Being More Effective, the preamble

It's a vast amount of hours gone. It happens very slowly, or it seems to. What happens is this: it's dark here very early in the evening now, and it stays dark all night. It's quiet, or relatively, where I live. Almost all my memories over the entire course of my life have happened at night. I have never liked the morning, I've liked the afternoon only slightly more. I am a pasty and pale dude. And when the night comes on, the world stills, the place quiets and my entire family goes to bed. Then, I am alone. This is all I want, all I want all day long is the peace and quiet and to be alone. These hours are vast, and they go by fast. I have all night.

In my youth, and I suspect everyone can say this, I became a different person at night. The rake came out, or at least the hedonist. Again, the world is quiet at night and so this sort of behavior is reserved for the few night dwellers. For many years of my life I would not write at night, I would not read at night. No, night was, for well over twenty years, reserved for gaining experiences. Many of my experiences I have fictionalized in most of my short stories and some of my novels. I think all writers do this. During these years of nightlife, I wrote, read, worked, studied, and otherwise did what I had to do during the day. I have been a morning writer for most of my life. I mean, during the morning I am resentful and peevish, so I should spend my time writing.

November Conclusions Part 3: (pre)Occupations

I finished my manuscript (pre)Occupations today. This is generally a real cause for celebration. And anyone who knows me, knows that I love celebrations. Or rather, I like to drink, especially after completion of a project.

What I hoped to do with this project was to think about Longmont, the town where I live, in a different way. I both love and loath this town. I love it because this is home and this is where I live. I love my people here. I don't like the place because the two most dominate cultures here are the weed culture and the frackers. Either way, I don't get it. I just wanted to write a group of larger (5,000 word) short stories set here in Longmont. I chose to write each one about a character who has a specific job, or occupation. In a big way, I started to look around and see daily life here as very magical. Although it will always be hard to overlook the weed people and the kill 'em all, frack! Frack! Frack!, I did see my town for what it really is, Anytown, USA. Even the people on the streets captured my imagination.

November Conclusions Part 2: A Scout is Brave

It was about this time last year when Janice and I were at the Cafe Luna in Longmont. I want to like this little coffeehouse because it reminds me of all the little coffeehouses in both Northwest Portland and in New Orleans in the old days when I lived in both of those towns. It's funny though, I don't like the place. Too loud. The clientele are Jerry Garcia impersonators. It's not dirty enough to seem cool and it isn't clean enough by today's standards. It does have a few big south facing windows and a small room of books. It was one of those mornings, late November, Janice and I started to talk about blogs and how a blog can be good for a writer.

Not to belabor my feelings for the blog and the writer, let me just say that we started a blog in that moment. In that moment, we were two aging Gen Xers in a sea of fearful Baby Boomer banter. While all the other patrons were talking about foreign invaders and terrorists, Janice and I posted a blog entry complete with The Dead Milkmen.

November Conclusions Part 1: The Buchanan Book of the Dead

So, two dudes walk into a bar... Last night, my buddy Stefan and I decided to get a drink. The world, or at least our neighborhood seemed very dead. Yes, it's November, the nights come on early and it seemed much later than it was. Come on? Where was everybody? We landed up in a bar a few blocks away, and suddenly it all made sense. It was the seventh game of the World Series, and there were a great many people inside watching it. We sat at the bar, ordered gin and watched the game too.

This is not really a conversation about baseball. And it's not really a conversation about two dudes in a bar. What it is, really, is about the screen—in this case the television screen—we were watching. I don't have a TV at home. I never have. It is not a matter of me thinking I'm too good for it. The truth is, I don't do well with TV. The images move too fast, the volume changes too much, and fuck you and your advertising. I just feel sort of overstimulated and somewhat seasick. Consequently, I just don't watch TV. Last night, being a little different, I stared into the screen with my slack jaw like everyone else. I couldn't wait to leave which is just what we did when it was over.