Mike Sager's Blog, page 2
September 29, 2013
GO ASK SAGER: The Empty Nest: Fatherhood Never Stops Grabbing You By the Balls
The red second hand travels along the familiar white face of the schoolroom clock in my office… tick… tick… tick… audible and inexorable, stopping so diligently at each and every hash mark before moving on to the next, the sound resonating through the gathering quiet of my solitary evening like a steady heartbeat, bringing to mind a manifest of life’s tortured anticipations—waiting for the bell to sound at the end of a school day, for a lopsided game to be mercifully over, for an interminable meeting to conclude, for the labor pains to come closer together, for the notary to finish rumpling the many pages of the divorce settlement, for the commercials to end and the show to resume, for the light to change to green.
Tick… tick… tick…. I have nowhere in particular to go. Nothing at all to anticipate. No crib to assemble. No stroller to fold and lift. No Barney videos to watch. No kid to pick up from school. No snacks to provide. No functions or fund-raisers to attend. No practices to coach. No list of parents to advise of a game cancellation due to rain. No holding my tongue about asshole teachers. The middle school English nitwit who gave him a B on his life story. The history teacher who took umbrage with his thesis that Malcolm X was as crucial to the success of the civil rights movement as was Martin Luther King Jr.—I edited the thing; it was NOT an 82. The varsity coach. The players hate him. The parents hate him. The only time he ever won a championship was when his team rebelled and coached themselves. How to explain why the fancy school keeps asking him back?
No weekend tournament to sit through. No hard bleacher seats. No typing on deadline in the motel bathroom in East Jesus with the door closed while he sleeps. No other parents to deal with: During the years your kid goes from three to 18, it’s like you have a couple dozen awful in-laws with whom you must share your life. No graceful pretending that someone in the room is not there because it’s the polite way to handle things. No impossibly tight soccer socks to tug over malleable toes and rubber ankles. No cleats to double knot. No Pokémon movies to attend. No Monopoly, Chutes and Ladders, checkers or first-person-shooter games to play. No living-room-size battlefields of G.I. Joe figures and accessories to gather and put away. No jabbing my bare feet on tiny bayonets. No Airsoft pellets to worry about. No free throws to rebound. No need to visit the grocery store, planning dinner while rolling along the aisles. No dishes. No homework. No bargaining about bedtime. No standing by with my hands in my pockets, calling out wan encouragement as he scooters, skateboards or bikes down the huge hill outside our house; on several occasions he gets the wobbles midway and I feel my testicles spontaneously jerk upward—I don’t know if it’s ever happened to you, but it’s powerful. I read later that the phenomenon is part of the primitive fight-or-flight response, proof positive that fatherly love is something strong and physical that has you by the balls.
No sharp little fingernails digging holes into the top of my bald head during shoulder rides. No diaper genie to empty—I will never, ever forget that smell. No Dr. Seuss to read—Oh the places you’ll go. No day-long hip-hop showcases. No disappointment when my own favorite act seems so much better but does not win. No standing on the beach in an impotent panic as he paddles calmly out of a seizing rip current a distant quarter mile away, staying parallel to shore as he’d been taught—and had apparently learned. No blood to stanch when he slips playing one-on-one with me and face-plants on the asphalt—I hold him tightly; a blossom of red grows on my white T-shirt, removed from my back to meet his need.
No lunches to make. No avalanche of munchies in the pantry. No Cribs-inspired battalion of assorted drink bottles in the fridge. No trail of crumbs from the kitchen to his makeshift studio, where all the kids hung out. No spontaneous BBQ feasts. No large friends sleeping on the couch. No scuff marks on the hardwood floors. No dead bottles, candy wrappers or chip bags to be harvested. No supercute girls to pretend I don’t see. No raucous laughter. No happy competitive arguing. No canned crowd noise from whatever Xbox sports game is being contested; no ghost announcers making cogent comments. No kids giving me pounds, giving me dap, giving me man hugs, putting on their best Eddie Haskell: “Thank you, Mr. Sager.”
The clothes dryer, with its annoying trove of trapped coinage, stands eerily silent. The bamboo outside my window sways in the Pacific breeze; the hollow stems knock together, making the sound of an eerie marimba. It is Indian summer. My fingers ride the keyboard, clicka clack. A fan circulates, stirring the papers on the bulletin board at every pass. My nest is empty. The red second hand travels along the familiar white face of the schoolroom clock in my office. Tick… tick… tick….
We’ll see what happens next.
Tick… tick… tick…. I have nowhere in particular to go. Nothing at all to anticipate. No crib to assemble. No stroller to fold and lift. No Barney videos to watch. No kid to pick up from school. No snacks to provide. No functions or fund-raisers to attend. No practices to coach. No list of parents to advise of a game cancellation due to rain. No holding my tongue about asshole teachers. The middle school English nitwit who gave him a B on his life story. The history teacher who took umbrage with his thesis that Malcolm X was as crucial to the success of the civil rights movement as was Martin Luther King Jr.—I edited the thing; it was NOT an 82. The varsity coach. The players hate him. The parents hate him. The only time he ever won a championship was when his team rebelled and coached themselves. How to explain why the fancy school keeps asking him back?
No weekend tournament to sit through. No hard bleacher seats. No typing on deadline in the motel bathroom in East Jesus with the door closed while he sleeps. No other parents to deal with: During the years your kid goes from three to 18, it’s like you have a couple dozen awful in-laws with whom you must share your life. No graceful pretending that someone in the room is not there because it’s the polite way to handle things. No impossibly tight soccer socks to tug over malleable toes and rubber ankles. No cleats to double knot. No Pokémon movies to attend. No Monopoly, Chutes and Ladders, checkers or first-person-shooter games to play. No living-room-size battlefields of G.I. Joe figures and accessories to gather and put away. No jabbing my bare feet on tiny bayonets. No Airsoft pellets to worry about. No free throws to rebound. No need to visit the grocery store, planning dinner while rolling along the aisles. No dishes. No homework. No bargaining about bedtime. No standing by with my hands in my pockets, calling out wan encouragement as he scooters, skateboards or bikes down the huge hill outside our house; on several occasions he gets the wobbles midway and I feel my testicles spontaneously jerk upward—I don’t know if it’s ever happened to you, but it’s powerful. I read later that the phenomenon is part of the primitive fight-or-flight response, proof positive that fatherly love is something strong and physical that has you by the balls.
No sharp little fingernails digging holes into the top of my bald head during shoulder rides. No diaper genie to empty—I will never, ever forget that smell. No Dr. Seuss to read—Oh the places you’ll go. No day-long hip-hop showcases. No disappointment when my own favorite act seems so much better but does not win. No standing on the beach in an impotent panic as he paddles calmly out of a seizing rip current a distant quarter mile away, staying parallel to shore as he’d been taught—and had apparently learned. No blood to stanch when he slips playing one-on-one with me and face-plants on the asphalt—I hold him tightly; a blossom of red grows on my white T-shirt, removed from my back to meet his need.
No lunches to make. No avalanche of munchies in the pantry. No Cribs-inspired battalion of assorted drink bottles in the fridge. No trail of crumbs from the kitchen to his makeshift studio, where all the kids hung out. No spontaneous BBQ feasts. No large friends sleeping on the couch. No scuff marks on the hardwood floors. No dead bottles, candy wrappers or chip bags to be harvested. No supercute girls to pretend I don’t see. No raucous laughter. No happy competitive arguing. No canned crowd noise from whatever Xbox sports game is being contested; no ghost announcers making cogent comments. No kids giving me pounds, giving me dap, giving me man hugs, putting on their best Eddie Haskell: “Thank you, Mr. Sager.”
The clothes dryer, with its annoying trove of trapped coinage, stands eerily silent. The bamboo outside my window sways in the Pacific breeze; the hollow stems knock together, making the sound of an eerie marimba. It is Indian summer. My fingers ride the keyboard, clicka clack. A fan circulates, stirring the papers on the bulletin board at every pass. My nest is empty. The red second hand travels along the familiar white face of the schoolroom clock in my office. Tick… tick… tick….
We’ll see what happens next.
September 7, 2013
GO ASK SAGER: Happy F!@#$%^ Birthday
I remember always wanting a horse. Being six, seven, eight years old, wearing my cowboy hat and boots and a pair of mini–six shooters, the holster’s rawhide anchor straps chafing my thighs. “Happy Birthday” is sung. My dad is a veteran of glee clubs; he loves to harmonize. Happy birth-day to youuuuuuuuu. And then my mom’s soft hand, like a mask over my eyes. The gleeful claps of those in attendance. Make a wish! Make a wish!
I blow with the entire force of my lungs, my being.
And then I open my eyes.
No horse.
Never.
Ever.
I’m not sure where we would have put a horse in my suburban Baltimore neighborhood. But my country cousins had horses, and that’s what I loved to do at summer camp back in those days when I was kind of husky and asthmatic. I think I remember wanting to be Roy Rogers, which was my favorite show. Hi ho Silver and away! The Lone Ranger was a guy who did a good deed and then slipped out of town, leaving a silver bullet as the only evidence that he was ever there. A guy who let his work speak for him, no end-zone dances required. And he had that fabulous horse that did wheelies and all kinds of fab tricks I tried to imitate on my Stingray bike, which I got instead of a horse for one of those birthdays and loved immensely, because on my bike I had the same kind of freedom to roam, though I often pretended it was a horse. I fell off a lot. Knocked out the stiches in my elbow twice.
Happy fucking birthday.
***
When I was 10 years old I wished desperately for a small reel-to-reel tape recorder (an early inclination toward media?). I got a fishing rod and reel instead.
I remember my parents sitting me down and drying my tears, explaining lovingly that they’d already bought the rod and reel, and that my grandparents were going to arrive later in the day with the object of my desire.
What they brought was more like Toys “R” Us than RadioShack. By dinnertime it was inoperable.
Happy fucking birthday.
***
My dad’s birthday, rest his soul, was two days before mine. We lived an hour from Chesapeake Bay. My parents were really into sailing but never actually bought a boat. (My mother was vocal about not being able to properly use the facilities while bobbing on the water—something about needing her feet on terra firma.)
During my high school years, for our joint birthday, my folks would rent a sailboat for a four-day trip. Something like 28-feet with a galley, a main cabin for my folks, bunks for my little sister and me. As you can imagine, sailing this thing was not easy. Despite my parents’ certificates from a sailing school in Annapolis, we were the definition of weekend duffers. There were all kinds of muddy shoals; on several occasions we had to be towed. There were mosquitoes and summer storms. There was the time we lost the grill over the side. Not to mention being 15, 16 and 17 years old and being cooped up over a long birthday weekend with your family, whom you loved dearly, of course, but.…
I think it was on my 17th birthday, in 1973, that my mother broke down and agreed to smoke pot with me—but only if I could make it menthol, like one of her True Green cigarettes. I spent quite a bit of time emptying a cigarette of tobacco and reloading it with weed. At happy hour, we fired it up. She had a puffy, early 1970s hairdo, and her eye makeup was always perfect, even on the boat. After a few “drags” she was done.
“I feel nothing,” she shrugged.
Then she promptly fell asleep, right there in the cockpit.
Party on, mom.
Happy fucking birthday.
***
I remember my 23rd birthday. I’d just moved into a cool renovated basement apartment in an old house with brick walls and track lighting. I’m pretty sure I was the youngest staff writer at the Washington Post at the time. Working around the clock over the past two years, I’d lost a lot of my hair on top, so I didn’t look that young, which suited me just fine, because I’d been dating this 32-year-old woman who lived upstairs, a member of a group house that occupied the top three stories.
She made me feel worldly and showed me a lot of stuff. She educated me about sushi, Vietnamese food, drip coffee, artsy films at the Key Theater—hey, I was fresh out of college and didn’t do much of anything but work. As our relationship became more intimate, this smart and talented professional woman also educated me about the raging case of herpes she’d been given unknowingly by some asshole. This was 1979 and nobody I knew had even heard of AIDS; as it was, herpes felt like a death sentence, there was no known cure. Maybe I was young and shallow, but even though she explained we could still be safe, there was no way I was having anything to do with that. As you can imagine, the breakup was somewhat awkward.
Anyway, I remember my parents driving from Baltimore to Washington to see my new pad and to take me out for my 23rd birthday. In my rare spare time, I’d begun decorating. So far I’d collected a high-tech folding dinette table, an antique clock, several framed posters—an ironic Magritte; an actual handbill from an English theater performance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show; something Guernica-related; and some photos by Post shooters I’d befriended. Upon arrival my parents proudly offered up their own presents: two expensive, signed and numbered posters by the artist LeRoy Neiman, each depicting a different one of my youthful passions—soccer and lacrosse.
I know I would have loved these colorful works on my bedroom wall when I was 14, but it wasn’t exactly the urban-sophisticate look I was going for in soon-to-be-fashionable Adams Morgan. I hung the posters at the end of the hallway that led to the basement door. Of course, there was a stairway in there, leading upstairs. I kept the door locked.
***
Today is my 57th birthday.
And guess what?
I’m expecting no presents. There is no party planned. I have no plans at all—except a vague notion that I’m going to do the things I do every day, the things I love—some writing in the morning, a walk near the beach with a female friend, some Korean BBQ with my homeslice, who is headed off to college in a few days, this kid whose diapers I used to change. He was two when we moved to California. Oy, how I remember the Sturm und Drang of toilet training—entire date nights with my ex-wife devoted to the subject. And I remember predicting he’d be out of diapers by the time he went to college. I guess I was right about that one.
What I’ve learned about birthdays is the same thing I’ve learned about life. You need to be your own party planner, but you don’t necessarily need a party.
These days I see my birthday as a way to celebrate my life—the semblance of things I’ve built to make myself happy and comfortable, this little world that works for me. I no longer hope to receive from others the stuff I really want and need. Instead, I understand that I have to ferret out those things for myself. It’s all about me providing for me, feathering my nest, making it right. Who can do this for a person better than they can for themselves? Who even wants to?
Last year on my birthday I was doing something else I like to do on my birthdays, buying a present for a loved one—in this case, my son. We were at this youth-oriented clothing store when I saw it, this kitschy sign I had to have—colorful and sparkly single letters in a bulbous, happy font, strung out along a line: Happy Fucking Birthday.
I put it up in my dining room, but I never got around to taking it down—and here it is, my birthday again.
I guess I leave it there as a reminder.
for more by Mike Sager and The Sager Group, please see http://www.TheSagerGroup.Net
I blow with the entire force of my lungs, my being.
And then I open my eyes.
No horse.
Never.
Ever.
I’m not sure where we would have put a horse in my suburban Baltimore neighborhood. But my country cousins had horses, and that’s what I loved to do at summer camp back in those days when I was kind of husky and asthmatic. I think I remember wanting to be Roy Rogers, which was my favorite show. Hi ho Silver and away! The Lone Ranger was a guy who did a good deed and then slipped out of town, leaving a silver bullet as the only evidence that he was ever there. A guy who let his work speak for him, no end-zone dances required. And he had that fabulous horse that did wheelies and all kinds of fab tricks I tried to imitate on my Stingray bike, which I got instead of a horse for one of those birthdays and loved immensely, because on my bike I had the same kind of freedom to roam, though I often pretended it was a horse. I fell off a lot. Knocked out the stiches in my elbow twice.
Happy fucking birthday.
***
When I was 10 years old I wished desperately for a small reel-to-reel tape recorder (an early inclination toward media?). I got a fishing rod and reel instead.
I remember my parents sitting me down and drying my tears, explaining lovingly that they’d already bought the rod and reel, and that my grandparents were going to arrive later in the day with the object of my desire.
What they brought was more like Toys “R” Us than RadioShack. By dinnertime it was inoperable.
Happy fucking birthday.
***
My dad’s birthday, rest his soul, was two days before mine. We lived an hour from Chesapeake Bay. My parents were really into sailing but never actually bought a boat. (My mother was vocal about not being able to properly use the facilities while bobbing on the water—something about needing her feet on terra firma.)
During my high school years, for our joint birthday, my folks would rent a sailboat for a four-day trip. Something like 28-feet with a galley, a main cabin for my folks, bunks for my little sister and me. As you can imagine, sailing this thing was not easy. Despite my parents’ certificates from a sailing school in Annapolis, we were the definition of weekend duffers. There were all kinds of muddy shoals; on several occasions we had to be towed. There were mosquitoes and summer storms. There was the time we lost the grill over the side. Not to mention being 15, 16 and 17 years old and being cooped up over a long birthday weekend with your family, whom you loved dearly, of course, but.…
I think it was on my 17th birthday, in 1973, that my mother broke down and agreed to smoke pot with me—but only if I could make it menthol, like one of her True Green cigarettes. I spent quite a bit of time emptying a cigarette of tobacco and reloading it with weed. At happy hour, we fired it up. She had a puffy, early 1970s hairdo, and her eye makeup was always perfect, even on the boat. After a few “drags” she was done.
“I feel nothing,” she shrugged.
Then she promptly fell asleep, right there in the cockpit.
Party on, mom.
Happy fucking birthday.
***
I remember my 23rd birthday. I’d just moved into a cool renovated basement apartment in an old house with brick walls and track lighting. I’m pretty sure I was the youngest staff writer at the Washington Post at the time. Working around the clock over the past two years, I’d lost a lot of my hair on top, so I didn’t look that young, which suited me just fine, because I’d been dating this 32-year-old woman who lived upstairs, a member of a group house that occupied the top three stories.
She made me feel worldly and showed me a lot of stuff. She educated me about sushi, Vietnamese food, drip coffee, artsy films at the Key Theater—hey, I was fresh out of college and didn’t do much of anything but work. As our relationship became more intimate, this smart and talented professional woman also educated me about the raging case of herpes she’d been given unknowingly by some asshole. This was 1979 and nobody I knew had even heard of AIDS; as it was, herpes felt like a death sentence, there was no known cure. Maybe I was young and shallow, but even though she explained we could still be safe, there was no way I was having anything to do with that. As you can imagine, the breakup was somewhat awkward.
Anyway, I remember my parents driving from Baltimore to Washington to see my new pad and to take me out for my 23rd birthday. In my rare spare time, I’d begun decorating. So far I’d collected a high-tech folding dinette table, an antique clock, several framed posters—an ironic Magritte; an actual handbill from an English theater performance of The Rocky Horror Picture Show; something Guernica-related; and some photos by Post shooters I’d befriended. Upon arrival my parents proudly offered up their own presents: two expensive, signed and numbered posters by the artist LeRoy Neiman, each depicting a different one of my youthful passions—soccer and lacrosse.
I know I would have loved these colorful works on my bedroom wall when I was 14, but it wasn’t exactly the urban-sophisticate look I was going for in soon-to-be-fashionable Adams Morgan. I hung the posters at the end of the hallway that led to the basement door. Of course, there was a stairway in there, leading upstairs. I kept the door locked.
***
Today is my 57th birthday.
And guess what?
I’m expecting no presents. There is no party planned. I have no plans at all—except a vague notion that I’m going to do the things I do every day, the things I love—some writing in the morning, a walk near the beach with a female friend, some Korean BBQ with my homeslice, who is headed off to college in a few days, this kid whose diapers I used to change. He was two when we moved to California. Oy, how I remember the Sturm und Drang of toilet training—entire date nights with my ex-wife devoted to the subject. And I remember predicting he’d be out of diapers by the time he went to college. I guess I was right about that one.
What I’ve learned about birthdays is the same thing I’ve learned about life. You need to be your own party planner, but you don’t necessarily need a party.
These days I see my birthday as a way to celebrate my life—the semblance of things I’ve built to make myself happy and comfortable, this little world that works for me. I no longer hope to receive from others the stuff I really want and need. Instead, I understand that I have to ferret out those things for myself. It’s all about me providing for me, feathering my nest, making it right. Who can do this for a person better than they can for themselves? Who even wants to?
Last year on my birthday I was doing something else I like to do on my birthdays, buying a present for a loved one—in this case, my son. We were at this youth-oriented clothing store when I saw it, this kitschy sign I had to have—colorful and sparkly single letters in a bulbous, happy font, strung out along a line: Happy Fucking Birthday.
I put it up in my dining room, but I never got around to taking it down—and here it is, my birthday again.
I guess I leave it there as a reminder.
for more by Mike Sager and The Sager Group, please see http://www.TheSagerGroup.Net
August 20, 2013
Albert Murray, RIP. A tribute to a mentor.
When I was a senior at Emory University, Albert Murray was a writer in residence, my creative writing teacher for a semester. I didn’t know much about him before he came. We didn’t have Google in those days, and kids weren’t so sophisticated; the world was a lot smaller for all of us. I did know he’d written this amazing little novel called Train Whistle Guitar (I’m looking at my signed copy, to Mike Sager of English 291). And he had photos of his pals, the legendary jazz greats, in his office, so we knew all about that connection — he talked liberally about his love of music. Without a doubt, up until that time, he was the coolest guy I had ever met. Often, on the afternoons that our seminar convened, as I walked in the door, he would tease me about my most recent column in the Emory Wheel. I remember in particular the one about being a senior and feeling old. This was thirty-five years ago. He was 59 (two years older than I am now), but he seemed ancient. He had a jolly good time with that one. I had a lot of hair back then. I still remember my scalp sweating.
In those days, before my alma mater’s great post-endowment expansion, our writing class met in a temporary trailer. There were white boards lining much of the wall space. One day, as we entered the room, Murray was found writing a long sentence that spanned all the whiteboards. When he was finished, he drew slash marks at various intervals.
Then, instead of reading the words, he scat-sang the sentence he’d written, transforming it into a rhythmic line, a little piece of a song. Later he shared a tip with the class. I don’t remember his exact words, but my takeaway was this: Write out loud. Write with rhythm. Make your prose sing.
From that moment forward, I have worked almost every single day on my craft. If you were in my room with me right now, you would hear me reading under my breath, singing the words out loud, trying to blend form and content the way he did.
I don’t think my work would be the same without Albert Murray. I have his picture in a silver frame. He will not be missed. He lives inside of me.
See the Esquire post: Albert Murray Dies - The Words of Albert Murray, 1916-2013 -
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/...
or read more about Mike Sager www.mikesager.com and The Sager Group, www.TheSagerGroup.Net
In those days, before my alma mater’s great post-endowment expansion, our writing class met in a temporary trailer. There were white boards lining much of the wall space. One day, as we entered the room, Murray was found writing a long sentence that spanned all the whiteboards. When he was finished, he drew slash marks at various intervals.
Then, instead of reading the words, he scat-sang the sentence he’d written, transforming it into a rhythmic line, a little piece of a song. Later he shared a tip with the class. I don’t remember his exact words, but my takeaway was this: Write out loud. Write with rhythm. Make your prose sing.
From that moment forward, I have worked almost every single day on my craft. If you were in my room with me right now, you would hear me reading under my breath, singing the words out loud, trying to blend form and content the way he did.
I don’t think my work would be the same without Albert Murray. I have his picture in a silver frame. He will not be missed. He lives inside of me.
See the Esquire post: Albert Murray Dies - The Words of Albert Murray, 1916-2013 -
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/...
or read more about Mike Sager www.mikesager.com and The Sager Group, www.TheSagerGroup.Net
August 12, 2013
LETTER DETAILS ORIGINS OF THE SAGER GROUP
Note: Too many years ago to properly recall, Mike Sager in San Diego, CA, and Phakama Mbonambi, in Johannesburg, South Africa, began an email correspondence. Eventually Mbonambi founded WordsEtc, the first black-owned and edited literary magazine in southern Africa, for which Sager is Editor at Large. This piece was written for the magazine. To date, TSG has published eight books. Three more will be published in January 2014.
My Dear Phakama,
Early this morning, as I was working through my email—the new cover art for my second novel (can’t wait to show it off!); last minute housekeeping on three different websites to enable the launch of our first Young Adult title; the disappointing news that the first proof of an eBook formatted in a (free) manner we hadn’t tried before was not exactly up to snuff—the cacophonous silence was interrupted by an odd pair of shadows dancing across the periphery of my computer screen.
Entranced, I swiveled around in my chair. Squinting into the sun through the ingenious translucent window shade, I could see the silhouettes of a couple of hummingbirds feeding on the brilliant orange flowers of the giant succulent (Aloe marlothii) that lives beside my office. A quick Wiki visit confirmed my recollection that the species—which always makes me think of the mysterious and deadly plant in the musical “Little Shop of Horrors”—is native to your homeland, Phakama, as are many of my fondest plants, and a good number of the residents, frequently encountered in my part of southern California. (Can I mention that these same residents tend to be a bit prickly like the plants?) Marlothii’s seasonal inflorescence is a compound panicle, a woody stalk with many branches covered with tiny fluted flowers that draw all manner of insects and bees and small colorful birds; when the racmes dry and fall, the remaining skeleton resembles a giant thorny antler harvested from a huge and fanciful beast. Over the years, I’ve exhibited an assortment of unique specimens as sculptural pieces, planted in rocks in a large glass vase in the entryway of my house. With no co-workers anywhere in sight, no water cooler available, this is the kind of mission that typically occupies my break times (if not the more humdrum tasks of laundry or errands or foraging for food).
Accustomed as I am to spending the bulk of my time alone, engaged in the solitary craft of making words appear—or looking up information about weird plants and cult musical films on the Web, or staring out the window watching hummingbirds feed—working with other children in this new creative sandbox is proving to be refreshing. In the lexicon of the digital age, the primary pursuit of The Sager Group is “self-publishing,” but it is hardly something I can do by myself. To date, the roster of participants in my little venture include: A Japanese designer, a pair of Romanian programmers (one in San Francisco and one in Transylvania), the writer/producer from Seinfeld who coined “yada yada,” the inevitable lawyers in New York and Hollywood, a documentary filmmaker who learned his trade shooting porn, an LA-based British movie agent who once managed (and may have been orally intimate with) the 1970s pop music icon Cat Stevens, known now by his Muslim name, Yusuf Islam. A Midwestern professor of copy editing and journalism, a master proofreader in Staten Island who assisted Woodward and Bernstein with their Watergate stories at The Washington Post, my best friend from fourth grade (he designed the logo), the former head of the school of communications at the University of Illinois, an ex-running back for the Baltimore Ravens NFL football team, a PhD from a Jesuit college who shape-shifts into a writer of young adult, romance and vampire novels. An alt-weekly writer who gets paid to party with rap stars, a deviant poet from the rainy northwest, a housewife/editrix with a tattoo monkey climbing her shin. My talented 18-year-old son and his multi-ethnic hip-hop network, a Dutch Web designer and his Serbian programmer, a part-time assortment of student and post-graduate assistants, a man once known as the “Teen Tycoon,” a former Navy Seal and his brainy Taiwanese wife who keep my technology running. And then there’s Andrew Greenstein.
Ten years ago, Andrew was a college senior who’d signed up for my first writing seminar in the Literary Journalism program at the University of California, Irvine. He was one of those bright, eclectic students who are good at too many things to settle down with only one; he played drums in a rock band and varsity lacrosse and had a cute puppy and wanted to travel the world and do something with his writing. Over time we would stay in touch, and I would supply a number of professioral recommendations—grad school, journalism school, law school. As it was, he chose the last but decided not to go into practice; instead he founded a tech firm based in San Francisco called SF AppWorks.
Lucky for me Andrew showed up at my door with his pretty girlfriend one day in August 2012. They were on a short holiday in San Diego. I was in deep trouble. I’d made a lot of promises and telephone speeches and prognostications; I’d collected reams of editorial material and sought free permissions from popular commercial publications (some of my finest writing?). I was looking to achieve the lofty goals of helping myself and others make our ideas happen, to eliminate gatekeepers, to harness the means of production.
But up until then, I couldn’t find the right people to help me turn my ideas into reality.
Without Andrew—and all the rest—The Sager Group would never have been more than a self-delusion.
***
Let me tell you how it began.
For the first six years of my working life I was a devoted employee of a large and respected newsgathering organization. In professional situations, when I introduced myself, my name was “Mike Sager from The Washington Post.” It was as if Mike Sager was my given name; from The Washington Post was my family name. My family was great and powerful. I was a loyal and dutiful son.
During my years in daily journalism—post-Pentagon Papers, post-Watergate—the Fourth Estate was seen in America as a force for truth and good. Along with The New York Times, The Post carried the torch of our Constitution’s important First Amendment, which guarantees a free press and freedom of expression. Thus equipped, modern journalists helped end wars, brought down corrupt presidents, exposed wrongdoings and crime. By the mid-‘80s, with the inception of televised tabloid news, gossip websites and paparazzi tactics, perceptions of the press would begin to shift.
Today, the notion of a journalist seems less and less like Woodward and Bernstein, and more like two guys on a motorbike chasing Princess Diana through the Pont de l'Alma tunnel to her death.
But when I left The Post, looking to pursue a more literary form of reportage and writing, newspapers were still thriving. What I was giving up was something my co-workers and I ruefully called the “golden handcuffs.” I wasn’t just leaving a job. I was leaving a big important job. And I was leaving home, the place where I’d been plucked from the ranks of copy boys and promoted to reporter, trained and allowed to make my mark… the only place anybody had ever heard of me.
Plus, I was giving up my name.
Which never really hit me until the first time I went to the stationery shop to order business cards.
Mike Sager?
Who the hell is he?
***
As the days of my freelance experiment continued, I learned that the independent writer had to wear a number of hats. I was responsible for cold-calling new clients and making professional contacts, convincing editors to assign and publish me, reporting and writing stories (and making them sing). I had to send out invoices, keep track of expenses and deductions, hunt down payments, make projected income tax payments, find health insurance, market myself and my work, make connections, get myself out there. I was the salesman, the factory, the work force, the accounting department, the public relations flak.
Maybe it was the isolation of my profession—I’ve spent an awful lot of time alone since 1984, when I left The Post; I like to say I haven’t had a proper job in twenty-nine years—but somewhere along the line I began to think of myself as The Sager Group…the many faces of Mike. When an editor would refuse to return my call, or turn down a story proposal, or kill the article on which I’d worked for nine months, or put dingbats instead of paragraph breaks in my perfectly constructed prose, or just generally boot-stomp my sensibilities or my self-worth, which happens a good deal in this business, no matter how successful you are, I tried to remember that it didn’t ultimately matter what this one joker said or did. We have a great expression in this country: “Opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one.” It speaks to the relativity of taste and opinion. And I believe it is particularly true when it comes to anything involving the senses—art, food, music, film, design, sexual attraction. As a writer, you always serve at the pleasure of the king; one asshole’s opinion matters way more than anybody else’s. Usually that guy or gal is the one who’s paying you. There’s not a whole lot you can do about it. Ever try to argue an editor out of killing a story? Vainglorious. A great word. I am not too proud to tell you: I have left the newsroom of The Washington Post in tears. I have cried in a phone booth on the corner of Clinton and Delancy Street on the lower east side of New York. I have assumed a prone position on the cool and eco-friendly bamboo floor in my office and sobbed. All because somebody’s opinion of my work counted more than my own. And because at that moment, I and my opinion didn’t matter one iota.
When I was a child, I was an overweight and unexceptional kid, but my parents loved the shit out me and thought I was the greatest. When something went wrong for me, my mother—who grew up Jewish in the not-so-tolerant American South during the eventful years of the Great Depression, World War II and the Holocaust—used to bolster my spirits by telling me: “Nobody’s better than you.”
What she meant, I am sure, was “You’re as good as anybody else. You have equal rights.”
However, in testament to the importance of semantics and repetition when it comes to propaganda, the message inculcated was the one uttered, the actual words I heard over and over again. Disappointed, furious, gut-struck by some arbitrary editorial decision and the resulting psychic bloodbath—a condition all of us writers know well—I would lick my wounds and tell myself: “He might be the editor of So and So, but I’m the president of The Sager Group.”
And so it went. The story hated by all the big editors in literal-minded Washington D.C. became the story loved by all the big editors in literary New York. The story killed by the high-profile magazine for political reasons became the story, later collected in a book, that garnered critical acclaim (and accurately forecasted the future of the Palestinian movement for statehood). The story that took nine solid months of investigatgive effort and paid only $1,875 plus expenses became the basis of two movies and an award-winning documentary; today that story is still one of the top five stories accessed on various longform sites on the World Wide Web. And then there’s the story that was to become a book. It was turned down as a proposal for a magazine article three times over 10 years so I just took it up myself. The book proposal hit the market after two years of research—just in time for the financial crash of 2008. It received only a paltry offer of advance and was abandoned. Some months later, the magazine version would receive a National Magazine Award, the Oscar of our industry, my first. (You can read the longform version in my new book, The Someone You’re Not.)
***
Of course, everything wasn’t all bad. One thing about me: I’m one of those feisty little guys who pop back up real quick. In time things began to flow more easily. I put a few years on. My skills aggregated. My work started to become a little more known. Today, when it comes to the pantheon of writers, I’m decidedly under the radar, more cultish than popular. But what matters to me most is that I’m able (thanks mostly to my beloved mother Esquire, which has fostered me mightily these last sixteen years) to wake up every morning and come down to my office and create stuff.
For reasons I can’t really explain, as my career progressed, I began spending a good deal of my time ministering to other writers and artists. (In fact I wouldn’t be writing this today, nor would I be involved with the amazing and inspirational project that WordsEtc has grown to become, had not Phakama Mbonambi been moved to email me some years ago.) Maybe it’s another side effect of working alone. I need people to talk to? Or maybe it’s genetic. My father was a small town gynecologist known for his sympatico and bedside manner, a former college fraternity president who would go on to become the lay president of our Temple, a man known for his good listening skills and his command of Robert’s Rules of Order, the guidelines generally used here in the anal and democratic west to facilitate discussions and group decision-making.
Why people choose to call me, I cannot explain. (Maybe ask Phakama?) But what I do know is that I enjoy spending my time in this way because it helps people, for one. And also because it helps me. (Honestly, that should really be number one.) I know you’re supposed to say piously that you love service for the love of service, that you love to give back to humanity and what not, but I think the truth is really that each little deal in life should be set up to yield a win for both parties. Each call or email (or Facebook message, text or Tweet) feels so complimentary, each question so important to the asker, that I am inspired to return the honor with my best effort at wisdom. It truly does feel good to give. But maybe a big part of that is because it feels so good to be singled out and needed. As my subjects in my journalism need to be heard, so do I, I suppose.
Over three decades, I have read, edited and advised hundreds of students and writers and artists. Even if The Sager Group existed in real time only as account names with Federal Express and Staples, one of our big office supply chains, clearly it has expanded. To the many faces of Mike have been added the voices and emails of many others—as to their own particular faces, most I’ve never actually met.
The point is this: I can’t tell you how many times, while talking with people about their ideas, or even just sitting here at my window, dreaming up ideas for myself, that I wished I could just wave a wand and make something happened. What a great fucking project. Wouldn’t it be amazing if I could just make it happen?
Now, with the advent of self-publishing, I finally can.
I can write something into existence. I can put it out there. Hopefully someone will like it. Hopefully I’ll make a living. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.
There are two mottos associated with The Sager Group. The first I stole from my interview many years ago for Rolling Stone with the well-known rapper/actor/entrepreneur Ice Cube. He came into the music industry as part of the group called NWA (Niggaz Wit Attitudes), at a time when rappers were pioneering a new business model. Instead of indenturing themselves to big record companies, they were recording their own music in their own studios, forming their own labels, and making distribution deals. “We harnessin the means of production,” Cube told me militantly. It has stuck with me ever since. Even in this Internet age of everyone liking and linking to everything and everyone else, one truth is clear: Without great content, a creative product that grabs and holds and entertains and somehow effects your life, all you have is a bunch of thumbs up and smiley faces.
The other motto, in Latin, is Artifex Te Adiuva. This one I came up with myself, with a grammar assist from a local teacher at the one private school hereabouts that still offers the ancient language. It means Artist Help Yourself. In the translation, the connotation of help leans toward the notion of enabling.
And so I have.
Free of the gatekeepers, I enable myself and others.
So far we’ve published five books, including Next Wave, a well-received collection with commentary of 19 literary journalists under age 40 that is already on some college syllabi. You can read about all of our offerings on our website, www.TheSagerGroup.net. We have also signed several more books for Spring and Fall 2013.
High Tolerance is a novel of race, sex, celebrity, murder and marijuana. Set in Hollywood during the great screenwriters’ strike of 2007-08, it is based on my decades behind the scenes covering all those topics in La La Land.
Outview, by Brandt Legg, is the first book of his Inner Movement Trilogy, a coming of age thriller of mystics an magic written for the upper age range of the young adult market. The second book is called Outin.
I’ll Show You Mine, by the noted underground poet Greg Gerding, is an oral history of love, sex and intimacy—a revealing peek into the hearts and bedrooms of everyday people.
Also slated: A pair of collections devoted to women in journalism, one a bible of great female literary journalists, the other a history of women writers in the newspaper game. A professor from the University of Missouri journalism school told me recently that nearly 70 percent of all journalism students these days are women, yet women’s historical contributions to the trade are sorely underrepresented in the literature. If I am not being too indelicate I can tell you the modest sums financing The Sager Group at this point come from a small inheritance left to me by my father. He spent a lifetime serving and listening to women and bringing babies into the world; women were also the source of his income. I think it fitting that The Sager Group serves women journalists in this fashion. I have also been working with a pair of young women who started a website of women's longform writing for everyone, www.TheRiveterMagazine.com. We have all these great women coming out of into the market. But most of the longform writing these days is published in sports and men’s magazines. Women writers (and professors of literary journalism) are vocally frustrated. If only some of those dozens of fat fashion mags would publish one real story in each issue….
***
It wasn’t so long ago that everyone thought books and writing and big ideas were doomed by our modern age of quick takes and sound bites.
But then a funny thing happened on the way to the funeral: The source of our supposed demise—the Internet—turned out to be our savior, bringing to an ever-widening world audience an unexpected renaissance of opportunity for writers and readers alike.
By harnessing the means of production, The Sager Group can dare to dream.
I guess the next step is to sell some books.
My Dear Phakama,
Early this morning, as I was working through my email—the new cover art for my second novel (can’t wait to show it off!); last minute housekeeping on three different websites to enable the launch of our first Young Adult title; the disappointing news that the first proof of an eBook formatted in a (free) manner we hadn’t tried before was not exactly up to snuff—the cacophonous silence was interrupted by an odd pair of shadows dancing across the periphery of my computer screen.
Entranced, I swiveled around in my chair. Squinting into the sun through the ingenious translucent window shade, I could see the silhouettes of a couple of hummingbirds feeding on the brilliant orange flowers of the giant succulent (Aloe marlothii) that lives beside my office. A quick Wiki visit confirmed my recollection that the species—which always makes me think of the mysterious and deadly plant in the musical “Little Shop of Horrors”—is native to your homeland, Phakama, as are many of my fondest plants, and a good number of the residents, frequently encountered in my part of southern California. (Can I mention that these same residents tend to be a bit prickly like the plants?) Marlothii’s seasonal inflorescence is a compound panicle, a woody stalk with many branches covered with tiny fluted flowers that draw all manner of insects and bees and small colorful birds; when the racmes dry and fall, the remaining skeleton resembles a giant thorny antler harvested from a huge and fanciful beast. Over the years, I’ve exhibited an assortment of unique specimens as sculptural pieces, planted in rocks in a large glass vase in the entryway of my house. With no co-workers anywhere in sight, no water cooler available, this is the kind of mission that typically occupies my break times (if not the more humdrum tasks of laundry or errands or foraging for food).
Accustomed as I am to spending the bulk of my time alone, engaged in the solitary craft of making words appear—or looking up information about weird plants and cult musical films on the Web, or staring out the window watching hummingbirds feed—working with other children in this new creative sandbox is proving to be refreshing. In the lexicon of the digital age, the primary pursuit of The Sager Group is “self-publishing,” but it is hardly something I can do by myself. To date, the roster of participants in my little venture include: A Japanese designer, a pair of Romanian programmers (one in San Francisco and one in Transylvania), the writer/producer from Seinfeld who coined “yada yada,” the inevitable lawyers in New York and Hollywood, a documentary filmmaker who learned his trade shooting porn, an LA-based British movie agent who once managed (and may have been orally intimate with) the 1970s pop music icon Cat Stevens, known now by his Muslim name, Yusuf Islam. A Midwestern professor of copy editing and journalism, a master proofreader in Staten Island who assisted Woodward and Bernstein with their Watergate stories at The Washington Post, my best friend from fourth grade (he designed the logo), the former head of the school of communications at the University of Illinois, an ex-running back for the Baltimore Ravens NFL football team, a PhD from a Jesuit college who shape-shifts into a writer of young adult, romance and vampire novels. An alt-weekly writer who gets paid to party with rap stars, a deviant poet from the rainy northwest, a housewife/editrix with a tattoo monkey climbing her shin. My talented 18-year-old son and his multi-ethnic hip-hop network, a Dutch Web designer and his Serbian programmer, a part-time assortment of student and post-graduate assistants, a man once known as the “Teen Tycoon,” a former Navy Seal and his brainy Taiwanese wife who keep my technology running. And then there’s Andrew Greenstein.
Ten years ago, Andrew was a college senior who’d signed up for my first writing seminar in the Literary Journalism program at the University of California, Irvine. He was one of those bright, eclectic students who are good at too many things to settle down with only one; he played drums in a rock band and varsity lacrosse and had a cute puppy and wanted to travel the world and do something with his writing. Over time we would stay in touch, and I would supply a number of professioral recommendations—grad school, journalism school, law school. As it was, he chose the last but decided not to go into practice; instead he founded a tech firm based in San Francisco called SF AppWorks.
Lucky for me Andrew showed up at my door with his pretty girlfriend one day in August 2012. They were on a short holiday in San Diego. I was in deep trouble. I’d made a lot of promises and telephone speeches and prognostications; I’d collected reams of editorial material and sought free permissions from popular commercial publications (some of my finest writing?). I was looking to achieve the lofty goals of helping myself and others make our ideas happen, to eliminate gatekeepers, to harness the means of production.
But up until then, I couldn’t find the right people to help me turn my ideas into reality.
Without Andrew—and all the rest—The Sager Group would never have been more than a self-delusion.
***
Let me tell you how it began.
For the first six years of my working life I was a devoted employee of a large and respected newsgathering organization. In professional situations, when I introduced myself, my name was “Mike Sager from The Washington Post.” It was as if Mike Sager was my given name; from The Washington Post was my family name. My family was great and powerful. I was a loyal and dutiful son.
During my years in daily journalism—post-Pentagon Papers, post-Watergate—the Fourth Estate was seen in America as a force for truth and good. Along with The New York Times, The Post carried the torch of our Constitution’s important First Amendment, which guarantees a free press and freedom of expression. Thus equipped, modern journalists helped end wars, brought down corrupt presidents, exposed wrongdoings and crime. By the mid-‘80s, with the inception of televised tabloid news, gossip websites and paparazzi tactics, perceptions of the press would begin to shift.
Today, the notion of a journalist seems less and less like Woodward and Bernstein, and more like two guys on a motorbike chasing Princess Diana through the Pont de l'Alma tunnel to her death.
But when I left The Post, looking to pursue a more literary form of reportage and writing, newspapers were still thriving. What I was giving up was something my co-workers and I ruefully called the “golden handcuffs.” I wasn’t just leaving a job. I was leaving a big important job. And I was leaving home, the place where I’d been plucked from the ranks of copy boys and promoted to reporter, trained and allowed to make my mark… the only place anybody had ever heard of me.
Plus, I was giving up my name.
Which never really hit me until the first time I went to the stationery shop to order business cards.
Mike Sager?
Who the hell is he?
***
As the days of my freelance experiment continued, I learned that the independent writer had to wear a number of hats. I was responsible for cold-calling new clients and making professional contacts, convincing editors to assign and publish me, reporting and writing stories (and making them sing). I had to send out invoices, keep track of expenses and deductions, hunt down payments, make projected income tax payments, find health insurance, market myself and my work, make connections, get myself out there. I was the salesman, the factory, the work force, the accounting department, the public relations flak.
Maybe it was the isolation of my profession—I’ve spent an awful lot of time alone since 1984, when I left The Post; I like to say I haven’t had a proper job in twenty-nine years—but somewhere along the line I began to think of myself as The Sager Group…the many faces of Mike. When an editor would refuse to return my call, or turn down a story proposal, or kill the article on which I’d worked for nine months, or put dingbats instead of paragraph breaks in my perfectly constructed prose, or just generally boot-stomp my sensibilities or my self-worth, which happens a good deal in this business, no matter how successful you are, I tried to remember that it didn’t ultimately matter what this one joker said or did. We have a great expression in this country: “Opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one.” It speaks to the relativity of taste and opinion. And I believe it is particularly true when it comes to anything involving the senses—art, food, music, film, design, sexual attraction. As a writer, you always serve at the pleasure of the king; one asshole’s opinion matters way more than anybody else’s. Usually that guy or gal is the one who’s paying you. There’s not a whole lot you can do about it. Ever try to argue an editor out of killing a story? Vainglorious. A great word. I am not too proud to tell you: I have left the newsroom of The Washington Post in tears. I have cried in a phone booth on the corner of Clinton and Delancy Street on the lower east side of New York. I have assumed a prone position on the cool and eco-friendly bamboo floor in my office and sobbed. All because somebody’s opinion of my work counted more than my own. And because at that moment, I and my opinion didn’t matter one iota.
When I was a child, I was an overweight and unexceptional kid, but my parents loved the shit out me and thought I was the greatest. When something went wrong for me, my mother—who grew up Jewish in the not-so-tolerant American South during the eventful years of the Great Depression, World War II and the Holocaust—used to bolster my spirits by telling me: “Nobody’s better than you.”
What she meant, I am sure, was “You’re as good as anybody else. You have equal rights.”
However, in testament to the importance of semantics and repetition when it comes to propaganda, the message inculcated was the one uttered, the actual words I heard over and over again. Disappointed, furious, gut-struck by some arbitrary editorial decision and the resulting psychic bloodbath—a condition all of us writers know well—I would lick my wounds and tell myself: “He might be the editor of So and So, but I’m the president of The Sager Group.”
And so it went. The story hated by all the big editors in literal-minded Washington D.C. became the story loved by all the big editors in literary New York. The story killed by the high-profile magazine for political reasons became the story, later collected in a book, that garnered critical acclaim (and accurately forecasted the future of the Palestinian movement for statehood). The story that took nine solid months of investigatgive effort and paid only $1,875 plus expenses became the basis of two movies and an award-winning documentary; today that story is still one of the top five stories accessed on various longform sites on the World Wide Web. And then there’s the story that was to become a book. It was turned down as a proposal for a magazine article three times over 10 years so I just took it up myself. The book proposal hit the market after two years of research—just in time for the financial crash of 2008. It received only a paltry offer of advance and was abandoned. Some months later, the magazine version would receive a National Magazine Award, the Oscar of our industry, my first. (You can read the longform version in my new book, The Someone You’re Not.)
***
Of course, everything wasn’t all bad. One thing about me: I’m one of those feisty little guys who pop back up real quick. In time things began to flow more easily. I put a few years on. My skills aggregated. My work started to become a little more known. Today, when it comes to the pantheon of writers, I’m decidedly under the radar, more cultish than popular. But what matters to me most is that I’m able (thanks mostly to my beloved mother Esquire, which has fostered me mightily these last sixteen years) to wake up every morning and come down to my office and create stuff.
For reasons I can’t really explain, as my career progressed, I began spending a good deal of my time ministering to other writers and artists. (In fact I wouldn’t be writing this today, nor would I be involved with the amazing and inspirational project that WordsEtc has grown to become, had not Phakama Mbonambi been moved to email me some years ago.) Maybe it’s another side effect of working alone. I need people to talk to? Or maybe it’s genetic. My father was a small town gynecologist known for his sympatico and bedside manner, a former college fraternity president who would go on to become the lay president of our Temple, a man known for his good listening skills and his command of Robert’s Rules of Order, the guidelines generally used here in the anal and democratic west to facilitate discussions and group decision-making.
Why people choose to call me, I cannot explain. (Maybe ask Phakama?) But what I do know is that I enjoy spending my time in this way because it helps people, for one. And also because it helps me. (Honestly, that should really be number one.) I know you’re supposed to say piously that you love service for the love of service, that you love to give back to humanity and what not, but I think the truth is really that each little deal in life should be set up to yield a win for both parties. Each call or email (or Facebook message, text or Tweet) feels so complimentary, each question so important to the asker, that I am inspired to return the honor with my best effort at wisdom. It truly does feel good to give. But maybe a big part of that is because it feels so good to be singled out and needed. As my subjects in my journalism need to be heard, so do I, I suppose.
Over three decades, I have read, edited and advised hundreds of students and writers and artists. Even if The Sager Group existed in real time only as account names with Federal Express and Staples, one of our big office supply chains, clearly it has expanded. To the many faces of Mike have been added the voices and emails of many others—as to their own particular faces, most I’ve never actually met.
The point is this: I can’t tell you how many times, while talking with people about their ideas, or even just sitting here at my window, dreaming up ideas for myself, that I wished I could just wave a wand and make something happened. What a great fucking project. Wouldn’t it be amazing if I could just make it happen?
Now, with the advent of self-publishing, I finally can.
I can write something into existence. I can put it out there. Hopefully someone will like it. Hopefully I’ll make a living. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.
There are two mottos associated with The Sager Group. The first I stole from my interview many years ago for Rolling Stone with the well-known rapper/actor/entrepreneur Ice Cube. He came into the music industry as part of the group called NWA (Niggaz Wit Attitudes), at a time when rappers were pioneering a new business model. Instead of indenturing themselves to big record companies, they were recording their own music in their own studios, forming their own labels, and making distribution deals. “We harnessin the means of production,” Cube told me militantly. It has stuck with me ever since. Even in this Internet age of everyone liking and linking to everything and everyone else, one truth is clear: Without great content, a creative product that grabs and holds and entertains and somehow effects your life, all you have is a bunch of thumbs up and smiley faces.
The other motto, in Latin, is Artifex Te Adiuva. This one I came up with myself, with a grammar assist from a local teacher at the one private school hereabouts that still offers the ancient language. It means Artist Help Yourself. In the translation, the connotation of help leans toward the notion of enabling.
And so I have.
Free of the gatekeepers, I enable myself and others.
So far we’ve published five books, including Next Wave, a well-received collection with commentary of 19 literary journalists under age 40 that is already on some college syllabi. You can read about all of our offerings on our website, www.TheSagerGroup.net. We have also signed several more books for Spring and Fall 2013.
High Tolerance is a novel of race, sex, celebrity, murder and marijuana. Set in Hollywood during the great screenwriters’ strike of 2007-08, it is based on my decades behind the scenes covering all those topics in La La Land.
Outview, by Brandt Legg, is the first book of his Inner Movement Trilogy, a coming of age thriller of mystics an magic written for the upper age range of the young adult market. The second book is called Outin.
I’ll Show You Mine, by the noted underground poet Greg Gerding, is an oral history of love, sex and intimacy—a revealing peek into the hearts and bedrooms of everyday people.
Also slated: A pair of collections devoted to women in journalism, one a bible of great female literary journalists, the other a history of women writers in the newspaper game. A professor from the University of Missouri journalism school told me recently that nearly 70 percent of all journalism students these days are women, yet women’s historical contributions to the trade are sorely underrepresented in the literature. If I am not being too indelicate I can tell you the modest sums financing The Sager Group at this point come from a small inheritance left to me by my father. He spent a lifetime serving and listening to women and bringing babies into the world; women were also the source of his income. I think it fitting that The Sager Group serves women journalists in this fashion. I have also been working with a pair of young women who started a website of women's longform writing for everyone, www.TheRiveterMagazine.com. We have all these great women coming out of into the market. But most of the longform writing these days is published in sports and men’s magazines. Women writers (and professors of literary journalism) are vocally frustrated. If only some of those dozens of fat fashion mags would publish one real story in each issue….
***
It wasn’t so long ago that everyone thought books and writing and big ideas were doomed by our modern age of quick takes and sound bites.
But then a funny thing happened on the way to the funeral: The source of our supposed demise—the Internet—turned out to be our savior, bringing to an ever-widening world audience an unexpected renaissance of opportunity for writers and readers alike.
By harnessing the means of production, The Sager Group can dare to dream.
I guess the next step is to sell some books.
July 29, 2013
Go Ask Sager - RV + Son = Meaning of Life
Early in the morning, high on a panoramic bluff in Malibu, I’m doing what I almost always do at this time of the day, alternately typing and thinking and looking out the nearest window. The marine layer is still in evidence; the gradually lightening gray-blue clouds meet the gradually lightening blue-gray ocean almost imperceptibly at the distant horizon. My window in the aft-cabin dinette is cracked open a few inches. I have my hoodie on my head. I can hear the waves break, the rush of the work-bound traffic below on the Pacific Coast Highway. A mockingbird sings in the lone gnarly sycamore tree that lives beside the campsite.
I’ve always wanted to come to this place. It’s called the Malibu Beach RV Park. It’s roughly 150 miles from where I live in San Diego. I’ve driven past it a zillion times en route from one work assignment or another—most of them celebrity interviews or photo shoots set in this shimmering enclave of wealth and fame, a kinetic postcard for the Southern California lifestyle, which has come to stand over the years for a truly American lifestyle, the land of the Beach Boys, bikinis and multimillion dollar seaside homes, the dream sequence where prosperity frolics barefoot. Every time I’ve seen the modest retro sign on the bluff, I’ve thought the same thing:
Wouldn’t it be amazing to stay up there for a few days?
* * *
Over the past two decades, I suppose I’ve driven past (and scurried away from) a good many fetching opportunities for personal or professional adventure. Some of it had to do with intestinal fortitude or consideration of personal safety. Some of it had to do with being married, though I kind of think of a wife or a grown-up girlfriend as someone who can take care of herself for a few days while you’re away—reviewing my romantic life down the years, that may well have been a miscalculation. Most of it had to do with a lifelong commitment I was handed—fatherhood.
For the record, I never wanted to be a father. At first, I was even kind of hostile to the idea: l had a lot of living to do; I thought a kid would only get in the way. Up to that point, I’d never even had a pet. The one spindly potted palm in my bay window was left to survive by its own devices during my weeks away in the field. Central to this philosophy: I didn’t want responsibility for something that couldn’t take care of itself.
Of course, when you’re a young man, you don’t really understand your place yet in the larger scheme of things. You want to be in love. You want someone beautiful to gaze upon and to make your muse. You want to get it in. You think a long-term relationship is about playing house and steady sex and managing to stay monogamous. But women have other ideas that far supersede their desire for orgasms—or even their peculiar need for superfluous household accessories like dust ruffles, fabric softener, Kleenex caddies, salad spinners and napkins (in addition to paper towels). All of a sudden, I was 36 years old, holding in my hand the sonogram of a fetus whose DNA was half mine.
“I see labia,” proclaimed the new partner at the ob-gyn practice, so proud of himself, the immodest assuredness of a guy just hired for his first real job. I was so relieved. I wanted a girl. I figured it wouldn’t take as much effort on my part. Let the wife play Barbie doll dress up. My life already had meaning. I had a mark to make, great work to produce and leave behind. The way I saw it, I had my own name, my byline. I didn’t so much need anyone to carry it on for me. And I didn’t need all that pressure on my shoulders, either. It’s hard enough to support yourself as an artist. Let alone a mother and child.
My son’s first act upon his deliverance from the womb—besides surprising the shit out of all of us—was to pee on my arm. In the moments just after his birth, I went to the bassinet as new fathers do and he smiled up at me with dark eyes just like mine and let loose a healthy stream, a warning shot across my bow.
Or you could say he was marking his territory.
* * *
One day six months ago, I was cleaning out my e-mail when I came across a solicitation to learn about “The Ultimate Road Trip with GoRVing.com.” I’ve been a professional journalist for more than 35 years—unlike fatherhood, I started young. All over the world, journalists every day hear from businesses that want publicity. Usually, in my line of reportage, I plumb people’s souls for the deeper truths beneath the culture and the news. I go to living rooms, rural outposts, scenes of crimes, ghettos—not resorts and spas. My last expense account included four business meals at various Denny’s restaurants, in a radius around South Central Los Angeles, with a former drug kingpin who became a vegan while serving two decades in prison. (Turns out Denny’s has a pretty good garden burger.) Junkets to posh locations? Swag? Not exactly my turf.
But it turns out some marketeers don’t discriminate when casting their wide and desperate nets. I spotted the opportunity of a lifetime and I went for it. Some people have lots of money to make their dreams come true. Some of us have to rely on our wits.
And so it is, six months and a lot of typing later, that I am here, high on a bluff at the Malibu Beach RV Park in a 31-foot motor home (a Fleetwood Tioga Ranger, complements of El Monte RV.com), checking off a rather expensive little item on a very short personal bucket list (health and longevity being my numbers one and two).
My computer is humming away on utility power. There is (hot) running water even if you can’t drink it. The Wifi is perfect. I’ve finished my fruit and yogurt; there’s original Dunkin’ Donuts coffee dripping through the coffeemaker. Looking out the window at the distant and uncluttered horizon, my thoughts have far to travel. The word count on my document keeps growing . . .
What could be better?
* * *
I’ll tell you.
Fifteen feet or so away from my seat on the banquette at the aft dinette table (the whole arrangement converts into a set of bunk beds); just beyond the shower/bathroom, the refrigerator/freezer and the kitchenette—where yesterday for lunch I whipped up an incredibly delicious pair of hotdog, bacon and cheese sandwiches—my 18-year-old son, Miles, is asleep in a loft bed above the driving cab.
At the moment the privacy curtain is drawn—the rich maroon color lends the regal feel of achambre royal. There’s a flat-screen TV on a swing arm, lots of buttons and knobs, even his own skylight; at night we watch movies together up there on the memory-foam mattress, plenty of room for the both of us—with ample space left over for bags of Oreos and Chex Mix and other wonderful junk I’ve laid into the ample storage cabinetry. Now and then as the morning proceeds, as my fingers ply the keyboard, the crown prince will roll over and readjust (the way people do on vacation), causing our land yacht to gently sway. Over these past four mornings I’ve come to relish this odd and slightly vertiginous sensation, a physical reminder that my son is here with me, luxuriant and safe, cossetted within the warm synthetic fabric of the bedding and towel package one of the several PR ladies involved was kind enough to order for us, and in a larger sense, within this ingenious and ungainly home on wheels that shelters and enables our wonderful time together. When Miles moves, I guess you could say, my world rocks. That’s pretty much how it’s been since he entered the world so unexpectedly and pissed on my arm and changed everything.
A few hours from now, the motorhome will jolt slightly, as if hit by a sudden small rogue gust, and the royal curtain will pull back, and my son will appear, hairy legs first. I’ll get him some juice and fruit and coffee cake, and his allergy pill and a vitamin, just like I always do at home, and he’ll take up his position at the larger dinette in the kitchen (which also becomes a bed). Looking out his own window, he’ll fire up his computer and the extra speaker he brought along and turn on Pandora. Then he’ll proceed to download from his camera some more of the footage he’s taken for the documentary we’re here to make. In the fall, he’s going away to college to study film. When I mentioned the trip, it was the first thing out of his mouth. Like me, he seems happiest when engaged in a project; this is ours together.
I don’t know yet what he’s going to call his piece—it’s to be about a boy and his dad on a little road trip before college. Last night, after I’d grilled us a couple of rib-eye steaks—the salad mixed and dressed in a one-gallon Ziploc baggie—we were sitting at the picnic table under the stars, staring out quietly into the dark and limitless sky, watching all the helicopters and small planes flying by, hurrying important people to important places. The crash of the waves down below seemed louder and very close; the mighty river of rushing cars had slowed at last to a trickle.
We both had spoons; we were eating from a container of ice cream I’d left out for a while to make mushy—the way we both like it. I remember when I was small, and my father used to come home late from work, I used to ask him to mush my ice cream for me, and he would do so with the spoon inside the little glass cup. Later, as a teen, I’d come home from partying and I’d always find him in the kitchen, having a modest scoop. I can see him even now, gathering together a little ice cream with a little Hershey’s syrup and some nuts and offering his long-haired and glassy-eyed son a spoonful of the delicious goo. He’s gone now, Marvin Miles Sager. I miss him every day.
Miles handed me the carton of ice cream. Inside was a perfect concoction of coffee and chocolate and Heath bar. When Miles was young, he had to have ice cream every night. I used the microwave to make his mush. Sometimes I added syrup on top. Now, as the cool melted stuff puddled on my tongue, I thought about how lucky it felt to be here—doing a thing I’d always wanted to do in the company of the person I cherish more than anyone else in the world. I was thinking: Maybe if you’re really fortunate, you get to help produce someone who you kind of understand and who kind of understands you. I’m not saying we’re all the way there. He’s still young; you can’t lean on a kid or they grow up crooked. But I know how he thinks, and how he thinks of me. We’ve been through some tough years together since his mother and I got divorced. Our synergy is evident. Hopefully it will continue to grow, even when we’re apart.
Taking back the carton, Miles helped himself to another spoonful. “From now on,” he said reflectively, “I’ll only be coming home on vacations.”
If this is how it goes, I think I’ll be okay.
for more by Mike Sager, please see:
http://www.thesagergroup.net/
I’ve always wanted to come to this place. It’s called the Malibu Beach RV Park. It’s roughly 150 miles from where I live in San Diego. I’ve driven past it a zillion times en route from one work assignment or another—most of them celebrity interviews or photo shoots set in this shimmering enclave of wealth and fame, a kinetic postcard for the Southern California lifestyle, which has come to stand over the years for a truly American lifestyle, the land of the Beach Boys, bikinis and multimillion dollar seaside homes, the dream sequence where prosperity frolics barefoot. Every time I’ve seen the modest retro sign on the bluff, I’ve thought the same thing:
Wouldn’t it be amazing to stay up there for a few days?
* * *
Over the past two decades, I suppose I’ve driven past (and scurried away from) a good many fetching opportunities for personal or professional adventure. Some of it had to do with intestinal fortitude or consideration of personal safety. Some of it had to do with being married, though I kind of think of a wife or a grown-up girlfriend as someone who can take care of herself for a few days while you’re away—reviewing my romantic life down the years, that may well have been a miscalculation. Most of it had to do with a lifelong commitment I was handed—fatherhood.
For the record, I never wanted to be a father. At first, I was even kind of hostile to the idea: l had a lot of living to do; I thought a kid would only get in the way. Up to that point, I’d never even had a pet. The one spindly potted palm in my bay window was left to survive by its own devices during my weeks away in the field. Central to this philosophy: I didn’t want responsibility for something that couldn’t take care of itself.
Of course, when you’re a young man, you don’t really understand your place yet in the larger scheme of things. You want to be in love. You want someone beautiful to gaze upon and to make your muse. You want to get it in. You think a long-term relationship is about playing house and steady sex and managing to stay monogamous. But women have other ideas that far supersede their desire for orgasms—or even their peculiar need for superfluous household accessories like dust ruffles, fabric softener, Kleenex caddies, salad spinners and napkins (in addition to paper towels). All of a sudden, I was 36 years old, holding in my hand the sonogram of a fetus whose DNA was half mine.
“I see labia,” proclaimed the new partner at the ob-gyn practice, so proud of himself, the immodest assuredness of a guy just hired for his first real job. I was so relieved. I wanted a girl. I figured it wouldn’t take as much effort on my part. Let the wife play Barbie doll dress up. My life already had meaning. I had a mark to make, great work to produce and leave behind. The way I saw it, I had my own name, my byline. I didn’t so much need anyone to carry it on for me. And I didn’t need all that pressure on my shoulders, either. It’s hard enough to support yourself as an artist. Let alone a mother and child.
My son’s first act upon his deliverance from the womb—besides surprising the shit out of all of us—was to pee on my arm. In the moments just after his birth, I went to the bassinet as new fathers do and he smiled up at me with dark eyes just like mine and let loose a healthy stream, a warning shot across my bow.
Or you could say he was marking his territory.
* * *
One day six months ago, I was cleaning out my e-mail when I came across a solicitation to learn about “The Ultimate Road Trip with GoRVing.com.” I’ve been a professional journalist for more than 35 years—unlike fatherhood, I started young. All over the world, journalists every day hear from businesses that want publicity. Usually, in my line of reportage, I plumb people’s souls for the deeper truths beneath the culture and the news. I go to living rooms, rural outposts, scenes of crimes, ghettos—not resorts and spas. My last expense account included four business meals at various Denny’s restaurants, in a radius around South Central Los Angeles, with a former drug kingpin who became a vegan while serving two decades in prison. (Turns out Denny’s has a pretty good garden burger.) Junkets to posh locations? Swag? Not exactly my turf.
But it turns out some marketeers don’t discriminate when casting their wide and desperate nets. I spotted the opportunity of a lifetime and I went for it. Some people have lots of money to make their dreams come true. Some of us have to rely on our wits.
And so it is, six months and a lot of typing later, that I am here, high on a bluff at the Malibu Beach RV Park in a 31-foot motor home (a Fleetwood Tioga Ranger, complements of El Monte RV.com), checking off a rather expensive little item on a very short personal bucket list (health and longevity being my numbers one and two).
My computer is humming away on utility power. There is (hot) running water even if you can’t drink it. The Wifi is perfect. I’ve finished my fruit and yogurt; there’s original Dunkin’ Donuts coffee dripping through the coffeemaker. Looking out the window at the distant and uncluttered horizon, my thoughts have far to travel. The word count on my document keeps growing . . .
What could be better?
* * *
I’ll tell you.
Fifteen feet or so away from my seat on the banquette at the aft dinette table (the whole arrangement converts into a set of bunk beds); just beyond the shower/bathroom, the refrigerator/freezer and the kitchenette—where yesterday for lunch I whipped up an incredibly delicious pair of hotdog, bacon and cheese sandwiches—my 18-year-old son, Miles, is asleep in a loft bed above the driving cab.
At the moment the privacy curtain is drawn—the rich maroon color lends the regal feel of achambre royal. There’s a flat-screen TV on a swing arm, lots of buttons and knobs, even his own skylight; at night we watch movies together up there on the memory-foam mattress, plenty of room for the both of us—with ample space left over for bags of Oreos and Chex Mix and other wonderful junk I’ve laid into the ample storage cabinetry. Now and then as the morning proceeds, as my fingers ply the keyboard, the crown prince will roll over and readjust (the way people do on vacation), causing our land yacht to gently sway. Over these past four mornings I’ve come to relish this odd and slightly vertiginous sensation, a physical reminder that my son is here with me, luxuriant and safe, cossetted within the warm synthetic fabric of the bedding and towel package one of the several PR ladies involved was kind enough to order for us, and in a larger sense, within this ingenious and ungainly home on wheels that shelters and enables our wonderful time together. When Miles moves, I guess you could say, my world rocks. That’s pretty much how it’s been since he entered the world so unexpectedly and pissed on my arm and changed everything.
A few hours from now, the motorhome will jolt slightly, as if hit by a sudden small rogue gust, and the royal curtain will pull back, and my son will appear, hairy legs first. I’ll get him some juice and fruit and coffee cake, and his allergy pill and a vitamin, just like I always do at home, and he’ll take up his position at the larger dinette in the kitchen (which also becomes a bed). Looking out his own window, he’ll fire up his computer and the extra speaker he brought along and turn on Pandora. Then he’ll proceed to download from his camera some more of the footage he’s taken for the documentary we’re here to make. In the fall, he’s going away to college to study film. When I mentioned the trip, it was the first thing out of his mouth. Like me, he seems happiest when engaged in a project; this is ours together.
I don’t know yet what he’s going to call his piece—it’s to be about a boy and his dad on a little road trip before college. Last night, after I’d grilled us a couple of rib-eye steaks—the salad mixed and dressed in a one-gallon Ziploc baggie—we were sitting at the picnic table under the stars, staring out quietly into the dark and limitless sky, watching all the helicopters and small planes flying by, hurrying important people to important places. The crash of the waves down below seemed louder and very close; the mighty river of rushing cars had slowed at last to a trickle.
We both had spoons; we were eating from a container of ice cream I’d left out for a while to make mushy—the way we both like it. I remember when I was small, and my father used to come home late from work, I used to ask him to mush my ice cream for me, and he would do so with the spoon inside the little glass cup. Later, as a teen, I’d come home from partying and I’d always find him in the kitchen, having a modest scoop. I can see him even now, gathering together a little ice cream with a little Hershey’s syrup and some nuts and offering his long-haired and glassy-eyed son a spoonful of the delicious goo. He’s gone now, Marvin Miles Sager. I miss him every day.
Miles handed me the carton of ice cream. Inside was a perfect concoction of coffee and chocolate and Heath bar. When Miles was young, he had to have ice cream every night. I used the microwave to make his mush. Sometimes I added syrup on top. Now, as the cool melted stuff puddled on my tongue, I thought about how lucky it felt to be here—doing a thing I’d always wanted to do in the company of the person I cherish more than anyone else in the world. I was thinking: Maybe if you’re really fortunate, you get to help produce someone who you kind of understand and who kind of understands you. I’m not saying we’re all the way there. He’s still young; you can’t lean on a kid or they grow up crooked. But I know how he thinks, and how he thinks of me. We’ve been through some tough years together since his mother and I got divorced. Our synergy is evident. Hopefully it will continue to grow, even when we’re apart.
Taking back the carton, Miles helped himself to another spoonful. “From now on,” he said reflectively, “I’ll only be coming home on vacations.”
If this is how it goes, I think I’ll be okay.
for more by Mike Sager, please see:
http://www.thesagergroup.net/
July 20, 2013
Call Me Mike Sager
Just got off the phone with a student; we spent about twenty minutes discussing a topic near and dear to many writers, and perhaps a source of curiosity to many readers: How to settle on a byline.
For me, my choice of name had a lot to do with a journey of self discovery.
Later it led to an actual journey...
Here below, an excerpt from "Mike Sager by Mike Sager," originally published in Esquire, now available in a longer "author's cut" in my second collection, REVENGE OF THE DONUT BOYS.
Call me Mike Sager.
Everyone does.
It's the way I answer the phone, the way I introduce myself. It's how I think of myself--my symbol, my logo, my brand name, like Prince's glyph. Mike Sager . A random collection of nine Latin letters arranged into two groups, one space in between, the first group upthrust and masculine, like the monuments of the West, the second group rounded and feminine, like those of the East. Mike Sager , the yin and the yang. Three syllables, easy to say. Short and sweet--which my wife, in one of her occasional playful moods, would say describes me perfectly. Mike Sager . A simple name. A name that leaves room in a conversation for the next sentence. Not a fancy show-off name like Brandon Miller-de la Cuesta. Not a cool, exotic name like William Least Heat-Moon. Not a tragic name like Richard Kuntz, a kid who went to my high school. His parents called him Dick. He called himself Dick. I always wondered: What were they thinking?
Mike Sager . A name with no baggage, no connotation. Just a name, an ordinary name. Not too Jewish sounding, thank God--my mother's line; the first anti-Semite I ever knew. A name like a blank canvas or raw hunk of granite, a name you can work with, chisel into something. Mike Sager . A name of my own choosing.
My given name, of course, is not Mike Sager : It is Michael Andrew Sager. Mi-kul, as people in Baltimore said. Miiiii-kuuuuullllll, one of eight Michaels in my first-grade class, an overweight boy in husky-size corduroys who cried easily but never backed down from a fight, who spent his entire third-grade year sitting in the front of the room, his desk pushed against the teacher's.
Then, in junior high, I discovered sports; I ended up on the soccer team at Emory University. I made varsity my freshman year. They listed me on the roster as Mike Sager .
From there, things began to turn around. Mike Sager was not Michael Sager. Mike Sager was a winner. He was popular. He did well. He got a job at one of the world's best newspapers, albeit as a copy boy on the graveyard shift. And then, in 1978, the really big thing happened: I got my first big-league credit.
By Mike Sager .
That's me.
A body of work. A lifetime of actions large and small.
What's in a name?
To me, everything.
So you can imagine my surprise on that day some years ago when I typed the nine Latin letters of my name into Google.
I was gut shot. There were other Mike Sager s. Tons of them. I mean, Mike Sager is not exactly John Smith. How could there be others? What right did they have to use my name? A name I'd built from the ground up.
Time passed. I tried to forget them. But as is often the case, the things you hate become a prickly fascination. I found myself wondering: Who are these guys?
I started clicking around. There were 3,650 Google entries for " Mike Sager ," fifty-three pages. Going through them over a period of several days, I identified thirty-nine other Mike Sager s. This did not include the hundreds of still more Mike and Michael Sagers listed in various telephone databases on the Web.
There was Lutheran pastor Mike Sager in Spokane; motorcycle racer/sound technician Mike Sager in Wenatchee, Washington; car salesman Mike Sager in Perrysburg, Ohio; rock 'n' roll roadie/blogger/political-campaign worker Mike Sager in Reston, Virginia; and high-tech-company owner Mike Sager in southern California, who declined a meeting through his personal assistant, saying he preferred not to divulge any personal details. Third-generation plasterer Mike Sager lives on a small island near Vancouver with five hundred other humans and a large number of bald eagles. There were three Captain Mike Sager s: a Louisiana state police officer; a jail warden (he also played semipro baseball) in Virginia; and an avid poet, ex-Navy, sailboat enthusiast, and all-around renaissance man (just ask!) living in early retirement in a river town called Daphne, Alabama. And then there was help-desk coordinator Mike Sager , who works for a tire and auto business in Tampa and calls himself mIKEY(tm), a name he is attempting to trademark.
All of them Mike Sager .
None of them me.
What's in a name?
I needed to find out.
To read more of "Mike Sager by Mike Sager" please see: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001...
or go to www.TheSagerGroup.Net
For me, my choice of name had a lot to do with a journey of self discovery.
Later it led to an actual journey...
Here below, an excerpt from "Mike Sager by Mike Sager," originally published in Esquire, now available in a longer "author's cut" in my second collection, REVENGE OF THE DONUT BOYS.
Call me Mike Sager.
Everyone does.
It's the way I answer the phone, the way I introduce myself. It's how I think of myself--my symbol, my logo, my brand name, like Prince's glyph. Mike Sager . A random collection of nine Latin letters arranged into two groups, one space in between, the first group upthrust and masculine, like the monuments of the West, the second group rounded and feminine, like those of the East. Mike Sager , the yin and the yang. Three syllables, easy to say. Short and sweet--which my wife, in one of her occasional playful moods, would say describes me perfectly. Mike Sager . A simple name. A name that leaves room in a conversation for the next sentence. Not a fancy show-off name like Brandon Miller-de la Cuesta. Not a cool, exotic name like William Least Heat-Moon. Not a tragic name like Richard Kuntz, a kid who went to my high school. His parents called him Dick. He called himself Dick. I always wondered: What were they thinking?
Mike Sager . A name with no baggage, no connotation. Just a name, an ordinary name. Not too Jewish sounding, thank God--my mother's line; the first anti-Semite I ever knew. A name like a blank canvas or raw hunk of granite, a name you can work with, chisel into something. Mike Sager . A name of my own choosing.
My given name, of course, is not Mike Sager : It is Michael Andrew Sager. Mi-kul, as people in Baltimore said. Miiiii-kuuuuullllll, one of eight Michaels in my first-grade class, an overweight boy in husky-size corduroys who cried easily but never backed down from a fight, who spent his entire third-grade year sitting in the front of the room, his desk pushed against the teacher's.
Then, in junior high, I discovered sports; I ended up on the soccer team at Emory University. I made varsity my freshman year. They listed me on the roster as Mike Sager .
From there, things began to turn around. Mike Sager was not Michael Sager. Mike Sager was a winner. He was popular. He did well. He got a job at one of the world's best newspapers, albeit as a copy boy on the graveyard shift. And then, in 1978, the really big thing happened: I got my first big-league credit.
By Mike Sager .
That's me.
A body of work. A lifetime of actions large and small.
What's in a name?
To me, everything.
So you can imagine my surprise on that day some years ago when I typed the nine Latin letters of my name into Google.
I was gut shot. There were other Mike Sager s. Tons of them. I mean, Mike Sager is not exactly John Smith. How could there be others? What right did they have to use my name? A name I'd built from the ground up.
Time passed. I tried to forget them. But as is often the case, the things you hate become a prickly fascination. I found myself wondering: Who are these guys?
I started clicking around. There were 3,650 Google entries for " Mike Sager ," fifty-three pages. Going through them over a period of several days, I identified thirty-nine other Mike Sager s. This did not include the hundreds of still more Mike and Michael Sagers listed in various telephone databases on the Web.
There was Lutheran pastor Mike Sager in Spokane; motorcycle racer/sound technician Mike Sager in Wenatchee, Washington; car salesman Mike Sager in Perrysburg, Ohio; rock 'n' roll roadie/blogger/political-campaign worker Mike Sager in Reston, Virginia; and high-tech-company owner Mike Sager in southern California, who declined a meeting through his personal assistant, saying he preferred not to divulge any personal details. Third-generation plasterer Mike Sager lives on a small island near Vancouver with five hundred other humans and a large number of bald eagles. There were three Captain Mike Sager s: a Louisiana state police officer; a jail warden (he also played semipro baseball) in Virginia; and an avid poet, ex-Navy, sailboat enthusiast, and all-around renaissance man (just ask!) living in early retirement in a river town called Daphne, Alabama. And then there was help-desk coordinator Mike Sager , who works for a tire and auto business in Tampa and calls himself mIKEY(tm), a name he is attempting to trademark.
All of them Mike Sager .
None of them me.
What's in a name?
I needed to find out.
To read more of "Mike Sager by Mike Sager" please see: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001...
or go to www.TheSagerGroup.Net
July 15, 2013
Go Ask Sager
Hey folks. I've been asked to write a new monthly column by playboy.com's new mobile site. It has a paywall and all that, and is a beautiful site-- amazing what they can do on your iphone these days. But i will also be posting it here for free. Along with other items of interst.
The column was titled Go Ask Sager by the management. Funny, back when i was an unlikely frat president at Emory University, that's what people used to say. I've always thought that life imitates college, at least for those of my generation, and here's another example. For the column, I'll be exploring a lot of the topics that I wrote about in By Mike Sager, my award-winning column that used to appear in SanDiego.Com-- fatherhood, manhood, personhood, and this wacky world in which we live.
And please check out www.TheSagerGroup.Net, a consortium of writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers... i call them makers--people whose lives are dedicated to expressing themselves artistically. At The Sager Group we eliminate gate keepers and help artists help themselves. I can't think of a more worthy avocation as i look to fill my soon-to-be-empty nest.
The column was titled Go Ask Sager by the management. Funny, back when i was an unlikely frat president at Emory University, that's what people used to say. I've always thought that life imitates college, at least for those of my generation, and here's another example. For the column, I'll be exploring a lot of the topics that I wrote about in By Mike Sager, my award-winning column that used to appear in SanDiego.Com-- fatherhood, manhood, personhood, and this wacky world in which we live.
And please check out www.TheSagerGroup.Net, a consortium of writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, designers... i call them makers--people whose lives are dedicated to expressing themselves artistically. At The Sager Group we eliminate gate keepers and help artists help themselves. I can't think of a more worthy avocation as i look to fill my soon-to-be-empty nest.
