Published: July 09, 2009 08:58 pm      

If you’re reading this, it was finished in time

People occasionally ask me how I manage to find things to write about every week. (Usually, it’s worded like, “Where in the hell do you come up with some of that stuff?”)

Most times, my ideas come from the people I talk to. I’m a newspaper reporter by trade, and that’s what folks like me do.

Those who write books, magazine articles and so on sometimes suffer what’s commonly called “writer’s block.” Stephen King once put “Pet Sematary” aside for several months.

Newspaper people can’t afford to do that. We have deadlines to meet, and we have to write whatever it is that we have to write, whenever we have to write it, or else — and or else is always bad.

I don’t remember who said it, but it was a newspaper guy who described what we go through. He said you stare at the typewriter keys until blood begins seeping from the pores in your forehead. Then your fingers go to the keyboard and you start typing, and you have no idea what’s going to come out.

The reference to sweating blood is a common one, and it comes from the same source that gave birth to many of our English idioms: the Bible.

In the Gospel according to St. Luke 22:44 (NRSV), our Savior prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane prior to his crucifixion: “And being in anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling to the ground.”

Most folks think of this story as a metaphor, but medical science says it is possible for people to be under such enormous stress that they actually do sweat blood. It is recorded as happening to a condemned French prisoner on the way to the guillotine. (During an episode of the Blue-Collar Comedy Tour, Bill Engvall said he often used metaphors. When Larry the Cable Guy just stared at him, Engvall explained that, “I compare things.”)

What you read here on Sunday has to be done by Thursday, and there are times when I arrive at the newsroom on Thursday morning and have no idea what I’m going to write about. Even after I begin writing, I often don’t know where it’s going, or how it will end.

This is one of those times.

The thing is, I’ve been even more distracted than usual lately. The newspaper has a new computer system, and learning how to use it has been a time- and mind-consuming business. The program is brand-new and had more bugs in it than a mattress in a Third-World flophouse, but most of them are gone now.

Adjusting to new technology is, however, a misery-loves-company experience. Everybody else here has had to learn the new system, and it reminds me of what a friend told me about learning to fly a new helicopter.

He’s a retired Navy captain who made almost 1,000 carrier landings, many of them during the Vietnam War, and at night.

Back in the 1960s, he had to learn how to fly a Chinook helicopter, which isn’t configured like a conventional helicopter that has one engine, a main horizontal rotor and a vertical rotor at the tail. A Chinook has two engines and two horizontal rotors, one fore and one aft.

“It’s actually easier to fly sideways,” he said.

Being a Navy man, he said he was frequently amused by the sight of Marine captains and majors who had flown Corsair fighter planes (which themselves were challenging to fly) in combat during World War II and the Korean War, but were virtually reduced to tears at the ordeal of learning to maneuver an aircraft that had what amounted to two sets of controls.

It’s not that I haven’t been able to think of anything to write about. I’ve had plenty of interesting encounters lately, but none of them would be sufficient to fill an entire column.

Example A: A friend of mine told me his wife enjoys reading my occasional accounts about ghost-hunting in Gettysburg.

He said one of their relatives worked in a hotel that was supposed to be haunted. She was by herself and had made the bed in one room, then went out for a few minutes. When she returned, the bed was all messed up again.

“She got the hell out of there,” he said.

I told him a friend of mine once was a park ranger at the Eisenhower farm. All he would say about it was that, “Mamie (Ike’s wife) is still there.’

Another fellow once told me his son and daughter-in-law stayed overnight in what’s reputed to be Gettysburg’s most haunted hotel, in its most-haunted room.

Absolutely nothing remarkable happened to them.

As they were getting ready to check out the next day, he went to get the room key off the table and found that the key was gone from the piece of plastic it had been attached to. He and his wife fairly turned the room upside down in their hunt for the key, but with no success.

Finally, they gave up. He stuck the key-holder into his pocket and went down to the front desk.

He apologized to the clerk and said he had somehow misplaced the key and was willing to replace it if he had to. He said he did still have the key-holder, and when he reached into his pocket and pulled it out ... the key was right where it was supposed to be.

Example B of things that wouldn’t fill a column involves another friend of mine who likes to have a bit of occasional fun at his wife’s expense.

He told me recently at a picnic that, “She’s a wonderful woman ... but you’d never know it by the way she treats me!”

Everyone present got a chuckle out of that, and then I told him this:

“You know, it is said that bigamy is the state of having one too many wives ... but so, for that matter, is monogamy!”

He was still looking over his shoulder at me, grinning and chuckling, as he walked away.

Now, I have to think up a headline for this. Ah, well. Maybe by this time next week, I’ll have figured out something to write about.