2019 Wrap Up

For almost a decade I have written a blog post once a week. If I look back on the years 2010 to 2018, I can sum up all my posts into categories: things I wanted to share, blocks of instructions, book reviews, reading lists, author interviews and rants that I called “a call to arms.” After the first year or so, I found it difficult to keep coming up with something to write about. Every year in December when thinking about what I wanted to do for the coming year, I would try to plan things out. At best I could come up with a few ideas, often seasonal things.

For 2019, I thought I would write my manifesto. Over the years I would think about my manifesto or at the very least what my manifesto would be like. I could never come up with anything particularly. I have so many pages of musings, and sketches of ideas, but I never completed a single thing. So, knowing this about myself, why now? Why 2019? And furthermore, what would my manifesto be like? After all, I don't live in a secluded cabin with a personal vendetta against anyone or anything. I really don't care about anything. Part of it is apathy, and part of it is that I have gotten to think about the things I wanted to think about, and I've always gotten to do all the things that I've ever wanted to do. A manifesto for a guy like me is not really something I would need to do.

But, I was faced with 52 blog posts for the year 2019. I decided that I would make a cohesive piece of writing that I would then split up over the entire year. I decided to have exactly 12 chapters of about 4,000 words each that I would make into 4 blog posts of 1,000 words each. I would post on Wednesdays. Not a bad way of doing things. Then I decided that I would share something, a Youtube video or something else that would enhance my series in those months when there were five Wednesdays.

So, then, what would I write about?

Well, I took to my heroes. I looked at all the chapter headings that Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson had. I looked at the various points of the Scout Law that I know so well from my time with The Boy Scouts of America. I came up with nearly twenty chapter titles. Then I narrowed it down to twelve.

Then I wrote.

The two things I was hoping to achieve with this exercise were these: a cohesive manuscript and an ease in the writing of a year's worth of blog posts. I feel successful on both counts. I feel like I could read this entire year's worth of posts as a single manuscript-style manifesto. And I also feel like it was an easy thing to write. Every time I sat down to write, I knew exactly where I was, where I was heading and where I have been.

In short, it was a great experience.

The Future Part 3

At the time of this writing, there is one book getting published on Amazon every ninety seconds. If this post is approximately 600 words which should taken about three minutes to read, there will be four new books published on the online giant. Of the four books published during the reading of this, at least half will be self-published. And if you have a book which you think the world needs, you can probably publish your own book in about the same three minutes.

In a way, this is the greatest thing to every happen to the literate world. I mean, who wouldn't want to have all the books you could ever read at your disposal?

In a way, this is horrifying. Rather than having books, we now have data. We have data in lieu of any real knowledge. It's horrifying because we don't really have anything real, tactile, tangible. An ebook is great, but what happens when the “e” part fails. What do we do when the power goes out? We'll have the piece of mind that every ninety seconds a book was published.

The Future Part 2

Autumn of 2009 found me as an adjunct faculty member on a very collegiate looking campus. I walked through the old buildings which were half vacant and somewhat crumbling in the quiet and abandoned nooks. It felt good to walk through the trees on the outskirts of campus as the old trees began their transition to fall colors and finally shed those leaves outright. The entire fall semester was such a learning experience for me. I was still fresh out of graduate school and believed I could be, if the experience was good to me,a college instructor. Incidentally, it was not a positive experience and after the semester ended, I never taught in a formal classroom again.

The two things that really annoyed me were the two predictable things. At the time the economy was failing, or had failed. When the economy dips, it's predictable that college enrollment will increase. I found the administration at the college to be very out of touch with the outside world. They were scrambling to find classrooms and instructors for recession refugees turned enrolled students. The administrators also seemed somewhat annoyed that there was an increase of work due to these external circumstances. The second thing that really bothered me was the cellphones in my classroom. I had a few legitimate students, the rest were cellphones. At least that was the way I saw them, I saw them as cellphones. Needless to say, I could not wait to get through the 17 week semester.

The Future

If there is anything that I am thankful for, it's that I am unable to see the future. I know there are some people who wish they could see into the future, but for me, I think this would be a very dire curse. After all, if you knew what was going to happen, wouldn't you be constantly worried about it? And furthermore, wouldn't you be depressed that the future was not now?

When it comes to the future, I don't feel particularly hopeful. I once felt hopeful about the future, which is strange that I no longer do. I feel like the things I was once very excited about are the very things that now make me a no hoper. There are a few of these points. For the sake of this argument, it's the future of readers, writers and publishers that concern me.

Compensation Part 4

Lie to people. Lie to your family. Lie to your friends. Let everyone in the community think you're rich, and possibly famous. Let everyone believe that the books you penned are best sellers, and if not here, or New York, then at least elsewhere like Tanzania, Tasmania or Transylvania. It is no business of anyone to know how much or how little you get compensated for the writing that you do. It does not matter that you earned nothing more than prestige rather than any money when some small literary magazine picked up and published your short story.

It doesn't matter, not really, but I have learned all sorts of assumptions people make when they find out you're a writer. The first is that you must be really misanthropic. You must be wicked smart. You are more than likely an atheist. And the one that I love is that you must be shy. When the same people discover that you have a book, or many books, published, they have other assumptions. First, you must be more than wicked smart. You're probably famous. More than likely you have money.

It's absurd. I recently met a flour miller. I was floored. I was so excited to hear about what he did with his day, how he got into that line of work and what sort of education he had to get in order to become a miller. Needless to say, I made no assumptions about him, his personality, his bank account or the internal circumstances that led him on the path of the flour miller. Why would I? I just never understood why being a writer holds such mystic with so many people. In a way, it might be because we are subject to books and short stories and movies that have a frustrated writer as a protagonist, and therefore we're led to believe that there is something mystical about writers.

Compensation Part 3

The time never comes back. I've had the occasional time waste. I feel very fortunate that I don't fall victim to the more conventional time sucks. I don't have a television, and I never have. I do not play video games, have never been into sports. I have always felt that the time that I have has always been my own. I have never once in my life complained about not having enough time. Part of it is that I have never been one to overextend myself. The other part of it is that I know that my time is very, very, very limited. If I live a long life, and I feel like that's probable, I'm already past the halfway point. I find a little solace in that. However, my time is not preordained, and I could be at the very end of my life as I write these words, and I would never know it.

When it comes to compensation, we don't often consider time in the equation. We should. When it comes to the working world, there are allowances for time. Flex days off, extra money, etc. But what about those hours that we get to control? What about all those hours that so many of us while away in the idlest of ways? I think about these hours a great deal, and I hope to use them wisely. It's sad that I don't feel like I do as much as I could. I still get a great deal done, and like I said, I have never been one to complain of a lack of time.

Compensation Part 2

Getting paid is good. It's nice to see a whole bunch of zeros behind, well, behind any number. However, that isn't the case when you've decided to live the artist's life. It has never ceased to amaze me how any number of people, friends and family members included, have never had any trouble paying me for a drink and giving me a tip all those years I stood behind a bar. It's like they'll pay the eight bucks and a two buck tip without even blinking. Yet, come to buying one of my books? Forget about it. It's the exact same price, ten bucks, and of the ten bucks I'll get two. Sure, getting paid is a wonderful thing, wonderful indeed, but it just isn't a realistic expectation.

In fact, I feel like writing, and anymore especially, is a real hustle. I've known those creative writers who make a great deal of money, a whole lot of sales, but there is a time limit to it. I had an associate many years ago who wrote an entire series of military/zombie novels. He told me he'd had a ten thousand dollar month. Pretty impressive, and wow, I was proud of him if not a little envious. He also told me that the life expectancy of a novel in today's rapid fire publication scheme is less than ninety days. This means, of course, that a writer can work for weeks, months or years on a novel and only get the opportunity to sell that book over a period of ninety days.

Compensation

It's early morning. The small hours. It's darkness outside, the dark of night. This is the time of day when the late night people and the early morning people might overlap, but not due to personalities. It's the small hours. And the dawn is far off. And on this dawn, the one that's hours away, will be denied to you. This particular dawn will be a new day for everyone else but you. You'll be dead. This is the end of the road, the end of the line, the end of your life. This is not a threat, this is just a supposition. In this hypothetical death, you are very very very old. You have lived many years, many days and many nights and this night is the last. And also, in this picture, this late night picture, you are in a peaceful state, there has not been terminal sickness, no pain, no real indication that this is the end. But you know it is.

A thought: you now congratulate yourself on all the hours you got to work in your life. You went to work early, and you wore that badge of honor that you worked more hours than everyone else in your office. You moved more units and made more sales that the other guys. You were a loyal company man. And when you retired, forced to retire to make way for the next generation, you got another job, a retirement job, something to do, you see, to take up the hours. But this job was lucrative too, and the money never hurt. There were hours for you, television in the late evenings mostly after your family had gone to bed. The house is mostly quiet now. The children have left home, some many years ago now, they don't call too often, and they no longer come around for visits as they have families of their own. You miss your spouse, she passed a few years back. You miss your spouse as much as you can, the two of you, despite the years, hardly knew one another.

Interlude: negative affects of tv

Savage Neighbors Part 4

Then the mob returns. The mob returns to burn books. The mob returns to start to throw stones. The mob returns to lynch someone or a group of someones. The mob returns to build a wall.

If the notion of belonging to a group, a religious organization or a political party is not a frighten thought, then the prospect of being in a mob has got to be. The slow moving, nearly glacier like activity of a church does not illicit the immediate danger that the wildfire mob invokes. The mob comes, like army ants and destroys everything in its path.

The mob riots. It's the collective passion boiled up to unreal, unseen emotions. Then boom. It seems reasonable to demonize one book over another, or all books written by a certain person or group of persons. Fire can disposes of books instantly, what about governmental or cultural censorship? There is no real difference between the burning of a book and condemning it.

Mobs are notorious for the violence but they are generally localized and short lived. The systematic banning of books and ideas is far worse. This sort of thing is more permanent and less noticeable.

I felt like it was something that was nearly unseen after the turn of the century and before 9/11. It was this attitude of I'm ignorant and damn proud of it I thought I kept seeing. Then after 9/11 it was like no one wanted to travel anymore, not inside or outside of our borders. Then it seemed like all the shopkeepers in my neighbor who I knew were from other countries started to go out of business. Then it seemed like the late night coffeehouses and the activities in such places started to end earlier and earlier and earlier. Then it seemed like it was over, all of it was over.

It seemed like there was this undercurrent of fear that I was not privy to. Then it seemed like the topics of conversation all included words like stress and anxiety and depression. Then the entire place seemed to empty out. The entire country seemed to empty out. And empty further a few years later. And now, well, now, I don't know where everyone got off to. I could be way off. But I no longer recognize most of my neighbors. Many of the neighbors I do recognize, I don't understand.

Savage Neighbors Part 3

Control. It's all about control. Missionaries come to my door. They have paperwork. They have handbills and they have the GOP or the Apocalypse to sell me. They have something to do me good, to save my soul or my freedoms.

I tell them I don't believe we have a soul, but each of us are entitled two soles. And my soles, still intact will always deliver me to freedom. This is oftentimes not understood. I don't care for the organized things that come to the door complete with pamphlet or propaganda.

I mean, seriously, what? There are those people, generally on a street corner, who quote passage after passage after passage from the bible and they have a ministry. I like the bible. I mean, who wouldn't? With all that war and rape and murder and double crossing, how can anyone not like the bible? But it's not the end all of books. I really like J.D. Salinger. Now if I stand on the street corner and quote passage after passage after passage of The Catcher in the Rye, I will not have a ministry, I will have date with the county health care workers. The bible. The Catcher in the Rye. They're both books. I fail to see the difference between obsession when it comes to either one.

Savage Neighbors Part 2

I have no real aversion to someone taking drink on occasion. I don't have any real aversion to this only because I have the predilection to take a drink too. Although I don't not approve the nearly obsessive use of marijuana, I am unfortunately trapped in the dead middle of dope smoking country. I do not understand the illicit drugs that seem to transform the users into monsters. I fear the pill shakes that those pill poppers have and when you see these people in public, they seem more like zombies or sub-humans rather than someone I could talk to.

It always makes me scratch my head. Perhaps I have just been overly lucky. I have never had the cause to take pills, prescriptions or otherwise. I never had need to take any more drugs than the occasional experiment in college. And as far as the booze goes, I have never wanted to drink so much that it interfered with my ability or my time to write. I suppose, I am lucky on this point too, that the writing has always been more important than a buzz.

Savage Neighbors

I have always, since a very young age, been a creature of the night. I wish there were better things, darker things, deeper things to say about the creature of the night statement. I have often been called a vampire, but being awake in the night and being uncomfortable in the daytime is where my similarity with vampires end. After all, I am not a blood sucker and oftentimes lean to vegetarianism.

I suppose what I like about the night is the quietness that generally comes with it. Even in the nightclub districts and the bar scenes of my youth, there was a certain bustling activity and sound associated with it. But, a few paces off the nightclub entrances, the city was always fairly quiet, less cars, less people, less noise at night.

At a young age, I was safely tucked away in a suburban area. I would find my way out of doors all summer long, all night, every night. I was a meandering miscreant who never really found any trouble. Only very occasionally would I find another young traveler of the night. Sometimes, I had a planned excursion with a friend. And then, we would wander the streets until very late and postulate on the existence of man.

Education Part 4

Then come the autodidacts.

Autodidact, I like the sound of it.

I have favored some words simply because of the way they look, the way the sound or the very nature of them. For instance, I like the word apple because of the way it looks when written. I occasionally eat apples too, but it's the word I like. I like the nature of a few words too. For instance, I love the German word aufheben which means both to preserve and to annul at the same time. And as far as the way a word sounds, I like autodidact.

Education Part 3

What happens once we finish school, leave the compulsory education or graduate from any formal institution? Where do we go from there?

I think for most people it really does end there. I think for most people the workaday life begins. With that life comes the bills, the television, the routine. I don't have any real judgments one way or the other with this. It's true that most people just go through their days to collect a paycheck only to dole it back out to all the goods and services we are led to believe that we need. And on the weekends there is football on television.

I wish it wasn't like this for so many people. With all of the data given to us on a daily basis, there is so much of it that we can easily transform into worthwhile experiences and points of learning. The Internet for all of its pitfalls has more educational opportunities available at a few keystrokes than the world has ever known before. There is everything from short video tutorials to very elaborate and formally recognized courses of study. You can learn anything very quickly from the shorter how-to articles and the video tutorials. What's even greater about that is that these articles and videos are made by normal people for normal people and provided for free. With it, I feel like there is the capability to accomplish a task or create something quickly with the help of people who you will never know, never meet, never see in the flesh. What a way to share knowledge.

Education Part 2

I never had any intention of going to university. After all, I had been a student who did poorly from a very young age on. I was granted a high school diploma, but I didn't earn it nor did I deserve it. So, why go to college at all?

For me, there was a very unique set of circumstances that led me to enroll in college classes. These circumstances were both historically and personally motivated. First, when I enrolled in college, there were not a great many opportunities allowed me. In fact, there weren't many opportunities for most people my age. At the time when we were either entering college or the workforce, we were few and the older generation, the baby boomers, were many. At this time, the vast baby boomer generation was still in full swing, they were at the peak of their working careers. There were also major labor cuts and an explosion in automation that made jobs even fewer. Fortunately, college was still affordable at this time. I feel like a great many of my generation went off to college or to other countries or to alternative lifestyles because we could.

Education

I feel very fortunate to live in a country where education is both free and compulsory. I have never been offended when the schools want more money. Anyone who would begrudge a school district tax money is myopic and cruel. After all, the better the education system, the better the workers of tomorrow will be. At this point in my life I believe, we should provide the best goods and services to those who voted to support schools and leave those who voted against school budget increases out in the cold. Out in the cold where they belong.

Admittedly, I did not spend my time wisely while in that free and compulsory education. I was not a very good student and I was a very ardent truant. It wasn't that I was dumb kid. I was also not a very intelligent kid either. I was oftentimes bored, a drifting sort of student. Sure, I lacked direction, but mostly I lacked motivation and inspiration. I know that now.

Reading Part 4

Is there any reason to read outside of the obvious benefits: better vocabulary, better focus, more empathy and compassion, avoiding dementia, and as education to be a writer? I don't think so. I don't think there is anything new I can state on the subject of reading.

I feel like the all benefits aside, there is the notion that once a person begins to read they will never be the same again. With reading, there is more knowledge. There is deeper thought. There are connections being made from one side of the brain to the other. And the distance between one connection and the next is infinite. It's a pleasant thought to think that there is infinity just inside the confines of the skull. Reading, is nothing short of the greatest human endeavor.

Reading Part 3

Reading is life. And a life of reading is a full and rich life. How about the life of a writer? Simply said, I do not know how anyone can be or can become a writer without first being a reader.

I know for me, when I started to write it was nothing more than cheaper versions of all things I had been reading. I was a big fan of John Steinbeck and although my earliest efforts as a writer were nothing like the words he wrote, I certainly tried. I was also read a great deal of Ray Bradbury although my writing never came close to his either. They were early influences though, and I am grateful for that.

As I continued to read, things that I read would influence me in varying degrees. A number of very notable reads influenced me very heavily. I read Wright Morris's Love Among the Cannibals pretty late in my evolution as a writer. Despite this book being nearly fifty years old at the time that I read it, it made a very big impact on me. If I'm honest, every novel I wrote was nothing more than an imitation of this particular novel. I mean, sure, there are a great many mid-century novels that influenced me: The Movie Goer, That Sheltering Sky and Dandelion Wine to name a few. But it was Love Among the Cannibals that really did it for me. I think it was the relationships in the story, mostly between the two main characters and then the element of the road that really turned me on. I do not claim to be of the same ilk as Wright Morris, but the impact of the book was profound. I have never read anything else by Wright Morris. I have seen much of his photography, and he was an impressive photographer as well.

Reading Part 2

It's both fortunate and unfortunate to be old enough to have lived during the analogue age. I refuse to be the rambling old sentimentalist who glorifies the old days and condemns the present time. That is not part of my personality for starters and the good ol' days were the same days we have now. The old days, the analogue days were just different. I doubt people have changed, and I doubt they ever will. Perhaps the way we interact and how we see the world has changed. Who knows?

What I do know is this: everyone you see is holding a phone. I mean everyone. Not just young people who did not live during the analogue days. I mean everyone. It's a rare sight anymore to see someone holding a book, and anymore, it's rare to see someone holding a conversation. There is no judgment here, there can't be. But think about this: not less than a generation ago, seeing someone in the park or on the bus with a book was a very common thing. I know, I know, you can read books on your phone, you can have conversations on your phone, but how many people are really doing that?

Reading

As I sit at my desk and look into the bookshelves opposite me, all I see are old friends. The spines of the books that line the shelves have stories, personal stories that do not always have the same story as the one written within. There are the places I was when I bought any given book. Or the places that I read the book, also a question. There are the people in my life, or formerly in my life, who suggested a given book. And there are, of course, many books I am yet to read. I consider the unread books friends too, although we are yet to be acquainted.

Some books are the reminders of lovers. Some are the reminders of times long ago when I was young, or I felt like the world was young. Some books are the reminders of times when I was lost, or not well. Some are the reminders of the good times. Books, those vessels of knowledge, humanity, peace and the divine that cannot be discarded, lost or otherwise seen as outdated or outmoded.

2019 Interlude #2 Albert Camus

On Camus's The Physics of Happiness Part 4

Life in the open air.

Love for another being.

Freedom from ambition.

Creation.

-Albert Camus

Albert Camus's final point of The Physics of Happiness, Creation, is my favorite. In this one word, there are so many thoughts. When I think of creation, I think about everything from baking a batch of cookies to the Christian notion that god created the world in seven days.

In this physics of Camus, creation has to come last. In a way, the points before this one are necessary to promote creation. When I think about it, life in the open air is the stuff that it means to be human. The constant relationship with the day, the world in which we share with countless people, animals, stars, plants and sensations certainly opens the mind up to all sorts of thoughts and experiences. Love of another being too gives us the power to live our life in the way we as social beings need to have. When we have love, give love and share love, we able to move to the next set of desires. In a way, this is not different from what Abraham Maslow in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" tells us of our needs. And Freedom from ambition? How does that lead us to Creation.

On Camus's The Physics of Happiness Part 3

Life in the open air.

Love for another being.

Freedom from ambition.

Creation.

-Albert Camus

When I was first introduced to Albert Camus's The Physics of Happiness, I understood very clearly and very instantly the first two points. I knew life in the open air was important and in my younger years I work about a quarter of the year in the country living in a tent. I understood the importance of love of another being. I may not have understood it when love and friend was given to me, but I understood it all too well when it was denied to me. Yes, in my younger days, the first two points made complete sense. But the third point, freedom from ambition?

How is could freedom from ambition be reasonable to a young man in modern America. I was, and in many ways I still am, very competitive. I love a challenge and I especially enjoy a challenge which I can overcome. I may not be the sort of person who has to win a race, or a have the best time in an event, but try to play cards with me.

On Camus's The Physics of Happiness Part 2

Life in the open air.

Love for another being.

Freedom from ambition.

Creation.

-Albert Camus

I am a very fortunate man. I have a family of my own, people I am tied to either genetically or because we have allowed our relationship to be sanctioned by state and god. I have a small family, just three of us. We are bound together, living out our collective life, in a wonderful mode of love and domestic tasks. I am very fortunate. But I haven't always been. I have had times of loneliness.

My times of loneliness were due to geography or circumstances. Circumstances are by far more remote than any geography can take us. Times of loneliness when I felt like there was no one else I could talk to, no one to save me from danger or from my thoughts, thankfully did not come very often. Again, I am a very fortunate man.

On Camus's The Physics of Happiness

Life in the open air.

Love for another being.

Freedom from ambition.

Creation.

-Albert Camus

The first time I was exposed to Albert Camus was The Stranger. It was in the spring time. I carried a copy of the slim volume in my school bag. On the outer shores of downtown Denver on the Auraria Campus, I read Camus while the massive clouds drifted up over the Rocky Mountains some few miles away. In my younger years, so much of my freedom, so much of the peace I knew, so much of how I would later shift and form my life came from books and records. Books and records and the hours I spent reading or listening to music. It was a spring day when I read Camus. I was outside in the grass and I could hear the sounds of a downtown Denver that was on the move, on the move from a dirty derelict little western town to a major metropolitan city resting right next to ceiling of the continent.

On Bravery Part 4

It is not easy to determine when it's time to quit. It's not easy to figure out when it's time to go home. Of all the forms of bravery it takes to be a writer, bravery with the self, with others, and with your produce, the last use of bravery gets employed with it's time to quit.

There are those afternoons when one sentence, or even one word can take up all our time. It's that vague awareness that the light is shifting, that time goes on and on and that we're just working on one sentence. There is a point, though, when the sentence just has to be considered done. There is a point when the first draft of our story is completed. It's the final keystroke at this point which we much bravely leave and walk away.

On Bravery Part 3

I have known a great many writers over the years. I have had friends and colleagues who write one very short story a year. I have had friends and colleagues who'll write a novel every eight weeks and they can continue that pace for years. I have known published writers who do not have a single word written other than the books they've had published. I have known very prolific writers and I have known writers who would be content to write a sentence a week.

I have also known people who wanted to be writers, and are unable to even get started. I have known people who claim to be writers and have never written a single word. I have known people who have every excuse which keeps them from writing. This is not a good thing, these excuses, these claims, and this lack of action.

On Bravery Part 2

If only being brave was an internal thing. If the only obstacle to overcome was the one within. Of course, the internal struggle is the only one that is truly legitimate, it is not the only obstacle we have. The biggest obstacles are often the ones that we do not need to overcome. The biggest obstacles we have are the ones that ultimately do not matter. We can define these obstacles as those of society. And society whether defined as the overall structure of our families, our communities or our group as a whole, should not have any baring on our decisions to become writers or artists.

I know there are many families and many cultures out there that value the arts. There are many families and cultures that place the arts well above everything else. This is not our society in general here in modern America. This is not the family that I came from. My family, very much like the society in which we live held the highest value on money and material things. My family could easily gauge success on the size of the house over the accomplishments in a published short story. I do not mean to suggest that a person cannot have both, the big house and the published short story. I also do not mean to say that my family ever mistreated me as a writer. I was never encouraged to be a writer. I was blessed to have not been encouraged to do anything. I was also never discouraged from doing anything either.

On Bravery

I grew up with the notion that bravery was something that people had when faced with dangerous situations. Bravery was reserved for soldiers and Apaches and that it was something I should strive to have. A soldier I could be, but there was no way I could ever be an Apache. Being brave, was the first and most important of attributes to have.

When I was first cutting my teeth as a writer, I had what I considered the normal influences. Although the words I was reading were from Zamyatin and Huxley and Orwell, I began to have very different ideas of what bravery meant. It was becoming clear to me that the most hapless or the most clueless of heroes could and often were, brave. Bravery comes in forms that push along the plot, whether it is the plot in a story or a plot in life.

2019 Interlude #1 Richard Brautigan

Of the Merits of Thrift Part 4

I suppose when it comes right down to the heart of the matter, the merits of thrift, it is this: use time wisely. Using time wisely has a certain set of meanings that may be as personal as we are individual. I mean this, there are only so many hours in a day, in a year, in a lifetime. It's a question of what it means to use time wisely.

In our world of ever increasing leisure time and diversions, it really is a question of how we spend our time. It's all around us, all the time, and the distractions are so insidious that there cannot be enough words to forewarn us. There are the numerous screens, yes. There are the many hours that can be freely given to the video games, social media and one short video after another on all the outlets designed for our personalized entertainment. I am not free from these, and after I've spend the small hours of the day blindly staring into the screen, I feel a sense of loss that doesn't feel very good.

It's time that has been spent, time that is gone. And it is time that will be never be gained back.

Of the Merits of Thrift Part 3

I blame Henry David Thoreau for just about all of the existential dilemmas that I have ever had. When I was first introduced to Thoreau, of course, it was Walden. I carried a copy of Walden for a number of months in the early years of college. I was in my early 20s, back from a couple of overseas tours with the US Army, and I was learning that there was much less to life than I had been led to believe.

I can still see the tender blossoms of the cherry trees on campus on the fragile March day when I first read Thoreau's words. I would read a chapter at a time. I would read the chapter and then think about it. I would think about it some more, sometimes until it hurt and then I would think about it more. Then, I would read the chapter again. For years, I could quote Walden the way those charlatan-like people can rapid fire a Bible verse at the slightest small talk.

Of the Merits of Thrift Part 2

Only in retrospect is it a blessing to have been through relative poverty. How easy it would be to romanticize the halcyon days of youth when hopeless poor? Those days when money didn't matter, but what did was the experiences of traveling, or studying at university, or just learning about life. Yes, these are great memories, and many of us have them. But it is not right to glorify the hard times and conclude all discussions with the wistful breaths saying, those were the days.

Rather, it's those gained experiences that shape the way we are, the way we think, and perhaps the way we act. In the impoverished days of my youth, I never once felt poor. I was a college student and I worked my way through school the same way all of my classmates did. I worked all sorts of jobs, many of them at the same time. I worked in retail, restaurants, offices. I did temp work like unloading semi trailers or recycling old files for law firms. I even had a brief stint as a street performer. What I learned was this, especially at that particular time of history and my history, it doesn't take very much money to live.

Of the Merits of Thrift

In the study of classical economics, Adam Smith tells us of unlimited human desires overlaid on very limited resources. In that balance between desires and resources, most of our conflicts and problems arise. Aside from the I want, I want, I want or perhaps in our modern condition, iWant, iWant, iWant, there are other concerns entirely.

I have come to understand my position on prosperity and thrift even more fully with age. Over the years I have seen many of my friends take on absurd amounts of debt, liabilities and stresses because they have either wanted something, been told they want something, or have made the decision that having something is more valuable than the time it would take to pay it off.

It is easy to put money in the center of prosperity and thrift, as money is the most tangible thing we all seem to agree upon. And even the words prosperity and thrift invoke the idea of money. And when it comes down to it, we trade all sorts of things, time, morals and life for money. In this way, we have all learned that time is money. Perhaps time is money, and that is something that I never say, never think, nor have I ever believed. In fact, my ideas are the exact opposite: money is time.

Friendship Part 4

I like to consider friendship in fiction for a better understanding of humanity. This may seem trite, but it is how we make sense of the world. I have always subscribed to the fact that nonfiction may be true, but fiction is the truth. I have met people over the years who claim to hate fiction. Of course anyone who has said that to me, it's the last conversation we have. How could someone possibly say to me that they hate fiction when they find out that that was what I did, what I wrote? It's truth that we find in fiction. A work of fiction is somehow attached to something very real, very universal. In these stories we meet characters who are moving along their own trajectory and finding the truth for themselves.

When I consider the portrayal of friends in fiction there are the predictable books that come to mind. Those books we all grew up with. Books like John Knowles A Separate Peace which was on my reading list in high school. The entire story is really about two young prep school boys shortly before or right at the start of the second world war. Another example would be Ishmael and Queequeg in Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Of course, the greatest friends that I can ever imaged would have to between Huck Finn and Jim in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. There's hundreds more. Thousands.

Friendship Part 3

In this complex world of human endeavors, I know the way in which we build friendships are every bit as complex. We have shared experiences, we have the opportunity to discuss different experiences. Along with everything else, Aristotle defined friendship. To him there were three types of friendship: of utility, of pleasure and of the good. Being in the business of writing everything down, of course Aristotle would have the inclination to define friendship. In his day, speech and philosophy were the same disciple. And the discussion of what it took to be a good friend was part of the conversation.

The idea that there is a friendship of utility means that you have a friend who is useful to you in some way. I think this is a very common friendship when we consider the people we work with, or the people we see in school. These are certainly friends, and the common plane is the workplace. In all the years I worked restaurants, I always felt like I had a built-in circle of friends, the people I talked with during work hours and the people that I sat shoulder to shoulder with in drinking establishments that the normal people just would visit.

Friendship Part 2

Sometimes I become very disappointed by the way it has all turned out. In a crowded dinning room recently, I noticed first the low volume then I realized why. There were people in groups of twos and threes at individual tables. It seemed like nearly everybody was engaged with their personal device. Nobody spoke, at least not to the heartbeat with whom they shared a table.

This is not a new conundrum. It's been slowly invading our public places for years. I remember the rowdy coffeehouses of my youth where everyone seemed hopped up on caffeine and nicotine and we spoke about all those things you'd imagine to hear. There was fierce political thought. There was anecdotes, there were card games. There was always this allure of love or at least sex. In those days, at the danger of sounding like a sentimental old man, we made fun of the one guy in the corner looking into a computer screen. We made fun of the guy looking into the computer screen and looking into a screen is what I am doing now. In the halcyon days before technology made us instantly connected and instantly compartmentalized, we made fun of anyone who wasn't doing what we were doing: drinking coffee and talking loudly about nothing and everything.

Friendship

Imagine this: we're all in a darkened room, a large room like a sports arena. Everyone gets issued a box. This particular box is like the box you made for grade school valentine's day cards. And then we're set free into this large darkened room. We're tasked with collecting friends. We will collect friends like small valentine's day cards and put them in the box. The first one who has their box overflowed with friends wins the game.

I wonder if this is the way we collect friends, or if this is the perception of the collecting friends. In this way, we take a two dimensional representation of a friends and file it into a box simply called “friend.” In 1842 Russian writer and satirist Nikolai Gogol's book Lost Souls set about describing upper middle class Russian life as defining wealth with the number of serfs one owned. Of course, with the more serfs someone owned, the more taxes that person paid. Gogol's main character Chichikov set about the countryside to buy the souls of dead serfs which he got at a good price. Those who sold him dead souls were free from the taxes they'd otherwise have to pay. And Chichikov? Well, on paper he seemed very rich. We may not collect lost souls, but we do collect friends & followers. I don't see how this is any different from Chichikov collecting souls of dead serfs in order to seem more wealthy or powerful.

The Village Part 4

We live in strange times where we are led to believe all sorts of things that have only half truths or alternatively, half lies. We are led to believe that people on the other side of the globe are engaged in awful activities that somehow conflict with our own way of life. We have these thoughts and then we are led to believe that we live in a world community, a world village. Either thought can be silly or trite. If there are people elsewhere in conflict with our own activities, can not the same be said about us? And how can well over seven billion of us agree on anything specifically the way a village can work through some issue together.

I am as patriotic as they come. I love the country I live in even during the times I am critical of it. I love that we have our laws, and out borders and boundaries. I love that we have the freedom of speech. I also love that I do not agree with most of my countrymen, but I will gladly fight to the death to protect their freedom of speech. To further that thought, I love that there are other countries across the globe filled with people who have their own beliefs and laws and systems of doing things. In some cases, I feel like people deserve more, but I cannot judge an entire system adequately with the lens I see through.

The Village Part 3

When I think about all the places I've ever lived, I cannot think of a single place that was better and for that matter, worse, than any others. Sure, there are merits to every place you go, there are difficulties in every place too. For instance, I lived in Tucson, Arizona in the summer time once. It was a hot miserable place, dead and abandoned in every way. It was a particularly bad time of life for me. I loath the sun, I hate heat. It was the wrong place for a guy like me. However, I did not feel like that at all. Even though there were all sorts of problems for me both externally and internally, I really dug the place. I met wonderful people there. The experience as a whole was the precedent for everything that followed.

There are those times in life when we learn about ourselves. These times always seem to be times of adversity. The things that we learn about ourselves are generally not very good. This is the idea that what doesn't kill us, makes us stronger. This was certainly the case with me in the days of Tucson, Arizona.

The Village Part 2

It was a great many years ago that I came to Longmont, Colorado. I had come because my wife's family lives in Longmont. It seemed like this terrifically exotic place surrounded by the great Rocky Mountains on one side and farmland everywhere else. It was filled with that strange agricultural-industrial ruin you find in small places. There was the defunct and decaying sugar beet refinery. There was still an operational turkey packing plant which did not smell good. There were the rails with the patina of red rust snaking their way through the old warehouses. There was a Main Street, an old neighborhood of stately homes and plenty of open space between.

Longmont, for years captured my imagination. It became this strange fictional backdrop I could reference when I wanted to write a short story. I would put a few people on the streets of my imagined Longmont and give them some sort of missed connection or lost cause to deal with. In my world, I made Longmont to be the quintessential western agricultural center. And since we lived just down the road in Denver, I knew I would be going to Longmont for holidays or parties. Anywhere you go for a party or a holiday is always a great place. Even though Longmont was not a reference point for me and my past, there was something about going to Longmont in those years that made me think of the place as a home or as a sort of home.

The Village

It stretches across decades and time zones and continents. All the places where I have lived and for as long or as short as I have lived there are more than I can recount. As a child, my parents sent me back and forth over state lines from California to Utah. I can only guess at the number of moves I made in those early years. And perhaps the uncertainty of younger years led me to live the vagabond life as an adult.

The longer periods of time, for me, I lived in Denver. I lived in Portland. In the shorter periods of time I called Sacramento, Tucson, New Orleans and rural Vermont home. I have had the opportunity to be in Mexico City, Ansbach Germany, Lisbon Portugal and the most exotic of places in rural Colorado and Oregon for extended periods of time.

What I have learned in these places, was that each was populated with the people and things that I knew there. In each of these places there were certainly bookstores and coffeehouses and bars. There were friends and lovers or the illusion of friends and lovers. There were days and nights in these places when I was alone, because I was always mostly alone, and I was able to think and daydream and recoil and smile. I do not have specific memories but rather the memory of memories.

Self Reliance Part 4

Ultimately, listening to the silence of yourself and achieving self reliance, is not a very fashionable thing to do. This sort of behavior is not so easily transmitted via the ether to any give social media platform. This sort of behavior is not the sort of thing that marketers can cater to. It's tough for the outside to get in. And it may be too difficult to define to the outside what is happening on the inside.

In 1841 when Ralph Waldo Emerson published his essay Self Reliance he summed up all of this themes very articulately. He meant to say to the world that each individual needs to avoid conformity and false consistency, and simply obey their own instincts and ideas. Emerson was very critical of society. He was critical of the church despite being an ordained Unitarian minister himself. Self reliance to Emerson is a very personal journey. To Emerson, we all have the capability of self reliance.

I believe in the Emersonian view of self reliance. I'm in it totally, subjected to the thoughts of a man who specifically told me not to let anyone think for me, including Emerson himself. But even following the ideals of Emerson or the greater community of the American Renaissance writers like Thoreau, Hawthorne, Whitman or Melville, can only go so far in our modern times.

I don't suppose that humanity has changed all that much since the beginning of time. I believe that ancient humans were just sophisticated and just as deep thinking as we are today. I believe the human curiosity and human intellect built the pyramids at Gyza and the library at Alexandra. I also believe that it was human intellect and human destruction that destroyed the library at Alexandra or any number of cities from Famen Temple to New York's World Trade Center.

What has changed, I suspect, is how much there is. I mean there is more of everything than Emerson would have imagined. The population of Concord may not have grown much, but think about the population of Boston or Massachusetts or the United States and especially the world.

Self Reliance Part 3

Karma Repair Kit:
Items 1-4 

by Richard Brautigan

1. Get enough food to eat, and eat it.

2. Find a place to sleep where it is quiet, and sleep there.

3. Reduce intellectual and emotional noise until you arrive at the silence of yourself, and listen to it.

4.

I think about Richard Brautigan a great deal. Outside of his first book Trout Fishing in America I don't think he had a very wide audience. Although I can think of many merits to Trout Fishing in America, of all the books of his that I read, it isn't my favorite. After I began to read Richard Brautigan, I could not stop. Over a period of about a year, I read everything of his I could get my hands on. In those days, in those pre-Amazon, pre-internet shopping days, getting my hands on Richard Brautigan's books took me to every used bookstore from San Francisco to Cincinnati.

Self Reliance Part 2

A warning for our time: do not let anyone or anything take your concentration away.

We've all seen it. We've seen the people who drive their car and they have a cup of coffee in one hand and a phone in the other. They are not focused on any one thing. They are not focused on the coffee, probably not on the phone and certainly not on the road. I am not above it, I have been distracted too. I have had my attention split in many directions and I have had my concentration shattered. I've just tried to keep this at a minimum and not in a chronic state like it would be should I be careless.

The term “multitasking” has become increasing trite in recent years. Multitasking implies that a person can carry on with many things, none related, at once and get everything done. To me, this just creates confusion. Back in the car with the coffee and the phone call and eyes that should be on the road, is it really whole the hassle? I imagine if automobiles did not have any safety features, like seat belts, airbags or crumble bumpers, and if instead had a large sharpened metal spike that stretched from the steering wheel to the driver's face, multitasking would not be reserved for the car. I think if there was a reminder of the immanent outcomes of just one moment of carelessness, everyone would treat the operation of a motor vehicle with a level of mindfulness none of us currently understand.

Self Reliance

I have been blessed. My entire life has been a blessing. I have never felt otherwise. Like many of us, I have gone through those rough times, those dark times, the trouble times. This is what it means to be alive and to be sure, I would fear for anyone who has not seen rough times. These down times in life, whether it is financial, emotional or physical serve only to make a stronger person. When I say that I have been blessed it is for many, many reasons. The biggest reason, perhaps, is that I have been able to do everything that I wanted to do. All I ever wanted to be is a writer and that's really all I've ever been.

Another blessing that has occurred to me recently is one that is seemingly ridiculous. There is a very real and strange sensation that happens in my gut when I am subjected to a television. It happens when I look at a computer screen too, particularly an ad filled web page with flashing and blinking banners and boxes. And unlike most people these days, I do not carry a hand held device that constantly tells me what to do and what to think. It's a blessing that there has never been a television in my house and a blessing that in the these days of smart devices that I do not subscribe to them either. Like I said, this was not a conscious choice, I refuse to have devices that invade my thoughts, but rather a reaction to a physical sensation.

Higher Laws Part 5

In this complex world of making a living and obeying higher laws, I would be naive to suggest that we would all go one way or the other. It would be impossible, or next to impossible for all of us to throw away all confines to modern life and simply make art. It would not work. It just wouldn't. How could it? Who would teach the children? Who would grow the food? Who would fix our teeth? No, if all of us really listened to those higher laws, those driving forces, those things that compel us to make art, and then followed those laws to the letter, not only would the system vanish, we'd all die of starvation.

However, the opposite is nearly as bad. I do not want to make a grim prediction for the future much less the present. However, I think the higher laws are blatantly or at least lazily being ignored by way too many of us. I really do feel like we are bombarded by too much all the time. I feel like there is too much media, too much allure of the next great thing. I feel like the old fashion constrictions like church and state do not seem so bad now in light of pills and screens. Again, this is just my observation, and I am doing my best not to be so grim.

Higher Laws Part 4

Unfortunately, we do not live in a world in which all of us can focus on the intoxication of the day, the day spent in creative tasks. We have to negotiate the practical. We must, most of us on a varying scale of wealth and living expenses, pay the rent. We must earn money and procure the food and cook the food and clean up after the food. We must, all of us, live, make a living, make a life.

This balance between paying bills and living life overlaid on the making of art seems like it is in direct conflict with the path to the higher laws. Perhaps it is. Many years ago, I worked with a very talented and very artistic man. He could play just about any musical instrument he handled. He could paint pictures reasonably well. He could work with metal and made tables, chairs, beautiful structures. His home was a work of art, every nook, every corner. I loved him dearly, and in many ways all these years later, I still do. We had a friend who was an inspired artist. This artist was a printmaker and he engraved copper plates for his relief prints. As for me, I was an aspiring writer. I had, at the time, been writing short fictions and bad poetry rather unsuccessfully for a few years. I had had a handful of publications.

So, enter the welder, the printmaker and the writer.

Higher Laws Part 3

Something that has always dumbfounded me is the lack of time we are led to believe unavailable to us. It's like everything is instant,and instantly we have less time that ever. There are the 24 hour conveniences, the 24 delivery and the world of instant data at our fingertips 24 hours a day. And we are made to think we have no time?

I cannot and will not subscribe to this. I have all the time in the world, and time is all I really have. When we listless or perhaps haplessly float in a sea that pushes us this way and that at the whims of racketeers and marketers, we are too busy torn every which way. Our minds are muddled. We begin to comply with those terrifically organized things that make us a part of a whole. Being a part of a whole, despite sounding comforting, serves to make each of us slower as a group than any part individually.

We become pitted one against the other, at least in this modern age of commercialism. Buy this and be that and you will be happy. Buy more and be more. How does this serve anybody? This serves only to remove the image we hold deep inside and puts us in a state that shows not what we are but what others think we are, or should be.

Higher Laws Part 2

I would define Higher Laws as something that can never be written down, reread by others in authority or teachers. Higher Laws cannot be spread over the whole populace as an unifying theory. Your Higher Laws and mine can never be the same. Like me, you must obey the laws that govern you.

In this modern world of legal ordinances and societal regulations, we all know that the laws of men do protect us as a whole. We know that we must not steal, we must not murder, we must not imbibe in all those things legal or illegal and then drive a stole tank through the streets of Los Angels. I do not find the higher laws of the artist or the writer to be in direct opposition to the laws or morals of modern society. Rather than complementary, the laws of the system the laws of the artist are both parallel and perpendicular.

Higher Laws

The sun came through that famous brown cloud one bright November morning. Lit like it was, complete with the soundtrack of suburban commuters in individual cars, the wash of the morning was at once peaceful and depressing. The dirt worn asphalt seemed like it was a century old, and neglected nearly as long. The errant weeds of summer were dry and in their spiny grasp were the wrappers of fear and consumption: cigarette boxes and butts, beer cans and soda bottles, the waxy wrappers of fast food burgers and tacos. In each car, hermetically sealed from the outside world, animals that resembled human beings moved along this road, insular and cellular.

At the base of it, there seems to be an order. People wake up alone or in small families inside individually wrapped houses. There, they turn on any number of electronic media screens and get the news of the world. The news seems to give off a little more than events, it seems to give off a little of xenophobic fear which can easily be quenched with the purchase of any number of things, mostly data packages, big cars or small pills. Then, when the morning sermon finishes, it's time to seal up in a vehicle and move off, alone, to an institution.

One the bright November morning in question, along that route in the suburbs, there seems to be nothing more than the task at hand: getting from one place to the other. This is the appropriate time, this is the mandate. This is the system: get up and go, get to work and make money and pay it all out to tax, to utilities, to all the things the media said you need. These are the unwritten laws than govern the system. We all know this, some of us minimize it, some of us fight it and some of us glorify it.