Interviews

I don't think you can really write until you accept your basic drive to ignore.  The Buddha is right.  You're better off ignoring.  I mean, it's nice to sample here and there, what people might construe as life...  It's nice to know the history of people, the places, your own people, but, the usual Friday night stuff, as a writer, you know your better off just staying home and focussed.  Get a bike ride in.  Do some dishes.  Have a glass of wine, by yourself is fine, no need to deal with anyone.  Peace.  Time to catch  up on your thoughts, freed from the business of work.  An old friend, manager, now he owns a Japanese tavern, calls from the restaurants worked at together, remembers you as a hard-working guy, hey, nice.  Cool.  A conversation of such is acceptable.

"Attachment is the root of all suffering."  Distraction is the root of all suffering.   A day off is a day off.  Go grocery shopping.  Procure wine from old friends, as is customary.  Then, get back to the apartment, exercise, clean, cook, eat, take it easy.  This does not exclude having meaningful conversations, once that lens has been accepted.  The ego has been banished.  Along with that, a lot of the tiresome, a lot of the dishonesty.

There are enough thoughts to get back in touch with, while the mind is still able to do such things, the balancing act of thinking.  Catch what lightning you can while you still can.  The burst of thoughts that pulse through the mind.  The brain functions still, even we might be unconscious.

The bike ride is a long thing.  The pedal strokes are many.  That's why you have to let yourself have that time to write, until it's no longer possible.  Long distance.  The long slow pace.  Steady.

I used to get superstitious about writing.  In the morning.  No talking, not that anyone nor I was in such a position where I'd have to talk.  Order a coffee.  The online thing was less back then, when I wrote so.   Avoid any outside infection  of thought or word.  Minimize, as best you can.  I'd go down to the corner patios of coffee shops and attempt to let it flow.  Background noise helped.

As an older fellow, it's more about the self protection, the exercise element.

People marry narcissists.  The apparatchik evil of the world, of the self-chosen dictator.   Bad money driving good money out of the market.  Narcissist buy large houses, shout their politics, conform...



The basic law:  if you accept or strive for a job. the more it is your ego, thus the worse you will attend to its duties.  If you've not been chosen immediately, nor strived for it,  or been tasked with it, then you will be a good servant.

John F. Kennedy did not want to be a pol.  He was shy, sick, skinny, not good at it, wanted out the back door.

If you seek out the job, then you are the typical at it, using it selfishly, an imitation, which might fool some people.

If you battle with the very choice of it, and in some ways mentally despise what you do, but on the gut level accept it because you must, taking it through physically, because you have to, then you'll be good at it, by some law that must be observed.


I've always taken jobs no one else really wanted that badly.  Busboy.  Day-bartender, on up to head bartender.  The place then got corporate.  The wine bar had nothing going on.  Patience.

It's perhaps the most monkish of occupations, actually.  It falls under cover of evening, under the guises of the sins of the gluttonous and the wine drinker.


Let out your own spiritual thinker;  listen to your spiritual teachers whose actions are lessons.

Forty days, out in the desert, silent, what did he eat?   An unimaginably long time, like unto years almost...  What's he doing out there?  And for his part, he found himself worthy, enjoying the riches allowed by the instinctively met challenge, a calling he heard.