First off, let me be clear: I quite possibly could have been a musician. I did, after all, play music for several years: piano in elementary school, drums in middle and high school, plus ten years of service in the various incarnations of the children’s and youth choir at our church.

So, yeah. I probably could have been a musician. Although the onset of essential tremor in my mid 20’s would have certainly been quite a damper on any potential piano playing. And boy, I would have been right peeved if events had transpired in that fashion. But regardless how those events transpired, here I am, not a musician. My creative outlet, such as it is, is stringing words together. ‘Nuther words, I write.

Anyway, the reason I should have been a musician is because I’m lazy.

There, I said it. I’m lazy. And I don’t say that to impugn musicians. I’ve known many musicians, and lazy is not a designation I would ever assign them. But still…

If I were a musician, if I had stuck with the piano for all these years, and had become a competent-to-good pianist, I could, every evening or so, adjourn myself to my piano* and spend 10 or 20 or 30 minutes playing a little Brahms, or Thelonious Monk, or Jerry Lee Lewis, or Ben Folds, or, well… you get the idea. I might even occasionally indulge myself and play the composition I doubtlessly would have written my junior year of college in a vain effort to win the affections of a girl who was miles out of my league**. I could do any of that and feel like I had satisfactorily exercised a creative impulse.

(*in addition to my hypothetical piano, this scenario requires a hypothetical house with hypothetical space to hold said piano. I’m not sure how hypothetical kids – or even real ones – fit into the equation. I digress.)

(**this is all hypothetical, honey. You’re the only girl who was ever miles out of my league.)

The point is, as I indicated earlier, I’m not a musician. I’m a guy who puts words in order. I can’t adjourn myself to my laptop and crank out a few paragraphs of Joyce or Hemingway and feel like I’ve accomplished anything. While there is a thriving cottage industry for musicians who perform other artists’ material, no such thing exists for those of us who write. Every sentence I write has to be a new one, including this one.

And this one.

And this one.

(Okay, that last one wasn’t really original.)

So that’s what I’m getting at when I mention being lazy. I can’t just sit down and do something that’s been done before. Whatever I write, for good or bad, hasn’t been written before. It’s all mine.

So that’s what I’ll be doing here, when time permits. If I particularly like a series of words I’ve typed, I’ll go ahead and post them here for the world to see.

Have a nice day.