At the age of 25, I wrote a series of stories for a small newspaper in Sandusky, Ohio, headlined Hunger and Hope, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and landed me a dinner seat between Dan Rather and Annie Lebovitz, anchor of 60 Minutes and world class photographer respectively.
Following a bathroom break, I ran into the event’s host, the lovely and elegant Ethel Kennedy, mother of Bobby, who I was delighted to chat with for a few minutes.
After our conversation, I turned to see the tail of my white starched shirt sticking out of my fly. I mean way out at an inappropriate angle. To her credit and my everlasting respect, Ethel never cracked a smile during our five minutes talking intellectually together.
At the start of four decades of award-winning journalism, she was the first to teach me grace - redemption at the intersection of the comic and tragic.
With the launch of my blog, I continue to be drawn to stories that make me ask - Is there any possibility for redemption?
Against a widening gyre of division and hate, we fabricate, then bifurcate, foes into tribes of right and wrong. — liberals fondness for baby blood, and the conservative obsession with M&M genitals, to name a few. Split into opposing camps, we fight each other because it’s easier than working together on real and pressing problems — like, for instance, the distant echoing hoofbeats of the 4 Horsemen riding joyfully to Armageddon.
As a comic writer, I am forever grateful for our age of ripe irony and imminent destruction. Even with a million stoned monkeys typing on a million typewriters for the rest of eternity, you couldn’t make this shit up. In my way of thinking, the best coping strategy is to go down in fits of delusional laughter. I promise to do my best to contribute to such a noble cause.
Mostly, I write because I have no choice. It’s a question of survival. Each day, I wrestle with monkeys in my mind, a metaphor I use to describe life with mental illness, mostly anxiety and depression. A child of fundamentalism, a born cynic and idealist, I offer a smorgasbord of obsessions, phobias, and other dysfunctions, small servings from a large number of unhealthy entrees
The best I have to offer is a fool’s hope.
I’m just crazy enough to believe in the words of Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings —
“I find it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay — small acts of kindness and love.”
Like two small hobbits slipping unnoticed under Sauron’s ring of power, it’s such everyday, ordinary, slice-of-life stories I am drawn to tell — against-all-odds redemption born in the union of the tragic and comic.