June 9th, 2005
So, I stood right on the lip of Diana Krall's star on Toronto's Walk of "Not Too Shabby for a Canadian, eh?" and hummed a few bars of Send in the Clowns. This was not done out of any particular malice towards Diana Krall, but because I can't escape the fact that my sister is a better singer.
OK, sure, I'm going to be a home boy and a yes man about it, but Jennifer has a clearer voice, spot-on intonation, and—much more importantly—a stage presence that makes even non-jazz fans sit up and pay attention.
So when I saw Krall's star outside the Roy Thompson Hall sitting there next to Mary Pickford's (or whomever's), it didn't irk me that it was there—no, I don't take exception with her success—but it did swell my ankles that Jennifer's star wasn't there. And that is why I decided to heap the ultimate insult to jazz musicians (and good taste) everywhere by humming Clowns on poor Diana's star. I suppose I could have picked something equally dreadful ... Feelings, perhaps, or maybe Misty. :-) But Clowns seemed the most appropriate.
I swear this to be true, by the way, but you don't have to take my word for it; my cousin was there and witnessed it. Just ask him.
* * *
So, as you may have already guessed, I am back on the road (well, in the air) again. This time Toronto. I once wrote a story about driving from Calgary to Toronto, and I hadn't actually ever been to Toronto back then. People congratulated me on how accurate I was about the length of time such a trip would take, and also about my descriptions of buildings in Toronto as one drives into it. (You know, I just looked on some maps and guessed ... it's not that hard, really ... besides, details are all the same between cities—especially Canadian ones; Toronto, Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver ... they all have similar features, similar areas, similar neighborhoods that are the brunt of jokes, and similar groups of people—there are seven main types of city-dwellers and they occur over and over again in every city).
About the only thing that differs from city to city is the geographical layout and the view from the top floor of buildings.
But I didn't know that when I wrote my story, and although I received praise about nailing the guesswork on the details, I can't actually sit down and read that story any more. It is painful to do. Now, I can imagine people who have never strung more than a couple of thousand words together not understanding that, or perhaps pretending they can and chuckling to themselves ... but the truth is that trying to read that first story (written when I was 19-20) does real, palpable damage to my nervous system.
Of course, I was right proud of it at the time. Not so much the story, but, erm, the length of it! Yes, if I am really truly baring my soul here, the truth of the matter is that I was proud I could write a story that was every bit as long as a story written by a "real" author. This sense of satisfaction has, of course, been summed up a million times previously: "I do not like writing, but I like having written." :-)
Of course, I have since written 2-1/2 novels, dozens of stories, and untold hundreds—maybe thousands—of pages of technical documentation. So a few pages-long story that has practically more pretension than its pages can contain doesn't even register any more. And thank goodness for that, too; it means that I don't have to count it among my "works" and can even go so far as to pretend that it doesn't exist and never did :-)
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