Writers, Spiders and Glowing Moss, Part 3

It's a really funny thing. All of it's funny. I live in Denver, Colorado. I've lived here off and on for over thirty years. It's funny because there are significant enough breaks in my life here that I can honestly say that every time I moved to Denver, the place was vastly different than when I left. I think each time I've come back here I've liked the place less and less.

Writers, Spiders and Glowing Moss, Part 2

The summer of 2000 found me at Camp Cooper. This was my sixth year at summer camp and it was my last. Although I hated Camp Cooper, I am thankful for one thing, I spent most of my time alone and sober. I lived in a cabin in the dense coastal woods. My cabin had plumbing and hot water, but it had no electricity.

I had bought a manual typewriter in the spring at a church tag sale in McMinnville, Oregon. Knowing that my laptop needed electricity and my love affair with the composition notebook was strained due to the recent loss of one the autumn before, I thought a manual type writer would be beneficial.

Writers, Spiders and Glowing Moss

At the end of the century, I lived in the Pacific Northwest. I worked for the Boy Scouts of America. I was a recent college graduate and I had not yet lost the idealism that all young people ought to have. In retrospect, I had every reason to be cynical, angry and a bit befuddled. In 1999, at the time of this story, I was back from the war only 8 years, back in the states for 7. I had graduated from Metro State in 1997, and I had traveled extensively all through the western states, lived in rural Colorado, Mexico City and San Francisco. And in 1999, I moved to Portland for a job. It was to become an antagonistic job too. After all, I had wanted to be a writer, whatever that meant, and working for the Boy Scouts was just not part of my image of what a writer should be.

On living, quietly at home with the family and writing

It's not difficult to let writing slip away from you. If writing is not what you do when you punch a clock, it will oftentimes be forced lower down the list of importance. After all, most of us have life to contend with, right? There is the question of the bills and the smaller more pesky question, how are these bills going to get paid? Most of us have families, and many are at home rearing young. I'm part of all of this too. I never really understood the “rat race” metaphor. I understand the life of quiet desperation and yet, I fear, the desperation in our house is anything but quiet. When it comes down to it, I think the rents are way too high for what we get, the privilege of a phone, that I never seem to answer, and all the other niceties and needs are often less than needs or nice things. On the outside, the way we live at my house makes us all look like monks. Yet, I can't think outside of it, I still think we have too much and too much of what I don't think I want or don't think we need.