When I was enrolled at Clatsop Community College in the fall of 1990, I took English 101 as one of my three classes. And in it we had one of these dismal textbooks that was about writing and the writing process. It was the sort of remedial stuff that I would later come to loathe as people continually suggested I take writing classes to learn how to write. After things like CCC and the Seaside Signal and the seventy short stories of high-school, I didn’t need the how. I needed the time, the motivation, and maybe a little more practice.
But something from the how, from that early primer on writing technique, stuck with me. It was this essay called “Soup Can Labels Can Be Interesting” – at least I would swear that’s what it was called and has always stuck out in my memory as being that. This phrase has become something of a totem for me, for my writing life. Not that I always feel an accordance with its sentiment, but often enough to make it work.
But just now, feeling this memory full-force, reinforcing Em’s Psychology in Public Policy assessment of why I don’t feel I’ve changed much over the years (more on this in a bit, perhaps, like in a future post), I Googled the phrase of Professor John Rupp’s beleaguered fame. And I found exactly one hit (“Googlewhacks” I guess they call them these days, though I thought there was some other term). And it was … from my own webpage. How anticlimactic.
But of course, because I’m in SCLCBI mode, I pursued the link to my own storied past, to May of 2001 and the fateful weeks they were. To a Mariners season I accurately projected to be well beyond 100 wins. To the epic balance of non-communication that spared a long-documented Quadfecta-precipitated disaster for all involved (see, I can still talk cryptically about the same things I did 9 years ago – where’s the change in that?). To a visit to Sandy San D, to reuniting with old friends, to speculating on the writing life, aspiring to be a columnist, aspiring to write a story in 2001 that remains half-written on my desktop here in a year with all the same digits in a slightly different order. I only read 20 days and it felt like a lifetime, a time machine, a portal to life on the precipice of some of the better things I ever did while I waited and recuperated on the periphery of something I couldn’t yet detect.
And I’m there again. Because Soup Can Labels Can Be Interesting.
The essay, of course, and now I’m really wigging out because I could have sworn I wrote something about this essay before on this blog in this format and this kind of thing always seems to end with me figuring out a better way to Google it and discovering that it was a different February 4th when I was constructing the exact same post, but anyway the soup cans. The essay is about procrastination, about the little tricks and distractions we find to keep ourselves focused on anything else when it’s time to get started on writing. The essay was very general and written for people who sort of fear writing as a process in the same crippling way that most of the freshmen who walk in the door of Hardenbergh A2 have spent their lives fearing public speaking before they resolved to get up and do something about it. You know, the way people who attend Clatsop Community College sometime after their 11th birthday feel.
And while I never related to that exactly, or to the bulk of the essay, the imagery of Soup Can Labels Can Be Interesting stuck and stuck hard. Emily and I later identified a whole syndrome at work where one can clear an entire to-do list that’s been sitting on the back burner for a week or a month if there’s one dreaded task that creeps into the periphery. Suddenly, rote data entry and catching up on reply e-mails to people who accidentally wrote you become essential to job performance. Rarely for either of us was the task in question writing something – more often for me it was making particularly inquisitive phone calls to strangers (though that got better over time) or dealing with a couple of prickly personalities. But I think everyone can relate to this phenomenon, to being suddenly really motivated by the idea of putting off something that seems like even more of a struggle.
I could chronicle everything I’ve been doing since a little after midnight, the proverbial soup can labels I’ve been reading. Some of them have been about my past, while others have been really obscure Facebook data I’ve absorbed. There’s been a check of every blog I regularly read, every report about the Mariners, research into the nearest Minor League teams and when their seasons start, comparative mileage analysis and schedule checking for when I could embark. Granted, I could have spent this time, I don’t know, looking for an agent or doing something fun and non-productive, but instead this sort of half-assing around seems like a better compromise.
Editing out the soup cans is essential to deliberate living, to making this sort of life work. It’s part of the reason I’m coaching debate, playing intramural basketball, scheduling a good chunk of my time. Because life works best when time is valued, has a premium on it, is chosen for favored activities. Not doled out to absurd levels of self-delusional procrastination.
I’m being a little too hard on myself. Nights like this are rare. They were especially rare last year when I wrote American Dream On and they show no signs of entrenching themselves as I approach more projects. But they make it all important to nip in the bud when they arise. For all that I’ve enjoyed explaining this, this 1,000-word treatise on soup can labels is, itself, another soup can in a way. Though at least it leaves something for posterity. If nothing else, a second Google hit for the phrase.
Postscript – apparently my memory is thorough but its diction is imperfect. The actual title of the essay is “Soup Can Labels Can Be Fascinating“, which is more cutely hyperbolic. It appears in Jean Wyrick’s Steps to Writing Well, which I think was the remedial primer of record discussed above. The book is apparently still in print and newly released in a new edition, so bully for Jean Wyrick. The whole metaphor is aptly laid out in the first paragraph or so of that link, by the way, so check it out. If, y’know, you’re not just putting off something else you should be doing. Or maybe if that’s exactly what you’re doing.
