Nurturing my Wild Things – and launching my blog

Strange that my first-ever post should be about Maurice Sendak. Writing about the deaths of people who influenced you is something bloggers do. But I don’t feel like a blogger. Until now, I haven’t even posted.

But he died, and I had this blog, in the back of my mind, gathering brain dust, and nothing spurring it to motion (a blog at rest tends to stay at rest).

There’s always been a reason not to launch it. I need to tweak my “about” section. I need to edit my short stories. I need to read all the other blogs on Earth, and note-take, and “observe,” because that’s what writers do, is obserrrrrve. And maybe that was logical, except I wasn’t actually doing it — it was just a word trick designed to filter and translate (and mask) the real reason I wasn’t launching my blog, which was that I was scared. It is stressful to launch a blog. Maybe not for most people, but when you’re a bit of a paranoid perfectionist and you’ve already made the mistake (consciously, and yet irrevocably) of putting all your eggs in the “blog” basket and deciding that you will base your self-image on said blog, it is VERY STRESSFUL.

And then Maurice Sendak died, and it was like he was saying to me, “Go, idiot. Launch your blog. It’s not every day your childhood idol dies.”

And he’s right. In fact, there have only been two days on which my childhood idols have died: The first was Feb. 27th, 2003, when Mr. Rogers lived his last Beautiful Day and jumped up to that quaint Neighborhood in the sky. There is video of a young me acting out his daily entrance, mimicking it as he did it simultaneously on TV, complete with the sweater zip-up and the shoe change. There are also stories of me (no video) kicking my parents’ door in one day when I missed the entrance and burst in after he’d already greeted his viewers. He WAS my childhood — and, in an apropos coincidence (or a sign, depending on your beliefs), he died the day after I turned 18. My childhood, both officially and symbolically, was over.

With Sendak, the influence was not so tangible. Countless times I fell asleep to my mother’s voice reading his words in “Where the Wild Things Are” (every night for a year, she says). But I didn’t dream about being him, the way I did with Fred Rogers. I didn’t yet know I was a writer, so he was not a conscious influence. Eventually I outgrew him.

But years later I realized I’d carried the Wild Things story with me, pretty much forever. The memories it evoked catalyzed even my adult imagination, and whenever I’d think about the book, I’d be thrown back into his parade of beasts, and, more importantly, would be sparked to write evocatively myself. When the movie came out, I took my girlfriend on opening weekend.

And when he died, and I heard that voice say, “Go, idiot, launch your stupid blog,” I realized I am still carrying it. Its message — the same message Mr. Rogers devoted his life to conveying — is clear: don’t be afraid of your mind; don’t turn away from the urge to be creative. Creativity is a Wild Thing, and Wild Things are instinctual and animalistic and should not be repressed. And all these years later, I still needed to hear that. And so, with that, I launch my stupid blog, and I continue to nurture my own Wild Things.

Thanks, Mo.