bookseller).

Thanks!

Writing the Wrong

(Illustration credit: Andy Cole, whom I've known since grade school.)

I don't write much on this blog, but my hope is that soon I'll be writing more in general, and perhaps even getting paid for it. As you may know, I concentrate my blogging energies on my other site, The Backside of America. I also have been working on a memoir, on and off for the last eight years (see May 5, 2016, "Here's An Excerpt from My Road-Trip Memoir"). Now, after hemming and hawing for years -- yes, YEARS -- I am ready (I think) to launch myself back onto the paid writing market.

Oh sure, I've talked about this and thought about this and planned for this for month after month after month, always coming up with excuses not to venture out. I'm a stay-at-home dad and my kids need me to focus on them. I've been out of the job market too long and people won't hire me. Something is holding me back that I don't understand (see November 28, 2018, "ADD Me to the List," to read about when I did figure out, at least in part, what was holding me back).

Several months ago, after tinkering around with a professional web site for waaaaaaaaay too long, I launched the new-and-improved DaveBrigham.com. I've owned (well, rented) this domain name for a very long time. I used to blog at that site about my life, my kids, etc. I've now turned it into a place to advertise my talents, and to solicit clients for freelance work. But once I'd published the new version of the site, I just let it sit there. I didn't tell anyone about it. I figured I needed a week or two to get used to the idea of the web site being live. And then I would let my friends and family know and my writing career would pick up where it left off nearly two decades ago.

But no. That's not the way I work. As I wrote in my last post here, the above-referenced one about my having Attention Deficit Disorder, as well as Executive Function Disorder, "I have issues with planning and problem solving; self-motivation; visual imagery; critical analysis; and other things." So instead of just jumping into things, taking life by the horns, I procrastinate and put things aside and convince myself that I'll know when the time is right to make a move. Usually, that time comes when I'm just so sick of having something hanging over my head, and being transferred from one to-do list to another to another to another. That's why I finally began to promote, just a little bit, my writing web site.

I wish I weren't this way. I'm trying to manage my ADD and EFD and feel like I'm doing better in the nearly 12 months since I diagnosed myself and began taking note of who I am and how I operate. My new mantra is "Start living outside your head." I've always been one to think and think and think about stuff, and put off and put off and put off, somehow feeling that researching and planning for my life is just as good as actually living it. But that's not very satisfying.

So if you or someone you know needs help with a writing, editing or proofreading task, check out my web site (again, its DaveBrigham.com). While I haven't worked professionally since doing some freelance work about 17 years ago, I have honed my skills with the Backside of America blogging and working on my memoir. I feel my writing, editing, researching and proofreading talents have never been better.

OK, bye.

Bookin' It

I love to read but I'm not good at reviewing books. In junior high school I considered reading book reports to my classmates to be a fate worse than eating tofu-covered lima beans. Shrinking in my seat like an ashamed Rottweiler who's afraid to chase the mailman, I would agonize as student after student volunteered, hoping that somehow the teacher would exempt me. Of course she never did, and I never learned the lesson that going first means you get to kick back and enjoy as other kids stammer and turn red and tremble so badly their reports nearly tear in half.

In my adult years the fear of reading my work out loud has been replaced by the realization that I'm just not that good at critical analysis. I've always had difficulty plumbing the depths of long works of fiction, teasing out the symbolism, deciphering characters' ulterior motives or simply even remembering at the end of the book just what the hell happened in the first few chapters. These reasons attest to why I've never written a novel. I've diagnosed myself with executive function disorder.

Nevertheless, to coin a phrase, I've persisted. I've reviewed plenty of books here over the years, many of them non-fiction. Below you'll find links to three attempts. If you're so inclined, search the site for others.

April 4, 2013, Bill Bryson's The Lost Continent: Travels in Small Town America

January 20, 2012, Myles J. Connor, Jr.'s The Art of the Heist

July 24, 2012, Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole

I've come to you today with a somewhat different approach than the longer-form reviews I've done previously. I'm going with a quick-hit approach, offering up basic reviews and also a look at what's on my nightstand right now.

Also, there will be nepotism. Well-earned nepotism.

Earlier this summer I read Andrew Forsthoefel's Walking to Listen: 4,000 Miles Across America, One Story At a Time. The author of this memoir is young and freshly graduated from Awesome College or some such institution. He doesn't know what to do with his life, so he sets out from his mother's house in Pennsylvania on foot, a rucksack across his back, with the goal of simply talking to people along his route. He figures that he can learn from his fellow citizens how they make their lives work best, and apply those lessons to himself.

I really enjoyed Walking to Listen. Forsthoefel has an easy writing style and doesn't shy away from examining his own warts. The tales of kindness and generosity offered by his fellow Americans that he shares will make you think that in these polarizing political times there is hope for our nation.

Reading Forsthoefel's book was a dangerous thing for me to do, perhaps even brave. As regular readers know, I've been working, on and off, for several years on a road-trip memoir. So reading a really good book from a major publisher about trekking across the US of A is the sort of activity that could drop me into writer's depression. But instead I decided to take inspiration from Forsthoefel's book, go back and look at my work-in-progress and make it even better.

While I was the first member of my family to publish a book -- well, since you asked: (C)rock Stories: Million-Dollar Tales of Music, Mayhem and Immaturity -- I will not be the first to publish a memoir. That honor goes to my mother, Joan Bogert Brigham.

Published earlier this summer, her book, Invitation to Inner Light: To Love and Wisdom...an Essential Step for Personal and Planetary Peace, is part memoir, part travel guide to Peru and part revelation. The revelations for many readers will come in learning about my mother's spiritual path and how perhaps to follow their own, similar route to "opening to the sacred seed within." The book is about following your inner voice, which my mother tunes in via meditation, to realize who you are and how to realize your dreams and fulfill your destiny. She places great weight on love and learning how to discover the light that's inside each of us. This is my clumsy attempt to translate the message of Invitation to Light, as a person who is not at all spiritual and can't relate to many of the experiences my mother has had in her 85 years.

For me, the revelations in my mother's book were more personal. I had no idea that she'd yearned since she was a teenager for a meaningful spiritual experience. I never knew what motivated her to make not one, but two, trips to Peru in the 1990's. And I certainly didn't recall all that she'd told me about her transformative experience at Peru's Machu Pichu, the sacred and breathtaking ancient Inca city in the Andes mountains.

Additionally, I wasn't aware of just how important meditation, sounding and dream interpretation were, and still are, to my mother. Sure, I've heard her talk about all of these things all of my adult life, but reading it just makes it all the more evident and powerful. The message of my mother's book -- we as humans need to look inside ourselves to find the strength and courage to love ourselves and one another -- isn't unique. But given the tenor of our times, it certainly is a message that needs repeating. I can't express how proud of my mother for putting her heart, soul and, yes, LIGHT, into her book!

A few years back, I gave my mother a copy of Mark Adams's Turn Right at Machu Pichu: Rediscovering the Lost City One Step at a Time. I'm not sure whether she read it. More recently, I purchased a copy for myself, after reading and thoroughly enjoying Adams's Meet Me in Atlantis: Across Three Continents in Search of the Legendary Sunken City.

Now seemed like a perfect time to take Turn Right at Machu Pichu off my growing stack of books to read. And just as with his Atlantis book, I am getting tremendous enjoyment out of this one. Adams has a self-deprecating writing style that I both enjoy and employ myself. The basis of his book is retracing the route the Hiram Bingham III took in 1911 to expose Machu Pichu to the wider world. Adams ties his own trials and tribulations along the rigorous adventure to Bingham's pursuit, as well as to the history of the Inca people.

So far I'm loving it, and I expect that will continue.