Hey, Steve, What Finally Worked?

It’s 7:52 in the morning, and I haven’t slept in sixteen hours. I’ve got a journalism paper already two weeks late and a documentary proposal final due tomorrow, I have to present footage from my student film which looks worse and worse each retrospect to class in a few hours, and I have two physics books and have a dozen problem sets to plow through before the final test that will basically determine my grade in a week. And all of this to make good on the college degree I already spent about eleven semesters not getting the first time around.

I am fucked.

That, however, isn’t news to anyone who knows me particularly well. I seem to exist in a perpetual state of fucked-ness. This is what was on my mind as I walked down the block for a coffee and a lox bagel meant to be the special treat that gets me through what promises to be a shitty, anxious day — and that’s if it’s productive. The little Brooklyn nabe I’ve called home for the last few months was quiet and grey, with working people going about their business completely unawares of the coffee-sipping, cigarette-smoking walking crisis in their midst.

It was the perfect walk to make that kind of random mental connection that I’ve always taken unsubstantiated pride in: A scarily apt metaphor for the seemingly endless bouts with writer’s block I’ve been experiencing the last two years is Steve Sax Disease. Unlike Lou Gehrig (and if I’m anything, I’m unlike Lou Gehrig), this isn’t a tragic yet noble actual disease — Parkinson’s, in Gehrig’s case. No, instead it’s a mental block that makes what was once the simplest of tasks a neurotic torment, and makes the sufferer look like a complete buffoon.

A little background: Steve Sax Disease is actually a variation on Steve Blass Disease, but Sax Disease affects fielders while Blass Disease affects pitchers. In a pitcher’s case, it describes the onset of a sudden and sometimes complete loss of control over a thrown ball. A modern sufferer of Blass disease was the St. Louis Cardinals’ Rick Ankiel. It’s like a little explosion goes off inside a pitcher’s head, and suddenly a lifetime muscle memory honed to hit a catcher’s glove with a baseball from a little over sixty feet is completely forgotten.

Sax Disease is a more accurate portrayal of my own problem for a number of reasons. First, Sax played when I was growing up, and played the same position I did in Little League — second base. And as a fielder Sax had a number of other talents that didn’t suddenly disappear. For starters, he could still hit, which is probably what kept him on the perennially punchless Dodgers for years after the onset of his malady.

What would happen is that often on a routine play, Sax would field a grounder smoothly and then, with more than enough time to make the play, inexplicably throw it into the stands or the dugout instead of to the first baseman. The problem snowballed because, nervous that he’d make yet another throwing error (he racked up 30 in 1983) he would double or triple pump before throwing, or not even throw at all, and the runner would be safe at first.

This describes my difficulty getting started on a writing project perfectly. Sometimes, in a rush to write something, anything, I’ll miss the object of the exercise — making a point — wildly. Which has led to making fits and starts on stuff, and if not entirely happy with it giving up without doing much of anything at all. But there’s a twist to the Sax story that also mimics what I’ve been experiencing.

See, on a non-routine play, such as a bang-bang double play or a shot to the hole that tested his range, he had no trouble making the throw. Psychologists, especially of the Armchair Sports School of Psychology (not yet accredited) attribute this to the fact that Sax didn’t have time to think about what he was doing. His years of training took over and he was as automatic as a cat landing on its feet.

Again, there are times when something just sets me off and I can hardly keep myself from writing. Like this piece right here. I get an idea, I sit down, I write it, I send it to someone or post it online somewhere and I get a feeling like that which one gets on the field when one hears the smack of leather pill against leather mitt. It’s not always pretty, but it’s done, and there’s a bliss of relief.

Something happened along the way as a writer where at one point I was just writing because I wanted to, and because it came naturally. I didn’t want to become “a writer,” I just did it, because it was fun and I had something to say. But somehow I convinced myself, “Wouldn’t it be great to do this all the time, instead of editing catalog photos and copy for a national housewares retailer?”

And suddenly I found myself in a world where I spent more time thinking about the craft of writing, the profession or writing, the reasons to write one thing and not something else than actually writing. It’s gotten to the point where I’ve started to wonder if what I was doing before was even writing at all, because whatever I’m doing now isn’t nearly as fun.

It doesn’t seem to matter how often people tell me, “Hey, I like your work,” or, “That was great that thing you wrote” — which actually does happen more often now than it did when it all came easy. I’ve nearly killed myself trying to break blocks with booze and drugs, and have made efforts to appease, or at least annoy, the god or gods everyone seems so crazy about.

Oversleep, undersleep, overeating, undereating, exercise, repose, sex (with and without a partner), celibacy (intentional and unintentional), talking it out with my colleagues, my friends, my exes, my family, my therapist. You know the idiom “Banging my head up against a wall?” I have literally done that. I am, right now, trying to write out my writer’s block.

Instead of writing the papers that are due, or something I might get paid for, I have produced up to this point 1083 words relating my struggles to those of an above-average public professional who had the misfortune of becoming my go-to pop culture reference point for people who are paralyzed by “over-thinking it.” Which just goes to show that when there’s nothing on the line, I can make the play no problem.

Sadly, the time I could have actually turned this in for credit instead of something on-topic are long gone. So here it is, on my blog, because if there’s anything that will up the catharsis level (or at least win a few pity points) it’s flaying my psyche publicly. At least, that’s my hope.

The bright spot here is that Sax managed to lead the league in double plays, fielding percentage and set a record for singles in a season with 171 after leaving LA for New York in 1989 — six years after the first onset of symptoms. Hopefully I’ll manage my own little New York miracle and figure out how to get back to playing for the love of the game by the time I get back to San Francisco.