The Song Came Out Wrong

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I set out to write an angry song.

The idea was a defiance anthem. When hard weather comes for you, you’ve got two options — you can be a candle the wind puts out, or you can be the thing the wind feeds until it’s a firestorm nobody can stop. That was the whole concept, and I had the sound in my head before I had the words. Gritty. Driving. Distorted guitars low in the mix, something with dirt on it.

That is not what came out.

The lyrics were exactly what I wanted. The music underneath them landed somewhere around 2000s pop-rock — clean, bright, more anthemic than mean. Radio, not garage.

My first instinct was that I’d failed at it. I sat with it a while longer and realized it was better than what I’d been aiming for. Defiant words over bright music does something that defiant words over angry music can’t: the anger is already in the lyrics, and doubling it just makes it heavy. Putting them over something bright made the defiance sound like it was winning.

I never would have arrived at that on purpose. I arrived at it by missing.

I’m doing a version of the same thing right now with a book.

It’s a 1920s mob story. Fedoras, tommy guns, a city being carved up. It’s also, structurally, the Book of Esther.

If you’d asked me why before I started, I couldn’t have told you. It just felt right, which is not a defensible answer. It took getting into the actual writing to see the reason: the bones are identical. A woman with a hidden identity, in proximity to a man with absolute power, who has to decide whether saying the true thing out loud is worth what it will cost her. That’s Esther and it’s also every good mob story ever told, and the fact that one has a palace and the other has a speakeasy is a costume decision.

The collision only works because of what’s underneath it. Throw two random things together and you usually get oil and water — they sit there, refusing to mix, and you’ve wasted an afternoon. What makes an unlikely pairing land is when the same human problem is already running under both of them and you’re the one who noticed.

That’s not invention. It’s recognition.

Here’s what I’ve come to think the actual opposite of creating is.

It isn’t failure. Failure is fine; failure is a song that came out pop instead of rock and turned out to be right. The opposite of creating is segmenting — keeping the parts of your life in separate rooms and never letting them meet.

Work in one drawer. Faith in another. The thing you love in a third, opened on weekends if there’s time. Nobody who lives that way fails at anything. They just never find out what any of it would have become in contact with the rest.

I did that for twenty years. Data work here, music there, church over in its own compartment, writing as a thing I’d get to eventually. Every one of those drawers was full and none of them knew about each other. The most useful thing that’s happened to me recently is that they started leaking into each other, and it turns out I’d been carrying the raw material for all of it the entire time.

The first thing the Bible tells you about God is that He makes something. Before you learn anything else about Him, you watch Him create. A few verses later you’re told you were made in His image.

I take that literally in the practical sense. Not that everyone’s supposed to be an artist — that’s the small version of the word, and it’s the version that lets most people opt out. But that the impulse to look at what’s in front of you and imagine it arranged differently is part of the equipment, standard issue, not a gift handed to a lucky few.

Which means the question was never whether I had it.

The question was what I was still keeping in separate drawers.

Ten Cents

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

In my mid-twenties I was the office manager at an insurance adjustment firm, which is a title that meant almost nothing. What I actually did was accounts receivable and accounts payable, and errands, and whatever anyone needed, and on some days taking care of the dog. Ten dollars an hour. The owner smoked cigars at his desk all day, which is its own story.

About eight or nine months in, I was standing at the coffee machine when he walked up and asked me when I’d last gotten a raise.

I hadn’t. I told him so, and I got quietly excited about it.

He said I should give myself ten cents an hour on the next check.

Here’s something about me: I like math. I do arithmetic in my head for fun. So I had it before he finished the sentence. A dime an hour is a dollar every ten hours. Four dollars a week. Sixteen dollars a month.

I said thank you.

I want to be careful, because this is where the story wants a villain and I don’t have one.

That man let me work through cancer treatment. Let me come in for half days and never took a dollar out of my check for it. He was eccentric and he was generous, and the two had nothing to do with each other.

He wasn’t underpaying me out of malice. He was paying what he thought the job was worth, and he was probably right about the job. The gap wasn’t between what he offered and what was fair. It was between what the job was worth and what I believed I was worth, and I had those two things welded together without ever deciding to.

By then I’d been carrying a complaint for about two years.

The church thing had ended. I’d spent almost a year on odd jobs before the insurance office. And I had a story that explained all of it, which I could deliver on request and frequently did.

The university, for handing me a degree that turned out to be worth nothing. The economy. The hiring managers who wouldn’t give me a chance — a whole category of faceless people, conveniently unreachable, reliably at fault.

My wife heard every version of it. She was two or three years into being married to me.

And I lived the way people live when they hold a story like that. The dread started Sunday afternoon, somewhere in the middle of the day, well before it needed to. Evenings and weekends were the real life. The other five days were the toll.

The dime is what broke it, and not for the reason you’d think.

The cigar smoke should have done it. Getting cussed out by clients, occasionally by coworkers, should have done it. The sheer flatness of the work should have done it. None of that shook me, because all of it fit the story. Every miserable thing that happened was more evidence for the case I was already making.

Ten cents didn’t fit. Ten cents was a number, and I couldn’t argue with a number. Somebody had assessed what I was contributing and priced it, and the price was a dime.

The complaint had no answer for that. The university didn’t set that number. Neither did the economy. It was a measurement of what I was actually doing, in that building, that year — and the only person who could change it was me.

That’s what it cost. Not the pay, the excuse. The day the story stopped working was the day I couldn’t hand the problem to anyone else, and I’ve never found a way to describe how much heavier that is at first.

So I went to work on it, badly at first and then less badly.

I got my insurance adjuster’s license while I was there. I found a mentor — a real one, someone I could describe the actual situation to, out loud, including the parts where I suspected I was the problem. He started showing me a version of myself I hadn’t been able to see. I read business books I only half understood, mostly to get familiar with a language nobody had ever taught me. Zig Ziglar was in the car.

And I had time, because a job that uses a tenth of you leaves the other nine-tenths sitting there. What had been dead space turned into something closer to an incubator. I learned accounts payable and receivable properly. I learned how insurance actually works, which I still use — I know how to protect my family because of that job, and I’m not being cute about that.

It also became very clear that nobody was standing between me and any of it. I had a library card. The internet existed. There was no gate and no keeper.

I stayed two more years after that. Three and a half total.

I left making about thirteen dollars an hour. Three dollars more than I started, which sounds like nothing and was nothing.

What actually got me out was a friend at another company who knew I was looking and asked for my resume. That’s the whole mechanism. Someone asked, at random, on a day I happened to be ready — and the readiness was the only part of it I controlled.

I aced that interview. I was professional and prepared, and I could speak the language, and none of that was true of the man who’d been standing at the coffee machine doing math in his head. That job turned into data management, which turned into the last twenty years.

I look back at that stretch now and I’m proud of him. That’s not a thing I say often about my younger self.

He never got the scapegoat back. I’ve never wanted it.

Out of Tune

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Several years back, I had a tape recorder in the passenger seat.

Not for anything important. Song ideas, mostly — I’d get a melody or a line while driving and reach over and hit record and sing it at the windshield. Later there was a little handheld one, and after that an MP3 recorder. Same habit, better hardware.

Almost none of it survived. The songs did, some of them, and a handful have since turned into real recordings. The talking is gone. Twenty years of ideas and observations and half-worked-out thinking, recorded onto tape and then never touched again, because the only thing to do with a tape is play it back in real time and I never once had a spare hour to listen to myself.

I’ve gone back to a few of those old songs lately. Here’s what I couldn’t hear at the time: the guitar is out of tune. Not wildly. Just enough. I didn’t know how to tune it properly back then and I had no idea that’s what I was listening to.

In the mid-2000s I worked at an insurance office and typed reports as a part of the job.

I got fast. Genuinely fast — that’s where the speed came from, and I still have it. I can still type 70 words a minute. I also came out of that job with a permanent aversion to long-form typing that has never once let up.

Somewhere in there I found a transcription tool, an Australian one whose name I’ve lost. I used it at work and then quietly for my own stuff. It transcribed, which sounds like the answer, except it put me right back at the keyboard cleaning up everything I’d said. The tool converted speech into a typing job. It didn’t remove the work; it moved it.

So the pattern for twenty years was: capture cheaply, pay dearly on the back end, and mostly just not pay — which is why the tapes are gone.

None of that was the actual problem.

I’m an auditory processor. I don’t think a thing through and then say it. I say it in order to think it through. The sentence coming out of my mouth is not a report on a conclusion, it’s the mechanism arriving at one, and it usually takes me a while to get there.

What that cost me — and I didn’t have words for this until more recently — is that most people can’t tell the difference. I’ve had to start telling people when I am thinking out loud.

Why you ask? I’d be mid-process, three or four minutes into working something out, and somebody would take a sentence from minute two and start acting on it. Building the plan. Pushing back. Getting concerned. Meanwhile I hadn’t landed yet, and now I’m defending a position I was only passing through.

I never used to say, I’m still thinking, let me get to the end. It didn’t occur to me that this needed announcing. I assumed everybody’s thinking sounded like this from the outside. My wife was the first one to point it out to me. I’m glad she did.

That’s the thing I couldn’t hear. Same as the guitar.

What changed is smaller than it sounds.

I can talk into my phone and get the text out the other side. Recently I spent four hours on a road trip, just talking, and every word of it came back to me in a form I could actually work with. Then I hand it off and it comes back organized instead of transcribed.

The capture was never the hard part. I’d solved capture in 1998 with a cassette. What I’d never had was somewhere to put four unedited hours where nothing would interrupt me at minute nine.

I don’t get better ideas than I got in the car twenty years ago. I get to keep them now, and I get to finish them out loud before anyone responds to them. That’s the whole difference. Everything I’ve made this year runs on it.

Twenty years of building workarounds for a constraint I never named. The recorder, the MP3 player, the software from Australia — all of it aimed at the storage problem, which was never really the problem.

I was in tune the entire time. I just needed to get all the way through the song before somebody stopped me.

On The Second Floor

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

My second ministry job came with an office on the second floor, at the end of a hall, away from where the other offices were. The reasoning was practical — they didn’t want teenagers wandering through the suite where the grown-ups worked. So they put me and the teenagers up where we wouldn’t be in the way.

It was an interior room. No window. Not much bigger than a broom closet, and I’ve never been sure it hadn’t been one.

I decorated it. Spent real time on that. Got it set up the way I wanted, because I was going to be in there studying and praying and planning, doing all the things a person does when he’s twenty-two and has been handed the thing he asked God for.

I sat in that room for two years and I was lonely in a way I didn’t have words for at the time.

I came in hot. Ideas, energy, plans. I’d done two years as a music and youth pastor already and I was going to do this one well.

Those two years turned out to be exactly enough experience to be dangerous. Enough that I stopped thinking of myself as somebody who needed to be taught anything, and not nearly enough for what this job actually was. The gap showed up fastest in the places I wasn’t looking. I was barely older than the kids, which felt like an advantage right up until I needed to be an authority and had no idea how to become one. The adults were harder. The volunteers who’d been serving in that ministry for years saw the job as something we’d figure out together. I saw it as mine. They offered feedback and I heard interference.

I wasn’t lazy. I worked hard the entire time. I just worked hard at the parts I already knew how to do and quietly avoided the parts I didn’t, which is the most convincing way there is to be failing while feeling productive. It didn’t take long to be noticeable.

By the second year I knew. Not in words, but in the mornings — sitting up in that room, unmotivated and miserable, and aware it had started to affect the one relationship the whole job was supposed to be about.

When they finally called me in, the decision was the right one. I’ve never once argued with the outcome. Quit or be fired. I quit.

What I’ve turned over for twenty-five years is that it was the first conversation. Two years, and the first honest exchange about how it was going was the one that ended it.

I want to be careful here, because this is where a story like this usually goes looking for a villain, and I don’t have one to give you. I was not an easy person to help. I was headstrong, I was defensive, and I’d have bristled at half of what needed saying. The version of this where someone sits me down in month four is not a version where I make it easy on them.

But I’d have taken a directive. That’s the part I know for certain. I respected the chain of command enough that if someone had said here is what we actually need from you, here is what we’re seeing, here are the three things that have to change — I’d have gone and done it. Nobody ever had to guess whether I’d follow an instruction. They only had to give me one.

What I needed was a mentor. I could not have told you that at twenty-two. I didn’t have the word for it. I just had the loneliness, and the ideas, and the closet with no window, and no idea that what I was missing was a person who’d already been where I was.

Years later I ended up in corporate data work, and I picked up the word fungible. It means interchangeable. One unit is any other unit. You don’t repair a fungible item — you replace it, because nothing about the individual one is worth preserving.

I’ve spent two decades arguing the opposite for a living. That the record has attributes. That identity is the thing you can’t reconstruct once you’ve lost it. That the expensive failures are almost never the loud ones; they’re the quiet ones where somebody decided a thing was generic when it wasn’t.

I don’t think I chose that work because of a room on the second floor. But I know exactly why the word lands on me the way it does.

We left and started attending somewhere else immediately. That part I’m glad about — we needed to be in a church instead of at one.

And then I sat in a pew and did nothing for years.

I didn’t volunteer. Didn’t sign up. Didn’t raise my hand for anything. We picked seats where we wouldn’t be noticed and we weren’t. If you’d asked me at the time I’d have said we were busy, or that we were resting, or that it was somebody else’s turn. What was actually true is that I’d learned it was safer to be no one in particular.

My desire to help people never changed. What changed was needing to get paid to practice my faith.

Here’s the part I only see clearly years later.

There was a man on that staff — the senior adults pastor, in his seventies and full of life, the kind of person who’d already survived everything I was in the middle of. I knew him. I liked him. I never once thought of him as someone I might learn from, because he worked with the old people and I worked with the kids and in my head those were different countries.

He’d wanted to take me under his wing. Wanted to, thought about it, and decided against it — because he didn’t believe I’d accept.

He was almost certainly right. Whatever version of that offer he was drafting in his head, I’d have heard it as a critique, thanked him, and kept walking. He read me accurately. That’s the thing that sits in my chest. He read me accurately and the accuracy is exactly what stopped him.

He died my first year there. His wife told me about it after he was gone.

So I ask.

It’s not complicated and it isn’t a program. When I can tell somebody’s struggling — at work, at church, a guy I know — I say the thing out loud. What’s going on. Tell me about it. What can I actually do. If they’ll let me, I tell them what I see, as kindly as I can manage, which is not always as kindly as I intend.

Some of them want it. Some of them look at me like I’ve asked to see their tax returns. I’ve stopped trying to predict which.

That’s the whole reason I say it out loud. A man once had the answer to my twenty-two-year-old problem and kept it to himself, and he had good reasons, and I never got to be the one who decided.

When you are stressed

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

The best place to be is with the ones you love. I can’t think of anything better that helps me unwind than being with the ones who recharge me. I am an extrovert and I am recharged by being with my people…my wife and son.

That is where I have been this weekend. It has been awesome.

Back to regularly scheduled activities tomorrow.