NPR: THIS I BELIEVE


I believe in the power of words on paper
Archived on National Public Radio (NPR)

I believe in pen on paper – an abstract liquid bleeding out across the ether, creating entire worlds whose origin lay in the abstract. A fifth of Jack and a fedora all wrapped in a black-and-white dream. The clack-clack-clack of a typewriter pounding hard-boiled fists of dialogue. Quick-witted jabs of lines said in an inner monologue by a Sam Spade type in the midst of a melee.

My beliefs lay in the free-flowing smoke, sultry and alive, of a dance hall as Shaw or Goodman or Dorsey swing rhythms around two people talking – talking about everything and nothing at once, spanning eternity, meaning every word like it was their last. In their own world — a world going dark around them.

They exist in an era almost forgotten, when good and evil weren’t shades of gray but stark contrasts on pulp and gelatin. Where a dime bought you a month’s worth of education you could only find on the newsstand. Fantastic stories and amazing adventures throughout streets filled with shadows in black masks.

I believe in the raw power of human emotion. Love. Hate. Anger. Happiness. In those words, my eyes see layers of a story. One in which people need to say what they feel, because life is too short to live it otherwise: “I love you, Slim.” The End. Fade out.

I’m an old soul at home in a decade thirty years before I was born. Too young to truly know what life is, yet too old to ever fit in. I sit and dream of what I could have been. (Not even sure I could have made it through those war-torn times – an era when men were men and not enlisting genuinely meant something.)

So I keep my faith in the power of words on paper, that thing I’m told is so unfashionable and out of date in these digital times. I write what I know. I write what I am. I write what I could have been.

The images come and go as glimpses through a foggy window. A flash of memory I didn’t know existed until the right moment brings it into focus. The right conversation. An interesting face. A Kentucky Bourbon aged 12 years. So I turn the dial on the old radio a little more to the right, past the static, and it comes in crystal, my black-and-white world. The stories write themselves. I just dictate.

I’ll keep pounding away until my fingers are as bloody as the pulps. To do otherwise would deny my soul and everything that I am.

Published in the Courier News and Home News Tribune newspapers
Sunday January 25, 2009

Special thanks to Jen and Laurie.

From the website This I Believe.org
This I Believe is an international project engaging people in writing, sharing, and discussing the core values that guide their daily lives. These short statements of belief, written by people from all walks of life, are archived here and featured on public radio in the United States and Canada, as well as in regular broadcasts on NPR. The project is based on the popular 1950s radio series of the same name hosted by Edward R. Murrow.