Lego Wasteland

Susan and I spent a recent Saturday cleaning out a few closets in dire need of organizing. One of the closets was in the kid’s playroom, which doubles as an auxiliary storage facility for the Lego corporation. Looking over the sprawling city of assembled police stations, firehouses, planes, cars, and little Lego people, I started to calculate the cost of it all. Somehow, instead of the good people at Lego paying rent to store these items in my home, I’d been bamboozled into paying them to keep it all.

My immediate urge was to vent at the boys, tell them we needed to cut back on the Legos. But the little guys weren’t in the house. Once they’d heard the cleaning word that morning, they’d mysteriously disappeared outside to play with Nerf guns, another corporation we open our bank account to for the privilege of storing their products in our garage. (I am in the wrong business.)

After we finished cleaning the closet, I looked over the Lego city in the playroom once more and remembered a time over thirty years ago when I’d wanted a go-cart. My dad pointed out that all the money I’d spent on comic books over the years, the ones stacked in my room and in my closet, would have bought a nice go-cart. I eventually got my go-cart, but always felt a little guilty about the money “wasted” on the comics once I stopped reading them. 

But in the playroom, with the memory vivid in my mind, I realized something.

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Do It Your Way

Six years ago, three friends and I spent a week paddling fifty miles in canoes on the Green River. The stretch of water winds through the Utah desert and eventually merges with the Colorado River. On the final day we arrived at Spanish Bottom, the designated pickup point nestled within a sharp bend of the Colorado. Miles from civilization, we sweated in the late afternoon sun to pitch tents amidst the tamarisk shrubs by the water’s edge. As the campsite began to take shape, movement from the corner of my eye turned my head toward a young man approaching. My body tensed when I saw his outfit.

“Excuse me, sir,” the young man said, stopping a reasonable distance from me. The tie that had been swaying across his dress shirt as he walked now came to a standstill above his belt buckle and khaki pants. “My group is a ways back,” he continued. “I’m scouting campsites. Do you mind sharing this one?”

I appreciated his politeness, and my tension eased somewhat. “We don’t mind,” I said. “Plenty of room.”

He thanked us and then disappeared beyond the brush, leaving the four of us puzzled. We’d known other campers could join us at the pickup point, but nothing prepared me for business attire in the Utah desert.

As we continued working, the conversation turned to the past week:

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A Double Life

I have a secret to share: I’ve been leading a double life. For many readers of this blog, I’m Christopher Laney, writer. But there’s another side to me: Chris Laney, businessperson. I’ve always used “Christopher” on magazine bylines, mainly because there is a heavy metal rocker named Chris Laney who claimed that domain name well before I ever thought about acquiring it. To carve out my own space on the web, I had to use my full name.

It’s taken a long time to realize that those seemingly separate sides—writer and businessperson—are one and the same, and, in fact, in harmony. Years ago, I wanted to distance myself from the business persona, mainly because I had mundane images of it. When a business partner and I sold our company to another firm, I told myself I’d stick around for several years and draw a nice paycheck helping that organization integrate the old company while I transitioned my life to one of a writer.

I made great strides over those years, penning articles for increasingly better magazines, teaching a successful writing class, and even starting the novel I’d always threatened to write. When the time came that I felt I could no longer add anything to the parent company who bought us, I said goodbye, taking off a year to accomplish two goals: 1) to finish the novel, and 2) to lay the foundation for a new company that my future business partners and I could grow into a business that ran well with talented, trustworthy individuals we brought into the fold. Still, I felt I had to keep the two sides separate, mainly because I had mistakenly believed that being a writer and a business owner, were mutually exclusive. At least, that was the case until a past conversation flashed in my head and I discovered an epiphany within it.

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