Sunday on the Couch with Football

A writing life is a slow life. It’s punctuated at times by periods of fierce activity but, for the most part, it is a life devoid of schedules.

Your friends have to learn to accomodate the burst of creativity that sends you plunging for a notebook in the middle of dinner or the ubiquitous presence of a MacBook on your lap. Add into the creative writing a dash of Journalism, and you inject into that equation the constant interruption of “Yes, Senator, what can I do for you this evening,” into dinner conversation or a sudden, thirty-minute detour to the plume of smoke on the horizon.

But the life is one of a relatively slow pace.

A few months back, I was approached about adding something to my dancecard. The news director of a DuPont Award-winning CBS affiliate asked if I would be interested in taking a job with his station, as their investigative reporter.

It’s a title I’ve held for some time at The Ouachita Citizen and it represented familiar territory as far as the scope of coverage I would be expected to provide. However, the position also brought with it something with which I’ve not had to contend for a while: a schedule.

I work.

Constantly.

And yet, something has happened corrolary to this new post that I had not expected. Weekends now mean something again.

I relish a Saturday night out with friends or a Sunday on the couch watching football. (Go 49ers! Yes, I’m a Louisiana writer who does not like the New Orleans Saints.) Simple downtime for the brain to decompress and file away the week becomes such a wonderful luxury.

We’ll chat more about this in the coming days. I’ve resolved to begin more regular updates of this blog, as I really do miss it.

If you’re in the Monroe area Thursday night, check out the Chatauqua Nexus at ULM — yours truly will present a lecture titled “Elegy for the Big Easy: a writer’s look at post-Katrina New Orleans”. 5:30, Airway Sciences Building.