I must have dreamt that I blogged last night. Or is it dreamed? Because I thought I was going to have a three day streak going here ... But, alas, it is not to be.

The reason I don't do most things in life is fear of failure. I would bet that's a pretty common sentiment for most people. I had this buddy in middle/high school who was a phenomenal skateboarder (at least I thought he was, though I'm not an X-game connoisseur or anything). And I know what made him so good: No Fear. (Which, now that I'm thinking about it, his adept skate skills would have intersected perfectly with the No Fear brand hay day. Or is it hey day?) It's also why I was terrible at baseball. Baseball I love; it is one of the few things that I have always loved and I'm sure I always will and I would gander that it is tied somewhat up in the fact that it has always been a common area of interest between me and my dad. But I was TERRIBLE. Now, I could field and throw and run the bases and actually did all of those things at an above average clip. But batting. The last summer I played baseball (Babe Ruth league, 14 yr. olds, Fargo, ND) I went hitless the entire year. I played three innings a game because that was the league minimum and I can't blame my coach because whenever I played there was a gaping hole at the bottom of the lineup. I struck out mostly and I sometimes tell people I just couldn't hit a 70 mph fastball (were they really moving that fast?). But really it was about fear: I was terrified of being hit by a 70 mph fastball. Here's the thing: I have a pretty high pain tolerance when I know something is coming, at least I think I do. I have a couple tattoos that didn't really bother me, I'm diabetic and take 4 or so injections a day and have done so for almost 15 years, I never feared talking to pretty girls in high school because I knew rejection was inevitable. You get the point - pain has never been a big bother for me as long as I know it's coming. And with baseball the chances are really good that you're not going to get hit but ... there are guys that get paid millions of dollars to throw baseballs and they still accidently hit guys from time to time. It's the same reason I hate downhill skiing - I'm not in control of the pain that might attack me. If I end up at the bottom of a snowy hill and my legs are not pointing in the right direction - terrifying. And it may never happen. But there is a chance.

I'm way off subject. I failed at baseball mostly because I was scared to get hit by a pitch, so I would only swing in a real half-ass kind of way. I think I carried that over to the rest of my life - if I just do things half-ass and no one really expects me to hit and they still let me play the league minimum three innings than at least I still get to play a little, right? Setting people up for the mediocre is a gift of mine: underpromise, overdeliver.

It's not working anymore. And I didn't set it up correctly here at the blog - I told you I would write everyday and you are witnessing my colossal failure. But I feel alright about it now. I don't know if we just get to a certain point in our life where we realize that everyone is a failure on some level or what. It goes back to baseball (as most things do). Had I just pulled a Happy Gilmore and gone to the batting cages and stood over home plate and let the machine fired baseballs pelt my chest, I think I would have been a decent ballplayer. Maybe not great and certainly not a minor-league contract kind of guy, but I would have at least held my own at 14 and wouldn't have been a chasm in the lineup every game. I have a decent swing, I surprise myself in slow pitch softball where there is no fear of being hit by a pitch. But if I could have gotten it out of the way, all the pain of being hit, and just gotten used to it, I think I would have been a different scrawny, scrappy ballplayer. The same goes for me now. I'm pretty used to failure. I'm super accustomed to mediocrity. And frankly, I'm a little tired of it. I'm interested in taking some chances. Because I've had failure bounce of my chest plenty of times and I'm still living to talk about it. So where is the fear in try now?

Oh Routine! Wretched Routine!

Geez.

As my wonderful wife pointed out in the comment section of the last blog, it has been five days since I last blogged. So. Two days after the first blog, five days after the second blog ... at this rate, I think you'll wait approximately one year between blog Nine and Ten. Whoever "you" are ...

The great thing about blogging, I suppose is that you just get to put your thoughts out into the universe and if they come back or if they ever reach another human being then that's all well and good, but the important part is the putting your thoughts out there.

(This reminds me of a super creepy Ray Bradbury short story. It's in the Illustrated Man book of shorts, which is a book based on this guy who's tattoos all tell stories. It's excellent, as should be expected from Bradbury. Anyway, in this particular story this spaceship or something explodes and these astronauts are floating out into space, all in separate directions, and they know that they'll never be saved, but they'll float on forever, but they can still communicate through their headsets in their spacesuit helmets. A horrifying idea - I think maybe a hell that terrifies me more than fire and brimstone, the idea of communicating sheer isolation. I shiver just thinking about it.)

That was a super long side note.

Onto the big news for today: We bought a house. Or rather our offer has been accepted. It's a little two bedroom, two bathroom, two porch house in St. Paul, just east of downtown, across the street to the south from Interstate 94. (This makes the front porch an interesting bit of construction, since it is a bit noisy there.) It's super exciting. We've been looking for quite a while and we've had two other offers on other houses and for the third to be the charm is glorious for us. We'd love to have you over once we get all moved in come October. And I don't even know who "you" is ...

I've been booking shows and reading Chris Offut's The Good Brother (which is brilliant) and hanging out with Eden and Sarah and enjoying my last two weeks of unemployment. I'll try to be better about this whole routine thing, I really will. We'll get in a groove here and you'll be amazed at the hyper-interesting blog posts that I have for you.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow. I'll write you tomorrow...

Micro v Macro

So. I've hammered home my point about how terrible I am with routine by not blogging on day number TWO. That's right, I lasted one day. However, I'm back on the horse or the wagon (speaking of, we just bought a Subaru Forester which I LOVE) or whatever it is that you say.

Today's quick topic:

I hate Twitter.

Here's the thing. I'm a mildly interesting person. I don't promise to be as interesting as some people but I am probably more interesting than a handful too. Thus mildly interesting. But for Twitter to work, if you are going to update it six or seven times a day or whatever, you better be UNBELIEVABLY interesting. Thus Twitter works well for organizations like the Onion, which can always drop hilarious headlines, really as often as they want and I would always love to read them. In fact, if you do Tweet (which I highly discourage) you'll want to follow the Onion. But this is where the next problem comes in: Even if you are interesting or if you're following interesting people who are updating their Twitters a thousand times a day, the chances are that you are following a hundred people who are not interesting but still insist on updating their Twitters a thousand times a day and if you obsessively check your Twitter (is it so important that I must capitalize it?) six times an hour, your chances of reading one tweet that is hilarious or relevant or at all important is ... well, I'm not fantastic at math, but the chances are not good.

Maybe it would help if I had ADHD. Seriously. Maybe tweeting is for hyperactive brains. And that's fine. In fact, if people start prescribing twitter instead of Ritalin, I will be overjoyed. But for me - it just doesn't work.

They call it MicroBlogging. I guess I would have to fully understand the definition of blogging to be in any place to argue with that sentiment, but I just don't get it. If tweeting is MicroBlogging, I choose MacroBlogging. It seems like blogging should be a place to present ideas and talk about them and I don't know, expand on something. 140 characters does not allow that. It's shorter than a text message. Which is really what tweeting comes down to: Mass text messaging. And I hate mass emails. Seriously. Even when someone picks them specifically for me to read, like it's a forward that they get, but then they think of me and they decide to send it to me - as kind as that is, I rarely read them, because of my rule that mass emails equal dumb.

So mark it down here. First: Luke skipped days two and still by day three didn't really have anything important to say. Second: Twittering takes an EXTREMELY interesting person, for constant updates to be relevant, and I am neither interesting enough or disciplined enough. Three: Out of mostly sheer ignorance, I decide to hate what I do not understand, thus I am a Twitter hater.

If you'd like to follow me, I tweet as AMERICANNOVEL.

And I never update it.

Luke

The Naming of Things

This is mostly my wife's idea. Although, I've always thought it would be interesting to have a blog. I just didn't think I'd be interesting enough. But if a gazillion other people can be interesting enough for blogs, I don't know why I can't at least try my hand at it.

First and foremost. They make you name a blog before you even start it, which I hardly think is fair. I've written a couple of songs in my life and in the naming of things one of two things happens:

1. The song names itself. My good friend Jacob Champlin does this well. I play lead guitar (which means I play a different guitar than him really) in his band cathy Crescendo. Small c followed by big C. ANYWAY. He often writes songs and then just names them about their main theme. For instance, on his first record, Giant Killers (available with all the rest at cdbaby.com) he has the following songs: The Soldier Song, The Divorce Song, and The Swallow Song. These songs include references to: a soldier, a divorce, and a swallow, or rather, multiple swallows. Now, Jacob and I are good friends and happen to agree on lots of things, but this is one area where we completely disagree. I think it's a lot like poetry: The title of a song can completely enhance the content. I don't always go for this, but I like to use it as a rule of thumb. And of course it will be inevitable, as any musician will tell you, that when people are asking about songs they will not remember whatever well thought out title you have and they will ask for "that little bird song! Can you play that song about the little bird?" So though you have been planning to name that song something like How to Run a Marathon on Tiny Legs or The Art of Winging It Out and though you may really put it down as that on your beautiful record, the fact of the matter is NO ONE WILL CALL IT THAT.

2. I used to play in this sweet rock band called Sequel to Adam and we had a song that I thought was aptly titled As It Stands We're All Murderers. Sweet name, right? Completely. I had written the lyrics and thought long and hard about how to properly name it (this is the second way of naming: thinking long and hard about how to properly name it) and I came up with something that enhanced the original song and sounded bad ass. Except that before it ever got printed onto a record it was titled Come Clean because we needed something to call it in the meantime. So everyone called it Come Clean even though it was not titled that (though we may have announced it as that from the stage).

Point: I've been forced to title this blog before 1) I know what it's about enough to give it a title like The Writing Blog or The Blog as Discipline Blog or 2) it's been around long enough for me to really think long and hard about how to properly name it. And regardless, you'll (if there is a you'll reading this) probably decide what to call it on your own - say, The Luke Hawley Blog or The Stupid Blog.

I suppose I should take a quick moment to explain where I was coming from on this pre-approved title. I just started a graduate program to get a Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing. It requires me to do a lot of reading (22 novels before Thanksgiving - 6 down, 16 to go!) and a lot of writing (30-45 pages of prose every month). And I have due dates. My normal tendency is to read and write whenever it feels right. For those of you who are strangers to me and are simply stumbling on this blog accidently looking for information on Reading, Writing, and 'Rithmetic, I would call myself first and foremost a songwriter. And the great thing about writing songs is that you're writing something that is going to be approximately three and a half minutes long. I can do that whenever I want, whenever it suits me. Writing for school and, more specifically, writing a novel require far more discipline. So the routine is new to me. I sometimes tell people that I never really committed to anything in my life before I married Sarah three years ago (although my mom says I committed to college, I think that might be a stretch) and it took so much time getting used to that I didn't commit again until we had a baby in April (Eden. I'm sure you will hear more about her.) But I'm 27, I've never had more than an entry level job, always taken the slacker way out, so as to stay cool and relaxed and not care about anything. And I'm kind of tired of that gig, you know? I'm interested in caring a lot about things and treating the things I care about with respect. SO - all this to say - I'm probably going to ramble a lot about Reading, Writing, and Routine. Among other tangential topics.

If you liked the way this blog read, please keep coming back. If you didn't, know that it was my first attempt, but they'll probably all ramble on like this. But I hope you come back to - I have a habit of growing on people. And who knows, maybe I win the lottery and give people $20 for every blog comment they've written. Or maybe not.