Geezer with a Grudge: First Day of My Life

Dec 22, 2014

First Day of My Life

“Everyday is the first day of the rest of your life,” right? I’ve heard that phrase for so long I’m not sure when it first popped into popular culture. Being the glass-half-empty kind of guy I am, I’ve had more of an “everyday gets you one step closer to the end” perspective for most of my 66 years. But this could be the start of something really new and different.

For the first time in my life, I have an actual office with a door and a bit of acoustic isolation and enough privacy to think about writing a lot. In other words, all of my excuses for not writing are gone. It’s not a perfect world, because my wife is about 60% hearing impaired. So, unless I’m up and writing at 5AM I am cursed to need background music to mask the blaring sound of television coming through the floor and HVAC vents. That’s not much of a hardship, though. I have a large music collection and Pandora fills in the blank spaces. The office also houses the remainder of my recording studio gear, so the sound quality is excellent although the room acoustics aren’t up to my old studio’s standards. Still, I’m not complaining.

This morning, I knocked out two Geezer column submissions (for MMM and the new Rider’s Digest) and added 1500 words to a book I’ve been putting off for years. Today is the first day this new office was fully furnished, organized, cleaned up, and property lit. Could be the start of something brand new for me?

2 comments:

Trobairitz said...: Good luck with the new office space. I'd probably get distracted by the computer or the music. Squirrel.....; 12/23/14, 9:45 AM
T.W. Day said...: In this case, the computer is a worthwhile distraction. No Facebook, no eBay, just a collection of music composition software, some great audio hardware, and just enough music instruments to make composition painless and fun.; 12/23/14, 10:48 AM

The Geezer Story

I stumbled upon this column name (Geezer with a Grudge) almost 20 years ago, in 1999. The first Minnesota Motorcycle Monthly editor I worked with, in late 1999, complained that the magazine was getting no mail and the editors wanted to know if any readers were still out there. I fired off a sarcastic note, as a joke, intended to provide a little humor and some feedback. He published it as an article and later called me to say he'd received more mail on that letter than he'd received in the past year! I followed that with an offer to write a monthly column attempting to piss off a particular section of the magazine's readership to see if that tactic would generate some mail.

It did, probably more regularly than the magazine wanted at times, and I wrote a monthly column for MMM until the magazine died in 2018.

I plan to post an occasional old Geezer article into the blog, followed by short comments about the current status of my perspective on our activity/sport/vehicle of choice.