I love Donkey Surround Sound. Warm breath, deep sniffing, soft brays. How donkeys talk. If you get down on your knees, they will surround you with Donkey Surround Sound.
On Mondays, I write about the blog and the new business of being a writer. I had dinner with a good friend of mine from Random House Saturday and he was curious about what I was doing with my blog. We talked about two things – the decline in hardcover book sales, the decline of the telephone call.
Like me, my friend doesn’t whine and lament change, he is fascinated by it and accepts it. When he came up to his house in the Berkshires, he didn’t call me, he e-mailed me. We made dinner plans online, and there was some inevitable confusion. He had hoped to visit the farm, but didn’t want to intrude, I wanted him to see the new place but didn’t think he’d want to make the drive. So we ended up having dinner in Vermont. We realized instantly we both had wanted the same thing, but didn’t say it in out texts. A couple of years ago, I said, we would have talked on the phone but my phone rarely rings any more and I see now that the phone call will eventually go the way of the expensive hard cover book. Neither will completely perish, but both will change radically and take different forms.
I told him that books and phone calls were similar, powerful new technologies were replacing both of them. I have come recently to realize that my blog is my new daily book, my living memoir, my great and lasting work. In keeping with that, I explained my new subscription program to him and he was astonished. I said I had been taking Paypal subscriptions – people have their choice, depending on their income and preference, of subscribing for $3 a month, $5 a month, or $60 a year. Last week, I added a credit card option for people who prefer paying that way. People can manage their credit card subscriptions, they can easily upgrade, downgrade or cancel their payments at any time. For me, the changes in publishing are huge, and so are the changes in communications. So far, a small percentage of the people who who read my blog daily have subscribed, but I have a lot of traffic – getting things for free on the Internet is a deeply ingrained habit, and Internet marketing lore says this will take time and patience. It grows slowly and steadily. The idea of Internet marketing is to charge small amounts of money to large numbers of people and just grow. I’m doing well.
I like the macro model of Internet media, by marketing stands the subscription program is very successful. And there is lots of room to grow. I am happy to be keeping the blog free, I can’t stomach abandoning people who have been with me from the beginning. Everyone else will have to make up their own minds about what they want to pay me for my work, it’s a personal and moral choice. I like being paid for the blog, it feels right and natural to me, it is hard work and expensive work. It is not a good cause or charity, it is simple payment for work done and consumed.
Hard cover books and telephone calls have been an integral part of my life, it is difficult and challenging for me to see both of them fade. Text and e-mail messages are not the same for me, the do not offer the particular knowledge of a person I acquire from hearing their voices and intonations. If I had talked to my friend on the phone, I would have known in a second that he wanted to come see the farm and the donkeys and the dogs. Life is colder, less personal and communications are stiffer and edgier. Yet it doesn’t really matter what I prefer, these changes are seismic and they are here and the world does not pause in it’s motion to ask me what I would prefer. The challenge of the creative person is to understand the present and convert it to the future. Nobody really cares what I am used to. Subscriptions are my future, they support the new book, the living memoir, and I am comfortable with it, it offers me more freedom and creativity.
Just as texting and social media messaging are a new form of the telephone call, the blog is the new form of the book. Just look online at the explosion of creativity and voice blogs offer – they make newspapers and some paper books look positively ancient.
My friend and I promised to call each other on the phone and talk more frequently. I don’t think we will.
The Rev. Bill Graham once told me (I profiled him for a newspaper I was working for) that there are two kinds of people in the world – Soul Suckers, Soul Savers. He said we all must choose which pathway we will take, the one or the other. My goal in life – this has come somewhat later for me – is to be a Soul Saver. To take nice photos, write meaningful things. To help a deserving child get a donkey. To help a creative friend start a blog. To encourage my wife to love her life. To be a warrior for light and color. To remember the poor and bring them comfort. I am not looking to be a saint or a full-time do gooder, that is not in my heart. But I’d love to be a Soul Saver, it is sort of the point of the blog, of my life with Maria, with animals, in my town.
I am not a selfless persona, but a selfish man seeking the pathway to bliss. And I do not want to be a Soul Sucker.
Soul Suckers are angry. They are judgmental. They divide, rather than unite people. When I see a politician preaching anger and suspicion, I know I am looking at a Soul Sucker, trading his soul for power. I can tell because Soul Suckers always make me feel bad, angry or upset. Soul Suckers always have warnings about things – don’t take your dog for a ride in the car, be careful of bugs, bees, foods, watch out for identity thieves, shred your documents, fear those who are different, do work you hate to build up your IRA’s, get long term health insurance while you are young, while it’s affordable, test yourself regularly. Soul Suckers send nasty e-mails, argue on Facebook, tell you how to live your life.
Soul Suckers always have a sad story, the deck is always stacked against them, life is always hard, they are endlessly complaining about “them,” and about taxes, prices, the young, the way things used to be, technology, they are Armageddon trawlers, the world is going to hell in a hand basket. They mistrust government, other people, they often spout religious dogma but sometimes seem to have forgotten what it means. Soul Suckers feed on anger and argument, they all watch cable TV news and suck on the angry chat rooms of the Internet for their view of life. Soul Suckers hate change, it is their enemy.
Soul Savers, on the other hand, make you feel good. They do not preach catastrophe, but life. They are open, honest, encouraging. They listen. They don’t talk about the dog who died ten years ago and how much they miss him, they talk about the dog they love now that makes them happy. They don’t trade in struggle stories and pity-me tales, they understand that we all suffer loss, have sorrow, that it is a part of life. Struggle is not a land in which to dwell, it is a condition of being alive, not a reason to be pitied, but a way of being alive. They don’t tell you how their health is or ask you about yours, they don’t see the world as being on the left or the right, they are open to many kinds of ideas. Soul Savers tend to love the natural world, and feel the pain and suffering of the earth and the animals who once roamed freely up on it. They respect accept change, if they can’t always love it. They care for the poor, they cherish the young. The see the beauty and light in the world.
I was not with the Rev. Graham long, and I am not an Evangelical Christian, but I am grateful for the guidance he gave me about my soul. I aspire to Soul Saving, it feels good, I think it is, in many ways, the pathway to bliss. I think it is the essence to saving my own soul.
