I have friends in this business who claim they couldn't write a new column every week.
How long have you been doing this? they ask, and seem shocked when I tell them I've had at least one column published somewhere every week since December 1996.
I know some of you are thinking, "That's way too much Wilken," and there are those dark days when I might agree with you.
Those are the days when new ideas are swamped by persistent obsessions like aging, my ex-wife, single-parenting, the Topsy-like greed at the top of the American economic pole, Iraq, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, our portly mayor Mr. Greg, and his buddy portly Paul the Billionaire, persistent racism and the even more pervasive homophobia that never seems to let go of so many of our fellow citizens' twisted, hateful hearts.
But most days when I pull in behind the word processor, or plop down in front of the computer screen, I have too much, not too little, to say.
There was a columnist in Cincinnati when I was growing up, named Frank Weikel, who grew rich (for a newspaperman) writing one- and two-line bulleted nothing items five days a week for the Cincinnati En-quirer, in its pre-Gannett salad days.
Frank's gimmick was raves and trashes of local people and politicos, mostly.
Frank was very predictable. He was a reactionary Midwestern white man who attacked the then-stirring minority activists and their Caucasian allies, while lapping at the feet of the already powerful.
Darts to Joe Blow who actually thought black people might belong at the same amusement park as white people, or flowers to Joe Blow who was keeping Cincinnati's Coney Island pure white, are hypothetical examples of what Frank did.
Even then it looked lazy, easy and wrong-minded.
But prejudice and supporting the status quo have always been a problem for the American middle class, who somehow feel the success of anyone below them on the economic and social scene will steal the bread from their laden tables.
The Seattle version of Frank - less malignant, but just as space-fillingly boring - was Jean Godden, now a city council member, who filled her daily space with cutesy bumper stickers seen, and boring-sounding social events she attended.
But each of these folks was very popular in his or her time and place, because the very daily-ness and bland agreeability (to the majority) of their offerings comforted somebody.
As I grow older, I am less and less intolerant of what Weikel and God-den did, if not what they wrote about.
I turn to certain columnists right after the sports page nowadays.
Naturally, and unfortunately, I tend to like those who agree with me most - Molly Ivins, for example - or the 1960s Jimmy Breslin. But I can read anybody's columnar opinions if they are well put, if not always well thought out.
Sometimes the poor reasoning exhibited in many columns, including this one, is the result of specious thinking, or bias-swamp. But oftentimes it is simply a matter of time and space constraints.
Columns that attempt to go beyond the darts and flowers of the Frank Weikels, or the random-seeming, journal-type entries of the Godden-like, can be difficult to write because we have only so much room and so much time.
But that doesn't make it less fun to do, or less interesting (on a good day) to read.
All this rambling reminiscence and self-involved column gazing was stimulated by two friends' recent queries, so if you feel this was a dropoff in quality, if not quantity, blame them.
But my goal, and I am sure the goal of most other columnists - those better, like Ivins and the young Breslin, and those worse, like the late Weikel and the now-political Godden - is to entertain, occasionally to sway and even more occasionally to convince you, the reader.
Let's hope, for all of our sakes, some entertaining, swaying and convincing is going on every time you all pick up a newspaper - preferably (from my point of view, of course) this newspaper.
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