Lifetime Sentences

By Jim Hagarty
2016

I used to be the editor of a community newspaper in my small city in Canada. It was the second “weekly” I had been editor of. (Newspaper owners started calling their weeklies community papers to get away from the disparaging “weakly”.)

I had a fair amount of experience by the time I arrived at the last paper I would work for. Three years on a weekly, 13 years reporting and editing at a daily paper and six years teaching journalism at a local college.

The publisher at the newspaper had also been in newspapers his entire career and like me, loved the business. But whereas I came up through the news path, he came up through advertising. But he was a lover of newspapers and was knowledgeable about the editorial side of things as well. When he showed up at our office, he would stroll into the newsroom and comment on stories we had written, photo spreads we had done.

Eventually, however, he left and I was sorry to see him go. His replacement was a man who had started out delivering newspapers, a noble job if there ever was one. He worked hard at that and was eventually named circulation manager at his small weekly paper. In other words, he was the boss of all the newspaper deliverers.

The new publisher was ambitious and developed a knack for getting to know the right people and the right things to say to the right people. And one day, he was elevated to publisher of 12 small town papers including the one I worked at.

The years I worked for this man were not pleasant ones. He knew nothing about any of areas of newspapering other than circulation and he had no interest in learning. But he thought he knew. And that was worse than not knowing. He meddled where he shouldn’t have.

I worked for this publisher for several years and when I left the paper in 2008, I came away with the very strong feeling, though I couldn’t prove it, that he had never once read even one story that we published while he was in charge. He had no interest in our town and it showed. And no interest in his newspapers beyond the paycheques they provided him.

I checked the staff list printed on the editorial page of my old paper recently. My non-interested publisher is no longer there. No doubt he has moved on to greener pastures, impressing someone somewhere with his knowledge of how to deliver newspapers and still not reading them.

My old newspaper is still going, though it has moved a couple times and is now in a small space on the second floor of an old building. There isn’t much in the paper. I doubt it’s making money. But it has survived the leadership of a completely unqualified manager, so there is that.

My incompetent publisher reminds me of politicians and CEOs who have overachieved somehow and are in positions where they don’t belong. These people, male and female alike, are like the dog that finally caught the tire of the car it was chasing, then didn’t know what to do with it after the chase ended. Or why it was even chasing the car to begin with.

The thing about the dog that caught the tire on the moving car: It probably miscalculated and got its head run over.

Sometimes it’s not a bad thing to fail. Or to lose.

Or even to quit.

Let’s hope.

By Jim Hagarty
Renowned Terrible Limericker

There once was a blogger named Jim.
Whatever became of him?
He wrote every day
Then just went away.
Did he get mad and quit on a whim?

By Jim Hagarty
2016

My daughter says that I have a quirk when it comes to jokes. She doesn’t exactly say it’s an annoying quirk, but secretly, I think she believes it is.

Her contention is that if I tell a joke and no one laughs, instead of giving up on the joke, I keep telling it over and over to everyone I meet, even though no one ever laughs.

She’s right. But here’s my problem. If I find a joke funny, I come to believe in that joke, and like any good preacher, I want to bring others into the sunshine that warms my face. My jokes are my higher power and I am a humour evangelist.

When I was in university 45 years ago, I hung around with a very funny guy. He had a bunch of one liners always at the ready and he would whip them out when he wanted to make someone laugh. And laugh they always did.

Here is my favourite quip of his.

When anyone would ask him how he was doing, he would say to them, “Oh, I’m able to sit up and take a little nourishment.” Now, the reason I found this so funny, and others did too, was the fact that he was standing there, perfectly healthy, explaining that he was just barely alive.

So, for 45 years, I have used this joke. Over and over and over. When a stranger, often a clerk in a store, asks me how I am, I tell them, “Oh, I’m able to sit up and take a little nourishment.” In 45 years, I have had a total of probably three people laugh at my reply. Maybe it’s my delivery or maybe I live in the wrong part of the world.

But I do know one thing.

I am going to keep using this line till the day it comes true.

The nurse will ask, “Well how are we today, Mr. Hagarty.”

And I will say, “Oh, I’m able to sit up and take a little nourishment.”

And she won’t laugh. Instead she will fluff my pillow and hand me my pea soup.

My friend and fellow blogger Al Bossence (thebayfieldbunch.com) is visiting his aunt in Florida and posted these photos tonight of flowers in her beautiful gardens.

I have been sitting watching TV news, all the while trying to think of something to write.

My screen is as blank as my mind. It is as though the normal merry-go-round in my head has come to a halt and been shut down for the night.

Every writer in any genre – novels, songs, short stories – seems to go through the same thing now and then and underlying it is a question that is never far away. Have I written everything I will ever write? Has the well run dry?

Self-doubt is part and parcel of the craft. To give an example, I look at the hundred and fifteen words I have just now written and think, “What crap.”

Some writers are very disciplined and therefore able to produce on command. I used to be this way in the newspaper business. I would interview someone, go back to the newsroom, write up the story. But I had my notes; the stories wrote themselves.

With creative writing, the game changes. The writer is dependent on inspiration. And sometimes that is in short supply.

©2016 Jim Hagarty

By Jim Hagarty
2016

Humour might seem to others to be my gift. I say that, hopefully not braggingly, because I have won awards for my humour writing and others have told me this.

But to me, humour is my medicine which I have to take many times a day to survive. Precisely because I am too serious about almost everything. I think a lot of “clowns” will tell you the same thing about themselves.

For example, I would like to write long pieces about suicide and I might just do that one of these days. Over the years, I have tried to keep track of the people I have known, some close, some only acquaintances, who have taken their own lives. At last count, that number is nearing 30. That number is higher than many other causes of death that have taken people I have known.

So, when you least expect it, I will drop a serious bomb on you. Maybe I will warn you in the headline. Don’t worry. All that will mean is I haven’t taken my medicine yet that day.

However, I don’t write about things unless I think I have something to contribute to the conversation.

So brace yourselves!

By Jim Hagarty
2016

Here’s something I believe in.

I don’t feel completely stress-free unless I am alone. If there is one other person in my presence, there is stress ranging from very mild to very intense. If there are a lot of people, I can feel almost smothered.

I have told her this so I don’t think she’ll mind me repeating it to you. My wife went away for a weekend with her friends recently. And my son and daughter are away at university. I had the house to myself for the first time in many years. At first, I didn’t know what to make of it. But before too long, I could feel great waves of relaxation sweep over me. I felt no pressure from anyone to talk or to do tasks, not that my wife is a hard taskmaster. Oddly, however, without the (self-imposed) pressure to perform, I actually got a few things done. I even cooked meals for myself, eating out only once.

A friend of mine got divorced years ago. I was surprised when it happened. I thought they made a very good couple. I saw her one day and I asked her what went wrong.

“He never went away,” she said of her husband. “He was always there. I never had a moment to myself.”

Familiarity breeds contempt. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. Not new concepts, but ones that appeal to me. I have a neighbour who always criticizes me for what she feels is a lack of attention I pay to my marriage. She is free to do that. But sometimes, I think less is more.

I especially believe that when it comes to contact with other human beings.

By Jim Hagarty

Six months ago today, I wrote my first post for Lifetime Sentences. When I did that, I became a blogger.

I really didn’t know what I was getting into. As it turns out, blogging and bloggers belong to a whole weird world that up till then had been a mystery to me. I have tried to learn the ropes but it’s a daunting adventure.

Every project I have ever started seems to go through a few phases. In the first phase, I hit the ground running and go at it like a madman. In Phase 2, the fun sort of falls off a bit and the project begins to feel like work. The Final Phase sees me trying to figure out whether or not I want to carry on with whatever new thing I have started.

In the past, there has been making recordings of my songs, writing books, freelancing (I even rented my own office for that one), and investing in the stock market online which can be likened to taking all your money up to the tenth floor of a building and throwing it out the window. (Not really. It’s actually fun and somewhat profitable.)

I still do all those things today but with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Sometimes you can’t get my guitar away from me and I write new songs like Bob Dylan on uppers. Other times, weeks go by, no guitar, no songs. Intense investing for a week or two, then a three-month hiatus.)

My blog has gone in several directions. Humour, philosophy, photography, music. I’ve written limericks and poetry and taken lots of pictures of old cars and trucks. I’ve posted some music by my friends. I’ve done political commentary (which I will probably stop when the U.S. election ends).

When I started the blog, I had various vague goals. I would contribute lots of stories, humourous and otherwise, and collect up those stories into a series of books which I would sell. And yes, I thought I could make some money from the project. I haven’t quite rang that last bell yet.

I envisioned a sort of online magazine, with lots of contributors other than myself. I haven’t gone very far down that road yet except for the music by friends and the fantastic photo displays by my son Chris and my buddy and fellow blogger Al Bossence who, with his wife Kelly and their pooch Pheebs, is RVing somewhere in the southern United States as I write. It was Al who got me going on all this blogging business. He has been at it for 10 years (thebayfieldbunch.com) and has had well over four million visits to his site in that time. His goal is to reach 2,000 views in one day. He has come close attracting over 1,900 sets of eyes in a 24-hour period.

So six months for me. I will keep plugging along but I might make a few changes along the way to keep the whole thing more enjoyable for me and less like a burden, which sometimes, to be honest, it does feel like at present.

It is gratifying to use my tracking software to see where my viewers are coming from. At present, most are in the United States, but a lot from Canada and even some from far-flung places such as Finland, Australia and Russia.

So I hope you will hang in there with me for another six months. On my one-year anniversary, April 30, 2017, there will be free popsicles and chocolate ice cream for everybody!

Thanks for dropping in. I appreciate your interest.