The Shelves

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Everybody’s seen one of those shows. A house that used to be a house — the counters go first, then the chairs, and eventually there’s one worn path from the front door to the one seat somebody still sits in. Everything that was supposed to make the life easier is now standing between the person and the rest of their own home.

My house is fine.

I’ve spent twenty years in data management, and if you reduce the job to a sentence it’s this: make sure information can be found by the person who needs it, at the moment they need it. Everything else in the discipline is detail hanging off that.

So this isn’t a story about not knowing better.

Last year I started doing my actual thinking in AI threads — talking a problem out, getting it back in a shape I could use, keeping the trail instead of watching it evaporate. It worked right away. So I built the structure to hold it. A place for each body of work, so related things stay related and nothing has to be reconstructed from memory later.

Then I used that structure approximately never, for six months.

I kept working the whole time. Opening threads, making things, moving to the next one. What I never did was the last thirty seconds — the part where you decide whether what you just made is worth keeping and then put it where it goes. Half a year of finished work sitting exactly where it landed.

I built the shelves and left everything on the floor next to them.

A few weeks ago I finally dug out. Not in one sitting. Several. Go back through, pull down what mattered, delete what didn’t, put the rest where it belongs.

It’s straight now. But I got there by excavating, and excavating is a completely different activity from maintaining. One is a project you have to schedule and dread. The other is nothing — a few seconds at the end of something you were already doing.

The reason I skipped it isn’t interesting. It was skippable. Skippable things get skipped, and for a long stretch nothing bad happens, which is the entire trap. Then one day you go looking for the thing you made in March.

Here’s the part I’d rather leave out.

Getting everything out of your head and into a system can quietly turn into its own version of the pile. A graveyard of conversations in perfect order, which is not the same thing as conversations in use. Filed and dead still counts as filed.

I’ve got open threads right now that don’t belong anywhere. Research questions I haven’t decided about. Half-formed things I’m not ready to name yet, sitting in the exact spot where six months of the last pile started.

The houses on those shows have one thing going for them.

Everybody can see them.

Mine looks fine from the door.

Falling More

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

A few weeks ago I was standing at the stove making my son’s eggs. I’d already fixed my wife’s breakfast and she was sitting there eating it, doing something on her phone, not paying any attention to me.

I stopped cooking and just watched her.

My son looked over. “Dad, what are you grinning at?”

“Your mama, boy.”

That happens at my house. It’s not a special occasion. I’ve been married twenty-seven years and she is still, to me, the most interesting thing in any room she’s in, and every so often I lose track of what I was doing.

The song came out of that morning, though not directly.

What actually started it was a sliding riff I’d been messing with on the guitar — nothing planned, just something I liked the sound of and kept playing. Somewhere in the middle of it I said two words out loud.

Falling more.

And the rest of it showed up. Not all at once, but fast, because I finally had the thing everything else could hang on.

I keep falling more
Like there’s no floor to this thing
There’s never been a floor
I still watch her like a sunset, scared to even blink
I haven’t found the bottom yet
Falling more

Here’s the part I’ve come to love about writing songs.

The chorus is your thesis, and you get to sing it. One idea, stated plainly, repeated until the repetition itself starts making the argument. Then the verses are your evidence — the specific things that prove the claim you keep making.

I keep falling more. That’s the claim. And the first piece of evidence is a man who forgot he was cooking eggs.

Once you notice the structure you can’t stop seeing it. “Hotel California” gives you the whole mood in the chorus and then walks you through the story underneath. “The Thunder Rolls” — the chorus is the storm, the verses are what’s happening while it breaks. You’re not decorating a hook. You’re arguing a case, and you happen to be singing it.

Which is why the hard part is never the chorus. The hard part is finding the idea, and the idea is almost always just a phrase you stumble into while doing something else.

Redemption keeps showing up in everything I write, and I’ve stopped pretending that’s a coincidence. I live a redeemed life. God saved me from myself, and once you’ve been on the receiving end of that, you start recognizing the shape of it in other places.

Marriage is one of those places. Two people who are not finished, staying, and covering for each other’s worst material long enough that both of them come out better than they went in. Twenty-seven years of somebody choosing to keep doing that for me.

So the love song isn’t only a love song. I don’t set out to write about grace. It just turns out to be underneath the thing I was writing about anyway.

Songwriting also makes me find out what I think.

You’re either writing from your own view or you’re inside somebody else’s, and the second one has a habit of changing your mind. I’ve walked into a song feeling one way about a situation and walked out of it feeling differently, because I had to sit inside a perspective long enough to make it sing. That’s not a technique. It’s just what happens when you have to say a thing well enough to repeat it.

Mostly I do it because I like it. I’ve spent this year making things, and this is the one that reminds me I’m not only the guy who writes about frameworks.

She’s heard it. She loved it.

She still doesn’t notice when I’m watching her, though — not that morning, not most mornings. The recording is finished, verses and bridge and all. The case it makes keeps building anyway, in the kitchen, while the eggs go cold.

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.