Author: Jim Hagarty

By Jim Hagarty

A note to struggling writers.

Songwriting icon Hank Williams Sr. once said, “If a song takes longer than 20 minutes to write, it probably wasn’t worth writing.”

Being cynical and no lover of country music, you might reply, “I’m surprised it took him 20 minutes to write some of those songs.”

But Hank Williams was a genius. Other songwriters revere him. Leonard Cohen, in his own classic, Tower of Song, wrote: “I hear Hank Williams coughin’, all night long. A hundred floors above me in the tower of song.”

Cohen wasn’t commenting on Williams’ coughing. And he wasn’t being cute or overly humble. In an interview about the song, he gave credit to the writer of Your Cheatin’ Heart and dozens of other classics as being at the top of the songwriting food chain. A hundred floors above Cohen himself, in fact, a writer of some celebrated note.

I just now tried to write a story. I struggled with it. So I quit.

If it doesn’t come easy, maybe it wasn’t meant to be.

“Probably wasn’t worth writing.”

By Jim Hagarty

Email is the most destructive influence in human relations since the invention of the handgun.

A fairly bold statement I understand but I am good and sick of my inbox, my drafts folder, my trash, my junk mail. I hate it all.

It’s a love affair gone bad. Really bad. In 1994 when I got my first address, which I still use, I couldn’t wait to run downstairs every night after supper to see what crazy jokes people had sent me and to prepare a few zingers of my own to distribute. It was so nice to be connected again to family and friends long neglected.

But even then, I began to have a feeling something wasn’t quite natural. I was writing long happy notes to people I wouldn’t say hi to on the street and, in fact, would duck into doorways to avoid. And I was continually blathering on as though I was the happiest guy on earth without a care in the world. In other words, I was as phony as the 18-year-old blonde model who just emailed me an invitation to be her pal. I don’t think she really wants to be my pal.

Twenty-two years and many thousands of messages sent and received later, I’m an electronic wreck. Email, it turns out, just exacerbates your character flaws, weaknesses and insecurities and plays russian roulette every day with your friendships.

Last night, for example, I went to bed feeling very blue. I had not received an email all day from someone who emails me daily, sometimes several times a day. Why the sudden lapse? Obviously, there could be only one explanation. I had said something wrong in my most recent email sent in her direction and smashed some feelings in the process. Probably lost a friend for good.

But there, this morning, was the long lost message and all was right with the world again. But for how long?

Last week, it was another friend and the several hundred words which zipped back and forth over the cyber lines between us escalated into a literary war which kicked the living crap out of what had been a pretty good relationship.

The trouble began when I impulsively emailed off a message which I immediately realized I shouldn’t have sent. Then the long, long wait by the monitor to see a reply. When it came it consisted of three words. That would have been fine except the writer normally couldn’t say hello without using at least half a Webster’s dictionary. So, he was mad. And a subsequent email proved me right: he was spittin’ mad. The words came flying off my screen like shrapnel. A bulletproof vest and hockey helmet with facemask would have been good precautionary apparel for me.

So, the battle was on. Of course, no reply for more than 24 hours from me was a tactical move – a way to wear down the opponent through neglect. Then my response: 4,000 words, only about six of which were, on reflection, suitable to be sent. The sound of a dying friendship could be heard all the way to Jupiter and back. A volley of messages, each a bigger club than the one used before until both egos were bruised and battered and a relationship torn and tattered.

And why? Next to both his and my computer are telephones. In a million years, no such acrimonious battle would have ever developed had we chatted instead of keyboarded.

When VCRs first surfaced, users taped everything they could, and stacked their shelves with unwatched cassettes. A new phrase was coined: video guilt. We rearranged our evenings just to try to catch up on the shows we needed to watch from the nights and weeks before.

Now there is email guilt. Messages sitting for days unopened. Others opened but never replied to. Still others answered with no answer returned for your message sent. Why the inbox no show? Another person peeved? More battles awaiting?

I met a woman a while back whom I was impressing, I thought, with the carefully dropped mention that there are six computers in our household of four people. Far from seeing me as one of the more enlightened guys she’d ever met, she had some astonishing news of her own, which overshadowed my hard-drive count.

“We’ve gotten rid of all our computers,” she said with a smile. “They were wrecking our lives.”

The truth is, they’re doing a number on my family’s lives too, and the nicest evening we spent all winter was one Wednesday when the power went out for a few hours.

I went home and wrote up a bit of a snarky message to the woman with no computers.

But it died on the screen.

I had nowhere to send it.

Surely Bob Dylan had something like this in mind when he wrote I Shall Be Released.

For every foot forward email has helped us take, it’s forced us to take two steps back.

Giant steps.

Email sucks.

By Jim Hagarty

Wow. My little blog, as of right now, has had 10,099 views. I am not sure what that means or how that figure translates into numbers of people who are having a peek at Lifetime Sentences now and then. The statistics provided by the blog creator are a little bit hard to interpret. Either that or I am as thick as a brick. I might have to break down and spend some money to get more in-depth analysis.

But my eye needs to focus on the job at hand which is creating content. How the content is received is up to Internet users, not me.

Farmers out working a field with their horse-drawn implements, walking behind the big beasts, would sometimes be tempted to look behind them, as they walked, to see how they were doing and admire their fine work. Often, when they did that, the horses would interpret the messages coming through the slackened reins incorrectly and could get all tangled up. The farmer learned to concentrate on where he was going, not where he had been.

So, my horses are hitched up and down the field we walk.

Thanks for tuning in.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

Whenever my bird’s wings flapped
I knew he had probably crapped
But George was a good crow
And when he would go
He was careful and everyone clapped.

By Jim Hagarty

If I was as handsome as you
I’d have me a fling or two.
I’d ask out a movie star
And rent a red foreign car.

If I was as handsome as you
I’d rent a Swiss chalet or two
And have my affairs over there.
Or maybe in France somewhere.

If I was as handsome as you
I’d hike off to Amsterdam too
And find out just what it’s like
To ride on a two-person bike.

If I was as handsome as you
The very first thing I would do
Is change my first name to Clint
And steal gold bars from the Mint.

If I was as handsome as you,
A dream that will never come true,
I’d probably still be OK
To live the life I have today.

Cause handsome was never my goal.
True handsome resides in the soul.
If I was as handsome as you
I might be an idiot too.

By Jim Hagarty

I have always felt like an outsider because I don’t have a collection of anything.

The list of things people collect is endless and I have always been envious of them. Stamps, coins, old records, even cars. Books, art, silver cutlery.

I decided to change that. And so I have begun my own collection, a photo of which is shown above.

I collect peanut butter jars. I love them. Each unique from the other, each with a special memory of the great peanut butter I have scooped out of them by the tablespoonful at 3 a.m.

“How do you tell them apart?” says the ignorant non-collector.

Believe me, I know them. I am thinking of giving names to each of them.

My challenge now is to decide which one of my kids I will leave the collection to in my will. I don’t want them fighting over them.

I don’t want to separate the jars. They belong together.

Forever.

By Jim Hagarty

As we try to make our way through life, it’s important, at some point, to figure out what we are. Maybe even more vital, is to come up with some conclusions about what we aren’t.

We are told, and I’m glad we are, that we can do anything we want to do. But that presents us with a lot of choices, and sometimes that can be bewildering.

At some point, it became clear to me that I am a writer. And as a writer, I should be able to write anything. But after a lifetime of writing, I am not sure that is true. As it seems to have turned out, I am a pretty good short story writer, best at penning little fables about life as I observe it in all its wonder.

But I didn’t just arrive at that grand realization one day when the clouds parted and God pointed right at me. I tried writing other things.

I am OK with poetry but I have only a fundamental grasp of the craft and have never been interested enough to study it further. On reflection, I could have maybe made a living writing greeting cards poems.

“When the days begin to shorten
“And you look into the sky
“And wonder at formations
“In the clouds as they drift by…”

Yadda.
Yadda.
And yadda.

Fifteen years ago, after I left my job teaching journalism at a local college, I tried freelance writing. I had the occasional thing published but basically came to hate the process.

But people always told me there were probably a few good novels in me. So I tried that too.

My first attempt was a humourous look at higher education. It was a book called Off to College. I might have finished three chapters. It sucked.

Another humour novel sprang to mind.

Billy and Charley hit my computer monitor. Three or four chapters in, I was bored out of my mind, ready to kick William and Charles in their boring behinds. Spoiler alert: If the writer is bored, the reader will be suicidal.

Then it dawned on me that I needed to tackle something meatier.

Presenting, Death Comes to Cold Hill.

Gratefully, death came to Death Comes to Cold Hill in fairly short order.

I had one minor success. A book about being a stay-at-home father called Poor Daddy. I am proud of it but the only reason it works is it is not a novel but a collection of more than 40 shorts stories.

But my freelance career was careening off a cliff, same one, probably that was featured in Death Comes to Cold Hill.

I went back to work on a newspaper. And before long, I resurrected my old humour column. Weekly short stories about the little ups and downs of life. I knew I was once again where I belonged and so did my readers.

We call people who work with wood, woodworkers. Good name. But within that classification are dozens of sub classifications. Same with cooking, decorating, glass making …

And writing.

I don’t know the origin of this quote or the context in which it appeared, but some smartypants somewhere once said something to the effect: “Life is a casting off.”

That seems to have been true with me. I didn’t find the right road till I had driven off down a bunch of wrong ones. I am glad I went down them, but grateful that I backed up and tried other ones.

The way I sometimes was headed, I might have ended up on Cold Hill and we pretty much know what awaited me there.

By Jim Hagarty
This is another memorable original song from my friend and fellow singer-songwriter Ted Schinbein who produced a CD entitled Remembering Rankin full of songs dedicated to his years living and working in the remote Rankin Inlet in northern Canada. The experience changed Ted forever and some of his fondest memories center around Rankin still today. Ted’s CD is available in the Corner Store.

The Men Who Carve in Stone by Ted Schinbein

By Jim Hagarty

It was a lazy, hazy Sunday afternoon in the summer and I was sitting in a lawnchair out back of my little blue shack in the city, when a noise, not unlike that of a jackhammer, or a hurricane, pierced the air of serenity around me.

“What the …?” I gruffed, my face immediately contorting into the sourdough scowl that is pretty much a permanent fixture on it these days. A short stroll led me to the source of my latest woe. The hair-raising hubbub was emanating from my neighbour’s place. He was busy:

a. dynamiting his concrete front porch to bits;

b. chainsawing his winter supply of firewood for his old furnace;

c. revving up his new, private, supersonic jet airplane;

d. washing his truck.

If you guessed d., leave me your name and address and I’ll get a sympathy card right out to you. Because you obviously have had some experience with yet another one of modern technology’s great breakthroughs: the power washer.

This handy dandy device is a portable machine, driven by a gasoline engine, which transforms the pathetic trickle of water that normally emanates from your garden hose, into a torrent of moisture any self-appreciating firefighter would be happy to direct at the worst four-alarm blaze. For $200, you can blast away at the grime in your world and demonstrate, yet again, your dominion over nature. It is not by accident that the name of this new apparatus promises to deliver “power.”

Actually, the power washer is not new; industries of all types have been using it to accomplish their various ends for years. What has changed is the widespread marketing of it for home use. Isn’t this how we ended up with the leaf blower?

For a pittance, we can all now give the fickle finger to filth. Glossy TV ads show the amazingness of it all: with its use, concrete patios, wooden decks and metal autos become shinier than the glistening faces of the happy homeowners who smile into the camera and testify that their lives have been forever transformed by their new Blast Master 400, Series E. They powerwash everything now, from the bricks on their house, to their motorboat, to their lawn furniture, their trees, their three smudgy kids and their ornery old grandpa on Saturday night.

But this is precisely the problem. It’s the same old story: because we can, we do. North American men used to be notorious for spending Sunday afternoons with their nose and toes pointed towards their rec-room ceilings which mercifully muffled their deep snores from the rest of their family. This activity, quaint as it might seem now, was known as resting. Now, thanks to power washers, power “vacs”, leaf blowers, power lawn edgers, power sanders and portable air compressors, we’re outside cleaning, cleaning, cleaning, cleaning as if we expect some community drill sergeant to line up all homeowners at the end of each weekend for a spit-and-polish municipal inspection. We return to “work” on Mondays in states of total exhaustion.

Bring back the “power” nap, I say.

One by one, our cherished stereotypes of summer in the city are falling by the way. When I moved into my home 30 years ago, I’d often head to the curb to buy an ice-cream bar from the pre-teenager who pedalled a small, white wagon down the street, ringing a little bell to let everyone know of his approach. Neighbours would cut their lawns on Saturdays, never on Sundays, and quietly wash their cars in their driveways the traditional ways, soap suds dribbling from sponges and water trickling from limp, green rubber hoses. There was something so suburbanly nice about it all.

Now, everything is about power, whether its power for our cars, our stereos, our computers, or our garden hoses. The ice-cream pedaller boy is long gone for good and so, apparently, is any hope of peace and quiet on a Sunday afternoon in the summer.

There is a new home computer available that is being marketed as making practically no sound when it is running and, in truth, it’s a pretty quiet little outfit. In comparison to my 22-year-old rig, which rumbles like a backhoe in need of an engine overhaul, this machine would not be a distraction during prayer time at a Trappist monastery.

However, so accustomed am I now to absorbing the ever-loudening pollution of the air waves around me, that I don’t really notice the ridiculous racket until I shut my machine off for the day. Then, I simply marvel that my brain is still able to function after listening to this incessant whirring all day long.

If I were manufacturing consumer goods for the 21st century, I think I’d be looking into ways to make everything quieter, not louder. Because once we’ve gotten a little further down the path to safe streets, safe water, safe air and safe sex, we are going to start demanding safe sound waves. Noise pollution is the next great frontier. Medical authorities already claim it’s causing accidents, physical and mental-health problems, suicides and in one celebrated case where a man went berserk on the fellow upstairs in his apartment building, murder.

A couple of years ago, another neighbour of mine, intent on enjoying his Saturday afternoon, brought a massive stereo speaker outside, plunked it on his back porch, and let ’er rip for seven straight hours. Shortly after the start of this free rock concert, the phone rang inside my house, and I had trouble hearing the caller’s voice, even after I closed my kitchen window.

A theme is developing here, the astute reader is saying by now. Seven hours he put up with this? Why doesn’t he just tell his neighbour to pipe down?

For the answer to this puzzle, see “murder”, two paragraphs up. Whether his or mine, it’s hard to predict.

Who knows?

I might just buy my own Blast Master 400, Series E, climb the fence and let him have it.