The Power of SU.

I guess around 1980, after an entire life of having baseball heroes, I gave up on baseball and heroes.

Maybe it was admitting to myself the dirt and the corruption in the game and realizing the golden-hour images created by sportswriters were as far from the truth as Ahab was from being a four-minute miler.

The great writer Mark Harris once wrote, "the only hero is the man without heroes." And in my mind I started distinguishing between heroes and people who did heroic things. You can be a schmendrik and do heroic things. And most everyone has a fair amount of schmendrik in them. After all, no one's perfect, or even near perfect. 

To paraphrase the old Noxema commercial from the 60s or 70s, "the closer you get, the more you are a schmendrik."

Eventually you realize that heroes, like everyone else are flawed. Give up on perfection and idealization. So I gave up on baseball heroes and started embracing writers I loved. 

I was methodical in my embrace. 

I would get my hands on everything they wrote and read it and if I could afford it, buy a copy so I could refer to it any time. 

Joseph Mitchell was one of those writers. In 1938 he published a book called "My Ears Are Bent." Later on he saw things in the book that he didn't like and it remained out of print for over half-a-century. 

I finally tracked it down at the New York Public Library on 5th and 42nd Street. The book wasn't circulating and I read the whole thing on microfiche. Later, still in pre-internet days, my wife found me a rare copy. I wrapped it in cellophane, put it in a plastic bag and have it still today. According to abebooks.com, though it's since been republished, my original copy is worth more than my car. 

I think a lot of people are as obsessive as I am. I'd imagine a lot of guitar players try to copy Robert Johnson, BB King, Django, Rosetta or Jimi. They learn every riff and lick. That's part of the "autodidact" that lives in so many of us.

Another of my writing exemplars is Robert Caro. I've probably written more about Caro in this space than anyone else. Besides reading everything Caro's published, I've seen him speak about twenty times. And I await the publication of his final volume of his five-volume magnum opus on Lyndon Johnson. Caro is in his late 80s now. Along with about a million other Caroites, I'm hoping he finishes volume five before he dies. Or before I do.

The other night I was upbraided by H, my long-time friend and GeorgeCo., LLC's Account Director. We had a client call and in my eagerness I went off script. I even talked over H, which I shouldn't do--for more reasons than I can enumerate.

I remembered something I learned from reading Caro. Something I am trying to actually incorporate into my life.

When Caro interviews someone, he writes SU all over his notebook's pages: Shut Up. 

In other words, as in the passage above, "Silence is the weapon, silence and people's need to fill it..."

I've seen this technique from Owen, my therapist of one-hundred years. 

I've seen it from Errol Morris, the Academy Award-winning director I spent weeks with shooting this long commercial. You can see a small glimpse of "SU," in this spot I did with Errol long ago and far away. At around :15-:22. (BTW, this spot does more to explain the potential efficacy of AI than anything I've seen since.) He leaves in a pregnant, uncomfortable pause. It makes everything feel realer.

OK.

I'll SU now.