Where's Zig Ziglar when you need his slimy ass?

Since I was a little ankle hugger wiping my snotty nose on my coat sleave, I always wanted to be a writer - well, either that or the second-coming of Steve Sax (I imitated his game, including the wild throws three rows into the stands). Because my lord Al Pacino didn't bless me with bat speed, a strong arm or soft hands, my baseball career was cut short by 20 years and it forced me to fall back on my fall back plan - a writer.

My teachers, none of whom looked like Michelle Pfeifer in "Dangerous Minds," would assign spelling-word stories. Here's how they went: Haggard, catcher-mitt-faced teacher gave us students a list of spelling words that must be used in a story, whereupon we'd misuse given words in a variety of wonderful, Steinbeckesque sentences (with the spelling words in bold) like, "Ernie exceeded quickly to his hiding place," or "The lamination process had tooken longer than he though since his sister didn't move too fast." I was a regular word smith at 8 years old - and I'd eat the assignments up like they were peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches. You can have your multiplication tables. Forget learning about fulcrums, inertia and what NaCl means on the periodic table in science class; give me 100 spelling words and a blank pad of lined paper and I'll spin a yarn about Paul the marijuana smoking goat and his buddy Chris the cockfighting rooster battling barnyard evil in Ames, Iowa.

Those spelling-word stories turned into two- and five-page topical reports about Ecuador, The Beatles and poo-flinging Orangutan's in Kenya's coastal jungles as I got older. The reports were easy; grade-school teachers are about as bright as an 8-year-old 40-watt closet light bulb, so give them a dose of a 10-year-old's circular reporting, and as long as the sentences are coherent and there's two full pages of oversized, heavy-inked letter words you could be talking about dogs licking their own genitalia when the report should cover post-war Italy and its impact on the world and still scoop up that A and a cool five bucks from the old man when he spies the report card. I'd write the old hags into circles. The bobby pins in their wiry hair would spring loose sending their tight buns (not to be confused with other buns which were about as tight as cottage cheese, but likely just as hairy) into convulsed wildness giving them a Doc Brown-mad scientist look. I tried this report tactic throughout my school career with a fairly high measure of success.

It wasn't until I hit college and decided pounding down jello shots while dancing to AC/DC's "She Shook Me" was much more important than what Chaucer had to say in The Cantebury Tales. With the deadline looming just one day away, I'd finally sit down the night before and pound out 10 pages of unmitigated nonsense, believing my ol' grade school tactics would keep me afloat. Maybe not A work, but likely a strong B. And lo and behold, the college professors won. They saw through my lines of BS, sniffing out the crap like bomb-sniffing dogs at the airport and deservedly gave my trite (or is it tripe?) prose a C - they must have liked the effort enough to spare me the dreaded D.

What I'm getting at is that it all comes down to motivation. I'll admit right now, hand on Mario Puzo's "The Godfather," that I'm an unmotivated slug who's ass fits better on a couch cushion than an office chair. And while the thought of writing, constructing 300-page tales about sex, drugs and poo flingin', sounds peaches and cream to me, that actual act of sitting and writing is the toughest thing for me to do. Take this blog for example. I was planning to write Thursday but was derailed by 1) dinner that night, and 2) Survivor at 7 p.m. Since 8 p.m. was much to late to start working on another masterpiece. It was easier to sit my butt down after hammering back a steak and three or four Tecates to watch nine TV whores who are basking in their 15 minutes of fame on a deserted Fijian island than to sit in front of the computer and pound out 1,500 words on why my pee smells oddly like stale eggs and oranges.

Then came Friday. I could have forced a grand of words out before we jetted off to a rehearsal dinner in Snottsdale. But what happens if I didn't finish in time? The entire night I'd fret about not getting the post completed, and instead of staying sober enough to finish my nightly diatribe - and give out the much awaited Sleazy Teazy - I skipped the exercise entirely.

I take the weekends off, so that's that. Five days between posts and here I am, pounding out words about my motivational drive, which seems more often than not, stuck in neutral. I read biographies about writers who would put everything second and writing first, and I wonder if could ever do that. I like my TV shows. I like nights out at the ball park, movie theater, or just kickin' with friends. And I'm not a night owl. Like I've said before, the clock hits 9:30 p.m. and my flowing white gown turns into a pumpkin. The eyes slam close like wind-blown doors and the only way to keep them open is heavy-duty duct tape. I've pondered the idea of getting up at 4 a.m., writing until 5:30 and getting to work for 6, but that all seems like cruel and unusual punishment. That's why death row inmates aren't executed in the early morning, human right activists would fight it as inhumane.

Then again, maybe I should just suck it up, write whenever and whatever, and let you, dear reader, decide whether it's an A or a C (I got $5 for A's back in the day, so if it's an A effort, feel free to send cash or a check to the compound).

And now, I'm off to the ball park to watch the Dodgers face the Diamondbacks. Ta-ta.