Simple Minds – "Alive and Kicking" (1985)

What you gonna do when things go wrong?

What you gonna do when it all cracks up?

Have you been wondering why it’s been so long since I’ve posted a new 2 or 3 lines?

Maybe you figured that I was dead.  That would have been a reasonable surmise given my advanced age.  Also, I do live a rather devil-may-care lifestyle that is not really compatible with a long lifespan.  But I can assure you that I am very much alive and kicking.  

*     *     *     *     *

Given that I’m not dead, what is the explanation for the recent lack of new 2 or 3 lines posts?

One reason why you haven’t heard from me in a while is simple: I haven’t had anything worthwhile to say!

I can guess what you’re saying to yourself right now: “Having nothing worthwhile to say certainly hasn’t stopped 2 or 3 lines from posting in the past.”

To which I could reply, “Eff yourself and the horse you rode in on.”

But that’s just not the kind of guy I am!

*     *     *     *     *

Another reason for my recent silence is that I’ve just been too busy with other things to crank out two 2 or 3 lines posts a week, which has been my modus operandi for years.  

(Some of you may remember the days when there were not two, but three 2 or 3 lines posts per week.  But that was when I was still practicing law.  Now that I’m retired, I don’t have the time to do three.)

Some of the projects that are taking up my time these days will be the subjects of upcoming 2 or 3 lines posts.  

*     *     *     *     *

I won’t lie to you.  As the number of days since my last 2 or 3 lines post continued to grow, I began to panic a little.

“Mother of mercy,” I said to myself (echoing the Edward G. Robinson character in Little Caesar). “Is this the end of 2 or 3 lines?”

But then . . . serendipity happened.  

A few days ago, I opened an e-mail with a link to an article by Tony Stubblebine that was titled “My Secret to Writing Everyday Is to Have a Lot of Drafts.” 

Stubblebine believes that writers need to develop an ability to manufacture writing.  “Surgeons can’t get surgeon’s block,” he asserted, and “writers shouldn’t allow themselves to have writer’s block.”

According to Stubblebine, the best way to manufacture writing is to keep your drafts folder well stocked.  He defined the term “draft” to include not just a preliminary version of a written work, but anything that contained the seed of a story.  A newspaper article or blog post could be a “draft” – so could the lyrics of a song, or something that a friend says to you.

At the time he wrote the article, Stubblebine was sitting on 801 drafts – most of which he would never attempt to complete.   

But he said that whenever he took a moment to open his drafts folder and go through its contents, he always found at least one idea that was worth turning into a finished product.

Sometimes, that idea had been sitting in the folder for years.  In fact, Stubblebine said he had recently stumbled across a ten-year-old draft that was finally ripe for the plucking. 

*     *     *     *     *

I can’t end this post without quoting the following comment by one of the people who posted a comment on “My Secret to Writing Everyday Was to Have a Lot of Drafts”: 

The fetishization of productivity through draft accumulation mirrors the industrial logic of just-in-time manufacturing – stockpiling cognitive inventory against future creative shortages. 

73% of authors in a 2024 Authors Guild survey maintain over 20 unfinished drafts, mistaking archival bulk for momentum, yet 61% report increased anxiety from this “hoarding heuristic.” 

Your pragmatic approach – writing as habitual stocking – sidesteps how 89% of productivity tools (per a 2023 UC Berkeley study) optimize for throughput, not meaning. 

Each draft, while a hedge against stagnation, becomes a debt instrument in the attention economy, its interest compounded by algorithmic platforms demanding perpetual output. 

The endpoint of this ethos?  A posthumous collection titled “Drafts 1-14,302: A Life in Margins,” auto-curated by an AI trained on calendar reminders.  

If productivity gurus had their way, obituaries would list word counts instead of loves. 

 

A lot of that comment went right over my head, but I love it just the same – it’s a real humdinger.  I would love to meet the guy who wrote it.

*     *     *     *     *

“Alive and Kicking” was released in 1985 on Once Upon a Time, the seventh studio album by Simple Minds.

The music video for “Alive and Kicking” was filmed on the site where the first great American summer resort hotel, the Catskill Mountain House, stood from 1824 to 1963:

Talk about your serendipity!

I vividly remember reading a book about the Catskill Mountain House years ago.  I found its subject so fascinating that I made a pilgrimage to see the spectacular view of the Hudson River valley that the patrons of that hotel enjoyed.  

I also explored the nearby Kaaterskill Falls, the two-stage waterfall that was a favorite subject of Hudson River School painters like Thomas Cole, who painted this picture of the falls in 1826:

Click here to read more about the Catskill Mountain House.  

Click here to watch a PBS program about the Kaaterskill Falls and the Hudson River School of artists.

Click here to watch the “Alive and Kicking” music video.

And click here to buy “Alive and Kicking” from Amazon.