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Empathy and Accountability Coaching: My Service in a Brave New World
ChatGPT Et Al.
As you’ve probably heard, AI is taking over the world of content creation. Something that “knows” the content of half the internet and can generate copy in less time than it takes me to open a Word doc and produce a blog in the voice of Joe Rogan is something I can’t compete with. It’s John Henry vs. the steam drill on steroids. Do you even remember who that John Henry was?
Content Creator
What I call “a copywriter” is more often referred to these days as a content creator. I’m not fond of that term. Like “consultant,” something called “content” could mean almost anything. My breakfast has “content.” But for years now, I have put words together for myself and others. I do that.
What I Can Offer
So what do I do, what can I offer my clients that separates me from ChatGPT? A listening ear. Empathy. Accountability coaching and suggestions for new work, offered without judgment.
And yes, I have a long rich history working with students of the English language, whether literal students or, more recently, professionals trying to communicate their skills and services. I have an advanced degree! (Although that feels more and more like something the Wizard of Oz would bestow).
Accountability Coaching
I’m currently working with a client who is ferreting out family history and work history, all against a backdrop of national and world history. Sometimes she needs suggestions. Sometimes she needs a cheerleader. Before long, she will need an editor to help develop the draft into a finished copy. For now, she needs to know someone is listening, paying attention, and encouraging her to stay on task. That’s accountability coaching. That’s me.
Copy Editing
For other clients, I’m the one who evaluates and improves a rough draft (whether AI-generated or other). I’m in touch with the client’s wishes and needs. More often than not, my job is to cut away excess and waste. Chisel the marble into a better form. I do that very well. I offer empathy together with accountability coaching
So when you need an attentive, empathetic “co-pilot” on your creative journey, think of me. Those are things AI cannot provide at any speed, at any price.
Let’s Get Lost
A few years ago, I read an interview with Grateful Dead drummer, Mickey Hart. I wish I could find the exact quote. But the gist of it was this: “When someone sits in with us, we like to see if we can get him or her lost, just to see how they handle it.”
Sound crazy? Maybe cruel? I get that. But I propose that “getting lost” is not the negative experience that we sometimes think.
Where’s the Map?
For many, getting lost is literal: Where was that freeway onramp? I know her office is around here somewhere. Which exit is for the airport? But we also speak of a figurative kind of displacement, like when we lose our place in a book, or we were about to say something, and then. . .
I agree: most of those examples are negative.
Lost or Transported?
But we also talk about getting lost in a book in a good way. Forgetting time and place and being transported to some mythical or at least fictional landscape—maybe an emotional landscape. And we sometimes get blissfully lost in our own emotions when we are falling in love. The very expression suggests surrender to powers we do not control. That’s a kind of “lost,” right?
In my own musical life, I once played in a quartet with an enthusiastic (okay, lunatic!) drummer who didn’t keep track of measures very well. Lots of beats, tempo accurate enough, but without the requisite counting units: “1, 2, 3, 4!”
I admit that my own sense of time had not yet internalized 4/4 or 6/8 (or whatever) as it later would. The same was true of my bandmates. So when we improvised, we blazed furiously into the sonic atmosphere, feeling the pulses, but often with very different ideas of where measures began or ended. We often surprised ourselves or each other—arriving at musical places we’d near been before. It was wild.
But here’s the thing. Our audiences didn’t mind. In fact, they thought we were simply more sophisticated than they were able to perceive. Well, probably not ALL of them. Maybe some of them, even our friends, were just too polite to tell us. So yes, we were technically “lost.” But as we created an avalanche of passionate improvisation without borders, we liked it, too.
Lost in the Woods
My favorite musical “lost” story, though, comes from Leon Russell. The Master of Space and Time himself. He had written a song that would appear on his album, “Carney,” titled, “Out in the Woods.” Leon and his producer had elected to feature a large chorus singing, “I’m lost in the woods.” In Swahili.
They contacted someone who could assemble singers able to do that, but there was a hitch. In that language, apparently, it was impossible to express the idea of being lost in the woods. If you were in the woods, you were never lost.
Or maybe the choral director was just yanking Leon, making something seem more difficult so whatever the chorus sang could be more sonorous. Or maybe he wanted a bigger paycheck. I don’t know. But the idea that being lost was impossible was very cool, I thought.
Into the Unknown
And it does put forward an idea about being lost that I think Mickey Hart also believed. That is, that “lost” is not so much an external reality as a state of mind. And if feeling safe and comfortable in unfamiliar circumstances—if being curious about where the next turn leads without assuming automatically that the trail leads over a cliff—is a reality: how wonderful! That kind of surrender is very powerful!
And I think about that feeling in writing. What a great experience to put pen to paper, or fingers to keys and just GO. Letting the road unfold before you.
Doctorow
E.L. Doctorow famously said, “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
I try to instill that kind of confidence, or courage in my clients and my students. In myself, too. Writing that way, with the ever-present risk of getting lost, requires faith, and yes, courage. But the rewards can be so great.
When I assign “NSAWs”— a form of free writing—my intention is for writers to lose themselves in words—in phrases that pop up, sounds that chime sweetly together, rhythms that expand like ripples in a still pond. All of that requires surrender. Getting lost in language, without the inner critic/”nag-igator” telling you what to do, where to go, and “Oh! You missed that turn!”
So let me invite you: Let’s get lost.
Fly Jefferson Airplane
“Jefferson Airplane”? Not exactly a contemporary reference, I know. But the confluence of several streams of consciousness has me writing this. And, as my wife will tell you, I spend a lot of time in the past.
Donovan
Many years ago, in high school, I discovered Donovan. If you don’t know who that is, I forgive you. Donovan Leitch was, in a manner of speaking, the British Dylan (although I have many British friends who will probably eviscerate me for that. They know that Dylan is the British someone-else.) But you may remember a pair of hits from oldies stations or movie soundtracks. Sunshine Superman or Mellow Yellow? What about an earlier folky tune, Catch the Wind? Season of the Witch? Anyone? Bueller?
In any case, I listened to Donovan an extravagant amount.
At that same time, I was attending a Massachusetts boarding school, where my roommate was from California. That was amazing in itself. But more important, he became the source of a lot of great music. Some of it from England after a vacation trip to London. More from the San Francisco Bay area, where he lived when not sharing a third-floor dorm room with me.
It was fall of 1965 when we began rooming together, and June 1967 when we graduated, which you have to admit was a pretty amazing time for music. Among all the memorable artists of that time, Jefferson Airplane ranked high. It may be hard to imagine now, but they were once the “it” band. No Top-40 hits after Somebody to Love and White Rabbit, but amazing countercultural popularity. They were on the cover of Life magazine. They were on Ed Sullivan, and more significantly, the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour! They were at Woodstock—one of the main acts! All while singing about a revolution in a real way, not as an intellectual abstraction.
The Airplane
In the first months of my familiarity with The Airplane (as I learned to call them, while feigning prep-school boredom), I happened to notice that toward the end of Donovan’s song, Fat Angel, instead of singing the refrain, “Fly trans-love airways, gets you there on time,” he substituted, “Jefferson Airplane” for trans-love airways. As I write this now, more than fifty years later, it seems pretty obvious that Donovan meant the reference every time. Only once, he made it overt.
Small potatoes? Not to me! Suddenly an amazing inter-dimensional culture warp occurred. This British singer was somehow aware of, was a fan of this then-still-obscure San Francisco band! It was all coming together!
Winterland Ballroom
Maybe for me, this was the beginning of a sense of the coming counterculture with which I would soon be much better acquainted. I went to college in the SF Bay Area. For my freshman orientation there, I went to Winterland Ballroom, a former skating arena, now a concert hall in San Francisco. The Airplane was headlining. Still technically the Summer of Love, fame hadn’t completely overtaken the scene. There was no “backstage” where the stage was located. So the band exited through the audience to get to their dressing room. As the band passed by, in my rural-Western-Massachusetts, star-struck stupor, I asked Grace Slick a question. A stupid, embarrassing question, true. But she answered me, if only to direct me to another band member who had written the song I asked about. But Grace Slick had spoken to me!
Truth be told, I felt a kinship with Grace. She, too, was a preppie (although I didn’t learn all about that until later) who went to a prestigious girls’ school in Palo Alto. She went to Finch with one of Nixon’s daughters and was on her way to becoming a model—beautiful, yes, but acerbic and whip smart. The kind of girl I might have dated back in school in Massachusetts. One who would have endured me for a date or two, then disposed of me. I would have deserved it.
That is achingly apparent in my early attempts to understand the music she wrote and performed with The Airplane. When I first heard the climactic chorus of White Rabbit, for example, instead of the iconic line, “Feed your head!” I heard, “Keep your head.” (Yes, I was a good son—a well-behaved young man from Western Massachusetts. Well, I learned.)
ReJoyce
Right about now, I’m itching to play a track from After Bathing at Baxter’s, the band’s third album, for my wife. She will roll her eyes, shake her head. She is sometimes exhausted by my preoccupation with the past. It’s amazing I don’t walk into things, according to her. And by my asking her to listen to music I find interesting—true for me, for her, not so much. But she loves me anyway, thank goodness. She will decline the offer.
So listen: reJoyce is a piece Grace wrote and performs on piano as well as with her voice. She’s accompanied by bass, a little subtle drumming, and some overdubbed woodwinds. But it is a largely acoustic piece: part Ravel, part jazz, part snake charmer. I would bet that almost no one outside of a small circle of former Airplane fanatics (Richard, are you there?) would remember it. But it is a masterpiece of weird, convoluted, evocative lyrics (as the title suggests, there are many references to James Joyce’s Ulysses), rhythmically and sonically sophisticated piano, and of course, Grace’s voice.
Sometimes I think that her approach to music was from the perspective of a lead guitarist—and I’m not the first to think that, I know. She sometimes finds responses to calls that have never been made. As a consequence, her style was magical, unique, and sometimes a little weird. And The Airplane, live, were often deafening. (Once, I saw Grace onstage with big Koss headphones—a monitor or earplugs? Both?) And that volume removed the piano from their stage sound early on. Some subtlety went by the boards.
It’s A Wild Tyme
But listening again now (and yes, my own headphones are on) to reJoyce, I almost weep. This happens to me. I’m never sure why. But I know it has a lot to do with memory, with the perspective of fifty years on that time of my life. Maybe a little bit with the excesses and failures of a time that seemed to presage such positive change. On one song from that same album, Grace sings, “It’s a wild time. I’m doing things that haven’t got a name yet.” That statement seems so true and yet so far away. Then the last line of reJoyce: “All you want to do is live, all you want to do is give/But somehow it all falls apart.” Kind of an epitaph.
I guess it did fall apart. But if I put the headphones on, though the time has passed, I can fly Jefferson Airplane again.
Meeting Death in Thrones and Elsewhere
I know that many of you are not Game of Thrones fans. While I am writing about the show, it is not from a fan’s perspective (though I am one). So, know that you won’t be left in the dark by what follows.
I’m finding myself profoundly affected by the events of the recent broadcast third episode of this eighth and final season of Game of Thrones. And by one moment in particular, early in the program.
The Dothraki
The Dothraki are a nomadic tribal people. They are fierce warriors and superb horsemen. And “men” is correct in that statement, though the women are fierce in other ways. Throughout the eight seasons, we have seen them be brutal with each other, brutal with captives. They are not generally nice neighbors. And we have seen them cut through the premier army of the day like a hot knife through butter. These are folks you want as allies, not as foes.
The Fatal Dothraki Charge
In the most recent episode, the Dothraki lead the charge—literally—against the army of the Dead. In the night, we see the Dothraki massed for attack: thousands of them, their curved scimitar-like weapons all aflame by sorcery. With characteristically savage war cries, they surge off into the dark, riding out to meet a foe as they have so many times before. From the vantage point of a nearby cliff, we see the solid wave of lighted blades, moving steadily across the dark plain.
Perspective
Then the director, Miguel Sapochnik, does something we understand well. Rather than keeping us in this long shot of thousands, the camera focuses on one single Dothraki horseman, a leader of the charge. We see him galloping forward, his face in a familiar war mask— a grimace of determination. Then, at the last instant, as he finally meets his foe, his expression goes from that determined ferocity to surprise and dismay as the wave of the Dead sweeps above and over him, his mount, and dozens of his tribesman around him.
Again, we see the fray from the cliff and see the vanguard of light dented, pushed back. Then from the rear, we see the points of light that are the lighted swords bobbing in the distance. We hear the war cries. We see the lights diminish in number. And then, barely a minute after the first encounter, the lights of Dothraki swords go out altogether. Silence. After a few seconds, a single horse, terrified, runs toward us, followed by a handful of Dothraki horsemen, on foot, running for the rear.
The significance of the speed and totality of this defeat is not lost on the remaining troops. They know what the Dothraki can do. And now, in a moment, the Dothraki are gone.
How All This Matters
The face of that one rider comes back to me now, as it has late at night and throughout my day. I think about his encountering Death as a shocking and immediate presence. Recently, my first childhood friend, two years my junior, died after a long illness. More recently, my next-door neighbor, just eight years my senior, suffered a major stroke and died within twenty-four hours. Death is no longer the abstraction it once was.
Today as I compose this, I feel the warm sun on my shoulders, the breeze in my hair. I look up at the oak tree. Its new leaves are just emerging, a lovely pale green. I grew it from an acorn taken thirty years ago from my backyard in Massachusetts. Now a thirty-foot tree, it is nevertheless still an infant. With luck, its lifespan will triple my own. Needless to say, I will not be around to see it mature.
All these reminders of mortality gathering—I remember my own father, confiding in me one dark night on Cape Cod, nearly forty years ago. “Since turning seventy, I have been very aware of my mortality.” Then it was something I heard but could not feel as I feel it today, a week since turning seventy myself.
What Kind of Astonishment?
I suppose this is a gift. We hear that we should treat death as an advisor. That we should live each day as if it were our last. I would prefer, however, the message of a poem my wife recently used in her yoga class, one that suggested we treat each day as our first. As Linda Pastan’s poem, “Imaginary Conversation” says, “each day. . . all raw astonishment. Eve rubbing/ her eyes awake on that first morning, /the sun coming up/like an ingénue in the east.”
I would like my astonishment to be more like that: given to each day I live, rather than that of the Dothraki warrior. I will try. I will feel the sun and the wind. I will enjoy the new leaves floating on the branches that reach out toward me, offering me their astonishment at being born.
Oh, Johnny Crewcut
I have a song called “Johnny Crewcut” about young men I grew up with and went to school with in Gill, MA, and who weren’t as lucky as I was, as I am.
The character is a composite of two or three individuals, but the reason for the title is the real central figure, John Zywna, who was a couple or three grades older than me. In high school, he became a star athlete—a football hero. Then he went to Vietnam. And a friend from back there told me he had been killed.
I wrote the song as a poem first after a drive down Main Road, Gill on my way to the airport one summer. I took the same route the school bus took every morning. That took me by the Zwyna’s house and cow barn, then the Tyler’s on the other side of the road. Both families figure in the title character of the story when it became a song one summer after another drive through my old hometown.
Last week, I went to an open mic in Brattleboro, VT. I had just gotten into town and called The Marina to ask if they still had an open mic and if so when it was. The woman said, “We do!” I asked, “When is it?” And she said, “Tonight!” “What do I have to do to get on the list?”
She gave me the 9:20 slot. Late, but I had dinner plans. I arrived about 8:30, as the host and the house band were roaring through their set. They were an interesting four-piece: two guitars, bass, and trumpet? The odd thing was it actually worked. The trumpet and one guitarist trading licks was amazing. And not just for Brattleboro on a Thursday night.
Before it was my turn to go on, I brought my guitar into the hallway outside the restrooms to warm up. A guy went by me into the men’s room, looking over his shoulder as he did. I moved out to catch the guy before me finish out his set. The bathroom guy plus another couple were heading out. The BG said, “That sounded great. I wish we could stay.” I said, “So stay.” They left. But ten minutes later, they came back.
I plugged in, did an opening song written in the 1850s (I called it a ‘50s tune) that went over well. Then I introduced “Johnny Crewcut.” I said pretty much what I did above. I said “Gill,” because no one has ever heard of it outside of about a fifty-mile radius. I ended the way I usually do, the way I did above, by saying the song is for those boys who weren’t as lucky as me. Then I sang the song. There’s a link to a recording at the bottom of the page.
It begins with me in a rental car, an emigrant, come home to gloat and reminisce. I notice a few old landmarks. The second verse introduces Johnny in the past: “He grew up poor in a family of ten/Working all summer on that bottom land.” Many kids in my class worked summers picking tobacco or baling hay, or both. They bragged about how many levels—tiers—they could throw a hay bale. I always like the sound of that.
The third verse—half as long— is Johnny’s death in Saigon, imagined because no one has ever told me what happened. After an instrumental break, time breaks as well, and we’re back in the car, in the present. I had gone off Main Road, down by the Connecticut River where some of the most fertile soil in the Valley can be found. The road abandons the river a few miles from the center of town, and turns and climbs into a forest of White Pines higher on the old riverbank. The song ends honoring Johnny by remembering him, or more precisely, not forgetting him, which takes intention and will. Saying his name out loud. At the end, just his name, repeated: “Oh-oh, Johnny Crewcut.”
Again, it was well received. The crowd was small, but mainly musicians, so their approval meant something. I sang three more. Then the house band, sans trumpet, came back to close out the night.
Several people upfront told me afterwards that they lived in Greenfield, where I was born. They knew Gill. (Pause) But they didn’t know Johnny Crewcut. I said, “Well his ‘can-I-buy-a-vowel’ last name was ‘Zwyvna.'” They looked at each other. “Isn’t that Tracy’s name?” “Yes, but without the ‘v.'” “Oh,” I said, “I might have added that after someone in the audience once told me I’d left out a consonant.” But apparently, I hadn’t.
“Tracy” was Tracy Zwyna, their neighbor across the street, whose dog had recently gotten out and run over into their house. She could be “Johnny Crewcut’s” granddaughter, grand-niece, or whatever. But in that area, in that town, almost assuredly the same family.
That was strange and wonderful small-world stuff, for sure. That was the first time I had performed the song within a few minutes’ drive of the setting in my childhood. That was powerful in itself for me.
But it felt like something else to me. If there is magic in names, and if speaking a name is summoning a spirit, then I think I had an answer that night. “Oh, Johnny. Where are you now?”
Here. Right here.
Here’s the link I promised.