I get up late.  Early morning the mind was awake, the body not able to move, then slipping back into a heavy sleep, dream, waking up groggy.

What I wrote yesterday seems a bit strange to the eye today.  Foreign.  The brain is in a different place today, its juices a different blend.  The chemistry is firing in a different way.

There is the embarrassment of putting a piece of writing out on social media, and I am considering hitting the delete button.  But the laundry is done.  Vacuuming.  I start the day with green tea, a turkey and butter sandwich on gluten free bread, take my pills and vitamins, call mom, who is happily en route with a colleague friend Jane P. to The Press Box for dinner.  I call at an opportune moment, giving them directions, over the bridge, left lane, left turn single, first street after the bridge.  She is happy, and I am glad to hear a happy laugh in her voice.

The piece was meant poetically, not to be taken literally.  By the late of day it looks foreign, not to be taken as literally as people will be inclined to take it.

As I lay in a thick red mummy bag, the bed clothes not set, as I drift in an out of the comfort of sleep, I think of the lack of physical erotic companionship.  Perhaps the consequences of events written about in Hero For Our Time.  I've always had a healthy taste for the opposite sex, but maybe I just come off as too strange, or I drink too much then, or to them I seem to have no discernible game, or I'm just a stubborn bloody Capricorn, too obviously crazy, who knows...


I look in the mirror and see that the haircut I gave myself the previous night with Ken Burns The Civil War playing in the background with a Wahl battery powered shaver lacks a bit to be desired, but rather than lamenting too long how bizarre the fresh look is, the I take it upon myself to clean it up a bit, which means shortening things with another round, looking in the shaving mirror with the reflection of the back and sides of my head in the bathroom mirror and going over, like a mower, the uneven spots.  And then finally more or less pleased with the results, into the shower, get the clippings off, shave the neck underneath the beard, come out clean.

With writing you have to be serious.  As with anything professional.  You cannot hem and haw, you cannot go halfway.  You have to write.  With focus.  Like cutting your own hair.  Like the chef owner of a restaurant.  For me, this means putting away the distractions of social life.  For me this means working in a restaurant.  You have to be dedicated.  And this is the lesson of maturity.  You have to create yourself.  That's the only way.  You have to let the God part in you reach down to the Adam part of you.

It is simple enough to be human.  You need sleep.  You get hungry, you need to eat.  You work to make a living.  You do the laundry, check the mail, wash the dishes, and try not to get distracted...

So, you wake up one day, and you ask yourself, hmm, what was all that about...  And then you get back to writing.  And you just write, like I'm writing now.

For me this means, proverbially, pulling the old books out, much as Quixote does at the beginning of his own story.  Take them out, remember them, the good stuff, the stuff you respond to, the stuff that strikes you as real.


Only time will tell, if the effort was worth it, or even if it amounts to anything.