Most writers do the bulk of their work before a certain age sets in.  At fifty your life is over, it's all epilogue now.

You run out of energy, out of the fire in the belly.  And to get done what you still can manage, you need medicine, you need good shape, you need wine.

A dream I have, in which I am a itinerant wine shopper.  The wines are Italian, and my tastes are French.  I've gone out looking for a good wine because of a sort of argument with my brother, who is having a nice dinner party attended by important well-to-do friends, his friends.  To make amends I go on this hike, which doesn't seem far at first, a way of cooling down.  "Don't go, you'll be missing out," one of his friends tells me, but I need some fresh air, some space to think.  So I'm wandering.  The wine shop is part restaurant.  There's a little patio out front.  I stop to talk, or linger, with my shopping bag.  I look through the wine shop, which is apart, in the back, or upstairs...  Racks.  The wines are unfamiliar.  Strong, jammy, high in alcohol.  I ask if there is anything similar to, say a Pinot Noir, from Burgundy.  The guy points a couple out.

More time has passed, I don't know doing exactly what, people, distractions, trying to help out another, confusion...  And then I know it's late.  I go back to the wine shop, except this time there is another guy, who, says, you know what, you are a freak, you act inappropriately, who needs a bum like you, get the hell out of here and do not come back.  I am surprised, feeling this unwarranted, what the fuck...  The original guy comes, lets me have two bottles, free, sorry, but he does not want me back either.   On the way out, a taunt from the second guy.

And then to get back to this place where my brother is with his dinner party, I am on a train.  Going through a city that is frozen in winter, ice everywhere, and then the train gradually darkens, and people quite down, the train car's lights dim, and then people are asleep, and by the time I get back, everyone has gone to bed, and the dinner party has been missed.


I take wine, red wine, French, low in alcohol, as a medicine.  Vonnegut, from whom I heard the thing about being done at age fifty in life and in writing, had his Pall Malls, like my grandfather.  I don't drink it quickly, I just sip it, and it relaxes me, and for a while it is calming and energizing, such that I can sit down and click and clack away with typing up words.  Nighttime, summer, in Washington, D.C.   An evolutionary loser.  A weakling.  A person with faults, and misdirections.  A James Bond movie is on in the background, just to provide the babel I am used to, so the animal doesn't get nervous.  Perhaps I should be listening to music, but alone, I crave some sort of information, as if so that I can pretend I'm learning something in one ear, as I write out of the central core.  Background chatter of the forest of the dark mind, as I shine a flashlight in and walk forward.


I have written here in this strange form, a journalist with reports of science fiction, as a sort of lecture, an oral history, as all writing must come back to the headwater, the spring of the bardic mind, where words are spoken, and every story, being an orality, is the story but capable of retelling, and different little changes.  As if one were a lecturer, granted a few liberties while explaining the lecture, the story.

The best and most filial stories, most faithful and with fidelity, are written not as writing but as talking, the speech of the mind.   The writer is the speaker.

Kerouac had written sketches exhaustively before putting it all together, The Scroll, the original typescript.   The overall spontaneity of On the Road was build of many pieces of spontaneity.  The oldest way of writing, of recording words.

Whatever you can bring back...  you try...  you get a little bit, then you get tired.