16/1/98

Hold The Back Page!

Deadline looms, with only 8,760 hours to write my next column.

    "Would you get out of the way, I'm trying to do sponja," she said.
    "Why do you always have to do sponja when I'm pacing?" I said.
    "Tell you what. While you're pacing, push this shmatte around. Then you can write that you did sponja. It'll be a once-in-a-lifetime experience."
    It was the best idea I'd had yet, so I wrote about doing sponja. But this is as far as I got before I ran out of what to say.
    Writing this biweekly column has, for the past four years, created a condition of chronic panic. Deadlines loom like a guillotine.
     Why, you might ask, don't I just have a couple of extra columns written and ready to go, to stave the pressure?
    But that's the point. I do.
    Twenty-six of them.
    And I know if I withdraw one from my columns bank and don't replace it within 14 days, I'll be down to 25 ahead -- less than one year.
    Now you understand why I'm gripped.
    There are two types of people: those who have 26 columns in stock, and those who have none in stock and have to write through the night to have something ג€“ anything ג€“ ready for the following morning.
    I am by nature the second type. (When I was a schoolboy, I did homework during the bumpy bus ride on the way to school. My teachers thought I had the weirdest handwriting.) And so, when I accepted the offer of this column, I suggested we not publish the first until I'd completed two more. But knowing my undisciplined nature, I then thought it best to maintain the frenzy of fear, to stay two columns ahead. Then I got three ahead, and aimed for five.
    Four years later I'm so far ahead that I could go live on a secluded mountaintop (if we had any) for 52 weeks and readers wouldn't notice I'd stopped writing.
    Problem is, I can't shake the frenzy. Now I want to be three columns ahead of the year I'm already ahead, but I'm in such a permanent panic that I'm worried a prolonged writer's block might bring me back down to 26, so that extra cushion of three isn't really enough and I'd better push myself to get five or six ahead of the three.
    God how I hate writing under time pressure.
    You'd think my editor would be happy to have a columnist he can count on to hand in his stuff on time. Well, yes -- but he can also count on me to  yank it at the last minute for something new. For instance, some time back, when the government created a new Information Ministry and then promptly shut it down before it could even get a phone number, would you have wanted that week to read about my grocer? When suddenly the haredim announced Coke was as tref as pork, because a female arm was found to be pictured on a Coke ad, how could I ignore that and put something in about my kids instead?
    The drawback to being 52 weeks ahead is that it crimps contemporariness.
    And the drawback to being contemporary is that everything else in my columns bank becomes two weeks staler.
    At the rapid rate this country changes, even timeless columns become dated. I once wrote a piece called "The Day That Never Was," a day-in-the-life that Israelis could only dream about. I figured that column had a shelf-life of steel-wool -- but months later I noticed that some of the impossibilities were slowly becoming daily routine. Suddenly, that column had a shelf-life of raw fish.
    Every couple of weeks, the same agonizing decision: which 25 columns can wait?
    At one point I was seized with the notion that Yasser Arafat might actually not live forever, the worst of which was that I could be stuck with a handful of unusable columns. I submitted them all, one after the other, and prayed for him to live that long. 
    I had no such fears of Rabin. A spoof interview of him, which was starting to collect dust, could go in any time before the next election, I figured. I eventually turned it over for publication -- a few dozen hours before his final day alive. (Many months later it did run, as an interview of Peres. Same questions, same answers.)
    The day before Independence Day 1995, I began to worry about what I'd write for Independence Day 1996. Within 48 hours, with time relentlessly running out, I put life on hold and pounded the thing out, with just 364 days to spare. Unfortunately, the holiday in 1996 fell both a week too early and a week too late for my biweekliness, so I shuffled that column to the bottom of the pack, holding it until 1997. I was now 729 days ahead, Independence Day-wise, leaving 1,094 days to come up with another, but I decided to wait and see how things develop because, the way things go, by May 1998 who knows? I may not have a column any more, or a job, or an independent country.
    I hope we're still observing Pessah the same way in 1998, because I've already started on that one.  
    My wife suggested -- suggested? Accused! -- that I've become obsessive-compulsive about But Seriously.
    I explained that I was simply building a defense mechanism against my innate indolence, and there can't be anything bad in that.
        She guessed, almost derisively, that I'd already started work on a turn-of-the-millennium piece. 
    But that's three years away! Which means, of course, that it's already written, and I've started fretting about the column for the next new millennium after that.