Journalists & competition & love

This is not a photograph of the city editor in Michigan I refer to in this post. Rather, I take it to be an advertising illustration I stumbled onto by a fashion brand based in Barcelona, Spain. Actually, it could be a representation of the woman I referenced because she was a cutie like the model here and, like many men in the profession of journalism, was a hard-drinking individual and tough as they came as a reporter and began in the newspaper business when typewriters still were in use.

Fram & the city editor

A few years ago when I was a working journalist in Michigan, the city editor of the newspaper and I had sort of a "standing argument." My point was that the only person worth competing with was oneself. My cornerstone stemmed from the "Old West" adage that no matter how good/fast you were with a gun, there always is someone better/faster than you, and that the concept is valid about everything .... no matter how good you are at a particular skill, there always will be somebody better.

She -- the city editor -- disagreed and loved to compete with other staff members in the newsroom at any and every journalistic skill known to humankind, some of which were so subjective in nature that it was literally impossible to determine who was the best.

Incidental to this story, at one point she quit the newspaper and divorced her husband and invited me to accompany her to Greece, all at her expense. I declined, so she found another young man who accepted her invitation. They were gone for about a month. After three or four such adventures, the relationship ended and she went back to journalism -- but not back to her former husband. The last I heard, cancer claimed her and the husband she had divorced was at her bedside when she died. Sort of ironic, I think, and illustrates something about actual love. It proved to me that "real and unconditional love" do exist -- at least for some people.

By the way, neither she nor I ever gave up on our argument. Under the circumstances, I guess it ends in a stalemate.

In that light, I have been re-reading some of my posts written since the first one in January 2009. There have been more than a few I like, but only a very few I think are actually "good" whether measured in the sense of being educational / entertaining / enlightening or by any definition. For the most part, I think my skill at writing has been declining over that span of time, and I am not quite sure what to do about it: Accept it or challenge it by a more dedicated approach.

When I decide what to do about this something less than fascinating dilemma, I will be sure to pass the word along to you.


Returning briefly to the incidental to this story .... regarding my decision not to accept the city editor's invitation for the trip to Greece with her, it is one more of those crossroads in life in which I still sometimes wonder if I made the wrong decision .... another stalemate, I guess ....