Loving Entrenpreneurs

When you look at the new media products depicted above, consider that they are the latest examples of the entrepreneurial spirit that never quite dies in San Francisco. Weekend Sherpa and TODO are the best of the current crop of new offerings.

Of course, my perspective is informed by the past. As I look around my room, it isn’t difficult to locate the evidence of years of work, here and there, all of which sticks with me. Books, magazine articles, newspaper articles, published photos, business cards, ID tags, office signs, IPO prospectuses, issues of magazines and newspapers I've edited, books I edited or contributed to, anthologies, screenplays, videos of movies I wrote or "acted" (as an extra) in, tapes of publicity tours, speeches, lectures, and on and on.

It's been quite a public life for such a private person.

I won't deny that I appreciate the success and the recognition. But I keep all the awards and medals stashed away in a dusty closet. The best of them were the result of collaborations -- teamwork -- much more than my individual effort. At this point in time, the creative process of inventing media requires so many separate skillsets that only the stubbornest of lone wolves would go it alone.

In my closet somewhere is a huge collection of T-shirts and hats, mainly from the dot.bomb era. Throughout my house are boxes of files of clippings. Once a friend put together as many of the clips as she could locate about our Patty Hearst stories in Rolling Stone (1975-6). There were thousands of them, and I don't know what's become of those.

As all records transition to digital form, I wonder how many of these momentos will survive. Already, many are crumbling into brown flecks of dry paper, breaking off, leaving jagged edges where there used to be smoothness.

Looking in the mirror, I see jagged lines, brown edges, aging flesh where there used to be smoothness. It seems like everything we knew is slowly disintegrating, dust back into dust. I'm not sure what it adds up to -- my lifetime of work. And, until this blog, I've never shared publically how I feel about it all.

I realize that after my departure, the blog may be all that survives of my work. They'll be a book here and there, and when the kids find the old awards and T-shirts, maybe they'll give them away or sell them on eBay (a good choice.)

Meanwhile, these hundreds of thousands of words blinking in electronic text format will outlive me. Knowing this, I choose each word as if it is my last.

One of them inevitably will be, of course. I would hope it would turn out to be Love.