Credit this blog for last night’s Moth StorySLAM victory

When I started blogging in 2004, people thought it was silly. They believed that it represented an unpolished, unprofessional form of writing that would go unread and unnoticed and eventually go away. They thought it a fad. A burst of digital narcissism.

In 2007, blogging had begun to gain more mainstream acceptance, but the perception remained that most blogs were written by loners and losers who were sitting at desks in their underwear.

2007 was also the year that blogging nearly destroyed my life. A long story for another day. A story I once told on a Moth stage. 

By 2010 blogging had become an accepted and valued form of personal expression and serious journalism. Authors were encouraged to blog in order to build their platforms. The media turned to blogging as a means of getting information out faster and more seamlessly. Readers turned to blogs as replacements for the dying newspaper and magazine industry.  

Today, blogging is viewed as a valid and valued form of written communication, news distribution and self expression.

I have been blogging consistently, almost daily, for almost ten years. This blog is my third. While my previous two blogs no longer exist on the Internet, I retain the material written on those blogs. My archive of posts, as a result, is almost a decade long.

I write my blog for several reasons:

1. It provides me with a means of expressing ideas, thoughts and experiences with an audience of engaged readers.

2. It connects me with people who I might otherwise have never known.

3. It serves as a laboratory where I can test new ideas before committing them to something more formal and traditionally published.

4. It provides a record of my life.

This last reason is an important one for me. Though I don’t often write about my day to day experiences, I do so when the moments are important or unique enough to warrant a mention. As a result, I have an extensive archive of the events from my life that I can return to again and again when needed.

Last night I was fortunate enough to win another Moth StorySLAM at Housing Works in Manhattan. I told a story about the day I intervened in a fight between two men outside my gym. When I saw that the theme of the night was Interference, the fight outside the gym immediately popped to mind as a perfect fit for the theme. But I also found myself unable to recollect the specifics from that morning. I couldn’t remember enough of the story to reliably tell it onstage, so for a few days, I searched for another story from my life that would fit the theme.

Then it occurred to me (while in the shower, of course) that I had written about that fight on my blog, almost immediately after retuning home that day. While I was sure that it wasn’t a perfectly crafted story suited for a Moth stage, I thought that the post might contain enough details to sufficiently refresh my memory.

I was right. The fight took place more than two years ago, but I found the post and all the long lost details that I required to prepare the story for a Moth performance.

The A-Team tee shirt that one of the guys was wearing.  The dialogue that we exchanged pre and post fight. My post-fight panic attack. All were details long since forgotten that came rushing back to me while reading the post. In fact, reading the post returned me to that morning in a way I didn’t think possible. I was able to remember even more about the fight, and especially my feelings about the fight, than even the post itself contained.

I was lucky to win last night. Some exceptionally strong storytellers did not have their names drawn from the hat.

But I am also lucky enough to have a detailed account of so many of the odd and unique moments from my life. It’s an archive that I can turn to again and again when I need to recall a story but my memory is failing me.

Specific details and the emotions of a moment are so critical to crafting and telling a successful story. Many times I can remember these elements with perfect accuracy. Other times, they are lost to the abyss of time. But as long as I continue to write for my blog on a daily basis and capture these moments in ones and zeros, I can reach down into that abyss and extract the information needed to craft a complete story.

I mentioned how lucky I felt to win last night competition to a fellow storyteller. He reminded me that luck favors the prepared.

I feel like I had been preparing to tell last night’s story for a long time. At least as far back as February of 2011, when I wrote the story down, and perhaps as far back as 2004, when people scoffed at the idea and laughed at the notion that I was writing a blog that no one would ever read.

Last night served as a big, fat “I told you so” to all those doubters and disbelievers. 

Deathbed regrets revisited: 2012

Two years ago, in response to a piece listing the most frequent death bed regrets of the dying, I listed what I thought would be my most likely death bed regrets. There were:

1. I did not travel enough.
2. I never pole vaulted again after high school.
3. I did not spend enough time with Clara.
4. I did not get into enough fist fights.
5. I started publishing novels too late in life and did not have a chance to tell all my stories.

Looking at this list two years later, it holds up surprisingly well. I have still not traveled nearly enough, I have yet to pole vault (though I may do so in the near future), I never feel like I spend enough time with Clara, and I still have a pile of story ideas clamoring for a place on the page.

In terms of fist fights, however, I may need to change my thinking a bit. When I was younger, I fought a lot, and though there was always inherent danger involved, the adrenaline rush, the primal nature of hand-to-hand combat, and my surprising ability to take a punch and remain calm in the midst of violence always made fighting a thrill for me.

Then I grew older and fighting ceased to be a part of my life. There were simply fewer and fewer instances in which people wanted to throw down.

Actually, fighting didn’t entirely stop. I punched a guy last year in an effort to break up a fight at the local gym, but that was a single sucker punch. Hardly a fight at all.

And perhaps I’m lucky that this was all the fight amounted to. Slate’s Brian Palmer recently wrote a piece about how easy it is to kill a man in a fistfight:

It happens more than twice a day, on average. Fists and feet were responsible for 745 murders in 2010, or 5.7 percent of all murders that year, according to FBI statistics.

Though Palmer goes on to explain that although most of these deaths are the result of the continued beating of the victim once he is unconscious, single blows to the head and chest have also resulted in death.

Although I may regret the lack of fist fights in my life, perhaps it is a regret that I should more readily accept. As he father of a three-year old and a baby on the way, there is no need for me to risk my life or the life of another human being in order to enjoy a brief adrenaline rush or demonstrate my proficiency at fisticuffs.

Best of all, in the two years since I first assembled my list of death bed regrets, I cannot think of another regret to add to my list, and the list of most common death bed regrets still do not apply to me.

Yes, I’ve made no progress in eliminating any regrets, but I have yet to add any to my list. A small victory.

Not that I plan on ever dying, but it makes for an interesting means of examining one’s life.