Confessions of a Public Speaker

Chapter 3. $30,000 an hour

It’s 7:47 a.m. at Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, so early the sun is just starting to rise. It’s an ungodly time and place for any writer to be outside. Writers aren’t the most well-adjusted people, and it’s telling that our preferred means of interaction with civilization is throwing paragraph-shaped grenades at people from behind the safety of a laptop. I know few writers who love mornings, and the doorman at my hotel—who wears a bright blue sailor’s uniform as part of the nautical-themed thrill ride that is the Argonaut Hotel—is clearly on my side. He waves down a cab for me and gives a half-smile from underneath his tired eyes, a smile that says, “Doesn’t it suck to work this early?” Anyone who finishes the night shift with a sense of humor is a good man indeed. Or perhaps I just look like trash this morning and he finds my appearance entertaining. Maybe it’s both.

People talk about sunrises as if they were magical things. Yet here at Fisherman’s Wharf, the morning fog forming a glorious orange blanket around a late-winter sunrise, no one except the doorman, the cab driver, and me is awake and outside. You know why? People are lazy. Even if there was a sunrise at 7:47 a.m. as brilliant and soul-stirring as a wall-sized J. M. W. Turner masterpiece, a sunrise giving out $100 bills and tomorrow’s lottery numbers, few of us would be out to see it. Most ...