The Big Picture - 
By Glynn Wilson - 

Here’s the blessing and the curse of writing a memoir: It requires reliving your life all over again, at least in your head.

Sometimes this can be great fun, at least when you are recounting an enjoyable experience and time in your life. Sometimes it can be mentally excruciating — when you are forced to relive disaster, failure or tragedy.

It seems the focus should remain on what can be learned from the experience. Sometimes you’re so wrapped up in the entertainment of it all that’s easy to forget. It might not be what readers are looking for anyway.

For whatever reason, words come easy for me. Maybe too easy. Is it possible that sometimes we take words too lightly?

“What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly,” Thomas Paine once wrote. But look at the rest of the quote.

“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”

We carry on.

When you’re a professional, paid newspaper writer making your living in exchange for a few column inches every week, it’s not always easy to figure out what to say. But you say SOMETHING, by damn, because the space around the ads must be filled. The presses must roll.

In television news, like show biz, “the show must go on” even though it might have been better to wait a few more minutes to get the facts straight.

In this era of web news, even when you don’t have a mean newspaper editor breathing down your neck screaming “crank it out,” there is still pressure to produce. The deadline pressure may be somewhat artificial, but it feels real. It feeds the adrenaline addiction of being a news writer.

When I first started some blogging in 2005, I described it like feeding a dog. Even a news website has to be fed. Otherwise it might die.

When I first started writing for publication on the web, rather than in print, I noticed a change in the attitude, and reveled in the freedom of it all. It has taken 22 years for the difference to sink in. This is normal. It takes awhile to understand a historical event like the invention of the internet and the world wide web (WWW).

Running across an early column this week while working on a section of the book from 1996, it occurred to me that this was a very early example of post-print writing. Otherwise I may not have talked about it in the book at all, because it’s really not very important in the overall scheme of things.

The Olympic Scene: Charles Barkley Smokes Big, Fat Cigars

In re-living this, however, and talking about it with associate editor David Underhill, an interesting question arose.

If you know David, you know he has a long history of asking the intellectually burning question that no one else in the room is thinking about. This often seems to occur in what appears to be the wrong place at the wrong time and is taken as an impertinent question. Sometimes people roll their eyes in the back of their heads. But it might very well be THE question that should be asked.

I also have a long history of asking the impertinent questions in public, usually in the right place at the right time, although they tend to be a little different. I’m actually known for asking the question everyone is thinking about — but no one else has the guts to ask.

The way to look at it is this: Somebody needs to ask these damn questions.

If nobody else will, this is one public service we can perform. Will it make us the richest, most popular people in the world? Probably not. But perhaps it will at least result in getting some people to think.

This is not for everyone. It requires an intellectual curiosity, even if you are 94-years-old and have lived under the impression that you already know it all for 74 of those years.

One of the things we sort of gave up on in the early days of the internet was trying to communicate directly with people we now like to refer to as “Trump voters.”

It would be wrong to consider this to be an early mistake, because it would take another 20 years for enough “Trump voters” to figure out how to sign in to Facebook and/or Twitter and allow themselves to be manipulated into becoming Trump voters.

The column I wrote was about opening night of the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, the night Eric Rudolph detonated pipe bombs in Centennial Olympic Park.

I did not write about the bombing, only making light of it in the end. If I had been on the payroll of a newspaper then, my assignment would have been much different. Covering the bombing was not my job. I left that to CNN.

So when Underhill asked me about it, that’s petty much what I said at the time. How could I not only ignore writing about the bombing itself, but even make light of such a tragedy?

It’s a good and fair question.

The more I thought about it, it was easy to conclude that I was there to have a good time. I wasn’t going to let a radical domestic terrorist like Eric Rudolph ruin it.

The party went on. The Olympics went on.

Life goes on. It must.

Was it wrong?

I don’t think so.

Was it just a bit ahead of it’s time?

Obviously.

Being ahead of one’s time is also a blessing and a curse. That is also a sub-theme of the book.

In the second edition of this book — the one I will be living and re-writing for the rest of my life — things are becoming more clear than ever.

But we’ve got miles and miles to go before we sleep. There is still so much to learn and write about.

Should we acknowledge the passing of George H.W. Bush like everyone else today? I don’t think so. That would just open up a different can of worms.

“Not gonna touch that,” Bush might have said. “Wouldn’t be prudent.”

While working on this column I took a minute to look up synonyms for memoir. Here are the chosen few.

Anecdote, autobiography, chronicle, diary, essay, journal, life story, narrative, recollection, reminiscence, thesis, treatise, confessions, discourse, dissertation, monograph.

Besides, I have cursed quite a bit in my life and writing. Sorry about that. I know English teachers don’t like it. But with a news man’s mouth, I can’t help myself.

That about sums it up.

Roll F. Tide!