Life Verbatim - The Beginning

Welcome to Life Verbatim: Expressing thoughts in writing about life as I have experienced it, and what I have come to understand about the nature of writing itself. I will admit to being a bit overwhelmed at the moment, considering the nature and breadth of the task, so what I intend to do is start with some background information about who I am, where I have been, and what I have written. We'll see where it goes from there.

Before I really get into this, I'm going to link to my website, Ardent Publishing, so you can look it over for yourself. In the near future I will be adding a second link to a companion video on YouTube. They will both be permanently listed in the sidebar as well.

There was a time in my undergraduate life when I dreamed about writing as a way of life. That was a time and place, however, when college was a place you attended to learn a profession, and it was quite common to graduate in four years with the tools to do so. Writing for a living was no more than a pipe dream, and like a puff of smoke that dream was swallowed up by the drive to "succeed". And so I did, quotation marks included.

In order to make it through medical school I signed up for the Navy Senior Medical Student Program and upon graduation headed for Long Island and a Navy internship. This was during the height of the Vietnam War. The St. Albans Naval Hospital (now closed) was an evacuation destination for wounded soldiers. In spite of knowing one never volunteers for anything in the military, I agreed to serve on the dirty wound ward for one rotation and will never forget that experience. Nor will I ever regret it. There I experienced, for the first time, truly, Life and Death Verbatim. True honor and quiet courage of a remarkable nature among those young men so torn apart and some, dying. I learned something about writing there.

Considering that experience, it would seem natural to avoid volunteering again. Still, the Submarine Service seemed so interesting... Going regular Navy I was soon attending Submarine Medical School in New London, CT, and six months later was assigned to the USS John Marshal, SSBN 611. Assigned as medical officer to the Gold Crew (two crews to each submarine so it could operate year around), I was approached by my opposite number on the Blue Crew who wanted to swap places. I didn't know the guy very well, or know that he was a smooth-talking slime ball, and decided to accomodate him. Turns out he had checked out the CO's and discovered the Blue Crew captain was a total jerk. Two years and two patrols later I emerged from active submarine service shaken to the core from a survival experience with a CO who was determined to destroy every officer he could not convert to his world view. Considering the power of Naval Captains, he destroyed more than a few. I learned a lot about writing there.

Fed up with military life, I resigned my commission and decided to have a go at practicing psychiatry in civilian life. Folloing residency training I practiced that art of artificial worlds created with words, worlds created with smoke and mirrors (more about that later), for about nine years before leaving psychiatry and medicine. I never looked back. To say that I learned many things about writing during this period would certainly be true, but I also learned things about what it means to be human that go so deep that they are still emerging many years later.

Truly at loose ends, and true to form, I decided to pursue learning a trade and set about teaching myself how to bake bread. That was a REAL transition, and, looking back, still has me shaking my head. Still, founding a wholesale bread company, I worked my butt off to build up a company that eventually served three counties. Thirteen years later, utterly exhausted physically, and psycholigically on my last legs, it became clear that my only option was to shut it down and walk away. And so I did. Without doubt I learned just an awful lot about writing during those thirteen years of incredible physical labor as I fought a rear-guard action that could end in only one way.

Shutting the company down and walking away with nothing to show for those thirteen years except an old 386 IBM computer and financial ruin, I decided, finally, that enough was enough.

Good place to stop for now. Be back shortly.

DBM