I'm beginning to notice the curmudgeon I am becoming, on top of all the other things.  Writing, you see, is kind of like the opposite of the television weatherman with his perfect mood, teeth, hair, physique, skin, go-get-'em I'm-a-fun-guy attitude, place in life, etc., about to break to the commercial.  Writing really has nothing sexy to say to be marketed (along with the rest of the crap that we really don't need).  Writing is contrarian.  Writing runs completely opposite even to the sense of time that we all are sold on, i.e., linear, with the exception that writing reminds us that we are, as Buddha made note, "burning," ephemeral, mortal.

(Not that one can be against Marketing, which is taking something and making it available.  I must remember  that there's nothing wrong with it.  It's even a little flirtatious.  Marketing makes use of sexiness.  Without marketing you'd never get to that market of personal life.  The writing that is to be marketed, that takes well to it, one could well be envious of.  Who wouldn't want that, except one really maybe even perversely afraid or disdainful of fame.)

Perhaps writing is meant for a secret private part of us to respond to.  Writing is traditional, an old school craft practiced by monkish people in stone beehive-like huts on cold rainy islands.  It makes note of the sad and beautiful.  Writing is out of synch with just about everything in modernity except the farmer's market. Maybe it's meant for a certain kind of elite, an intellectual elite, one not particularly concerned with world domination, more about the inherent truths in nature that might be cataloged because they are there, like Everest is there.

This points somehow to the genius of Ernest Hemingway, who was a real writer in that he wasn't telling us particularly happy things to crow about.  He was a naturalist, observing fish in streams just for the simple sake of observing fish in streams, and also observing the human observing fish in streams.  And he knew that writing was, at best, a lonely life, nothing to be particularly proud of.  By generosity of spirit, he kept on, empathizing with the little guy, with beatific types, with the soldier who is f***ed.  And it was a just thing that he, for The Old Man and the Sea, won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  The truths he gathered are often related to the spiritual.  "Our nada, who art in nada, hallowed by thy nada," he wrote.  He was something of a packrat, a clutterer, who kept stuff, like old theater tickets.  He was happiest being out in nature.  He was a shy person, according to the photographer Karsh, the shyest man he ever met.  The literary life worked for him.

A literary scholar informs me that Tolstoy spent something like literally forty years upon horses.  I guess that's better than watching television.  Probably a good escape from writing.

Writing, attempts at writing, tends to make you sick to your stomach after the third day of doing it, for some reason.  All us writers, a bunch of bums, who should be out trying to save and protect nature and folk custom.


I walk downtown, done to the Staples to pick up a ballpoint pen, a Parker Jotter, handy for work.  Don't know where they've all rolled off to.  "I have an addiction," I tell the woman at the check-out counter.  "It's all good," she says in her red shirt, having just said the same to a discombobulated man looking like your typical service lawyer buying a large clear plastic matt to put beneath a desk or a chair, perhaps with computer cables running underneath, to protect the institutional carpet below.  "We all need our vices," she says as she takes her scanning gun across the bar codes.  A blue one, a black one, a stainless one, and a couple non-gel ink refills, gel ink being bad for shirt pockets.  At a certain point in a Jotter's lifespan, the spring seems to stop functioning cleanly, so that you have to push the point back inside the barrel of the pen, even after having clicked the top button with your thumb.

I decide to walk down to check out my old haunts near the office where I worked when I first came to town, 1901 Pennsylvania Ave.  The food court in a large building between I and K seems to have disappeared.  Scholl's Cafeteria, also, a thing of the past.  I stop for a fish taco at Baja Fresh.  A long time ago the spot was a place that sold pretty bad doughy pizza with a complex array of toppings, but I'd go and sit in it sometimes and write in my notebook.  I remember a Fine Young Cannibals song playing, "She drives me crazy."  I go past the front door of the office building, looks pretty much the same, the office directory on a wall by the elevators.  Everyday, up to the sixth floor.  On closer to GW, another place I used to write in a small open air courtyard next to what is now an Au Bon Pain.  It is closing now as I walk past its lowered gate.  A sole woman in her uniform is out smoking a cigarette, looking dazed, a feeling I can empathize with.  What did I do with my life?  What will I do with it now?

What have I done in all these years, twenty four or so, a writer asks himself.  Why I have I put up with strange jobs and hours and strangely non-existent social life, just for the sake of writing something like a book?  Wouldn't wish that life on a dog, one's thoughts go.  Strange, life.

An Aussie lady was by the wine bar on Wednesday night.  Tall, friendly, in with a lobbyist friend of ours.  She is reasonably impressed by the restaurant offerings here in Washington, but, she adds pointedly, "but no one talks to you!"  Interesting, the observations of travelers.  Yes, I guess things would be better if people talked to you.