Day off after four straight busy nights.  A decent mood is essential to this day's creativity.   Sometimes I've been too tired and low to make much of the day off beyond the couch.

I can understand why Hemingway was shy, why writers are shy.  The good mood can be fragile.  Insularity has an importance, for the writer in a world which operates separately from his ways.  He is a quiet Zen monk of routine in a world he does not figure into, an economic stray, doing something for absolutely no discernible reason nor logic.  Who has left it to him to be his own preservation society, his own museum of odds and ends most grown ups would take to be childish as toy soldiers and such, mementoes of old neighbors and departed dad and grandparents, of old letters and pictures over the years.

The decent mood is necessary for the concentration, for the calm, for the meditation, for the creative nature, for the cellular level of such work.  Too much time off will drive one crazy enough.  A bright outlook has to be summoned.  One has returned to the library.  The spiritual star crosses over the accumulated literature of one's shelves.

Light box, Vitamin D, classical music, the start of putting things back in order.  A good apartment is uplifting.

Down in the basement, I put a load of a sheet, work shirts and a pillow into the washing machine, a fairly new one, one of those high efficiency low water kinds.  I watch it fill, slowly, spraying down from the lip of the canister, light in flow.  It takes a while to fill, but I stand over and watch;  how does it do its thing?  I've looked at these new models and options more carefully, now that mom needs a new one.  In a quiet way, here on a cool drizzling Thursday evening, dark out, watching how something works helps the wheels spin, in an uplifting way almost.

I suppose I came a bit closer to a bad place than I would have wanted to.  It had been building a long time, a long time finding the fears and anxieties difficult to hold off.  Building to a bad couple of years with a lot of things in question, up in the air, it seemed, causes for concern on several fronts, even as I pursued therapy and a serotonin uptake inhibitor and other measures, sometimes going to work was difficult.  Going out of the house was difficult.  What were these deeper values I had, apparently, tried at least to follow?  What was work?  What should I do for a job, a real job, and even too tired and out of synch to do even the slightest thing about it, about looking for a new job, benefits.  At one point, in the last days and months of the Obama administration my brother began to strongly suggest I get a federal job, the kind completely unskilled people have to take, something like a travel scheduler, for clearly I had no other skills, and the restaurant pay wasn't, would never be, enough to made anything close to local rent.  I tried, I added another shift, I kept going, but it didn't really work.  The one attempt at security I tried was an unappealing and ultimately failing enterprise that basically left me back where I had started.

But slowly it dawned on me, I would have a hard time not being physically involved with work.  And that entity within, with such tastes and distastes, to aversions and proclivities, that was as much the writer as anything else.  For writing books and anything else is some kind of physical labor, and the books on a shelf are comforting, for they show that writing is physical, in a way far less evident on a computer screen.

After observing my mother growing elderly, I began to understand, somehow she needed these over piled shelves and piles of books.  I did too.

A book, a sentence, hides the labor it took to make it.  The cover does not belie the long hours, the late nights, the travels to and fro in heat, in rain, in cold, and all other conditions of weather and hour, day and night.  The cover does not tell how the writer fed himself, much of what he ate, what he cooked, the energies spent.  The cover does not tell of difficulty sleeping, nor of difficulty falling asleep, or difficulty waking.

And if you're lost, if you lose the bulk of the reasons why you are doing all that which is on the side, but which is rather full-time, if you lose the understanding of the greater purpose and the sense of what writing a book might be about, might have to offer, then none of it is happy or satisfying.

So you wait on people.  You wait on the appreciative, the distracted, the self-concerned, you listen to talk of what people find to be justifying of their own seriousness and self-importance and all of their projects.  And sometimes, this hurts, all that getting a whole lot of the self-justification and reward stories of other people, while what you yourself are trying to do grows more and more twilight and obscure, sound and fury, signifying nothing, a tale told by an idiot.  Who would bother to read it anyway?

Tiredly, closing up shop, the painful last mile of it, the last glassware to polish, the paperwork to do, the cleaning of working surfaces and countertops, the feeling of running on fumes...  That college boy bright and concerned is a thing dim and tarnished, dusty.

But one thing they will tell you, in therapy, is that it will benefit you if you try, at least try, to follow through with your own values.  Remember them, act on them.  Continue to carry them.

The catch is that this requires one being able to keep in a decent mood, to not be down too often.

And maybe, to make a break through, that one which you have striven for, you need to go through a long dark night of the soul, the obscurity of the darkened wood, the obscurity of obscurity itself.  You have a point to make, one which held a value in physical work, from landscaping, to reading, to writing itself.


Of course.  It stands to reason.  The people who are capable of tangible success of the financial sort, give them credit for what they do and their hard work, must be, almost by definition, entirely selfish, unconcerned with the planet, with the human condition.  They might offer useful innovations, sure, to their credit.  But, they have succeeded in looking out for themselves, not that they do not help the un-clever...  Good for them.

But that is them.  And this is us.


I wish the best for all writers making a living today, making their modest hay on current issues, on being visible in milieu of social media, satisfying the primary need of perpetuating the animal they ride upon.  Louder voices than my obscure one, theirs of import, mine trivial.



Writing at the end of the period of humanity's useful literary effort, simple observations are necessary on the craft and its meaning.  It takes a kind of courage to face the breakdown, the manly/womanly breakdown.  You understand it finally as something necessary, a kind of credential, with literary precedence. The breaking apart of conventional thought, the entryway into the thinking beyond.

In such a state, one finds himself drawn to the writers one had always been drawn to.  Lincoln.  Twain.  Sherwood Anderson.  Kerouac.  Books in hand.  Which of them did not have a breakdown of some sort, and then a break from, then writing about the process.  They reached a point upon which let them not care for what anyone thought of them, finding it made little difference what anyone might think.  It's a good habit, anyway, for the maintenance of one's own integrity.