Confessions of an Obsessive Writer

I.

Today, my wife and I find ourselves at home. This isn’t at all strange; we’re quite regularly to be found at home, even when there isn’t a pandemic happening. Today’s no different. As the coronavirus drama continues to develop in the world, Valerie and I are relaxing comfortably in my study, contentedly doing what we always do on a lazy Sunday afternoon: self-isolating.

COVID-19, the disease that’s on everyone’s lips during this pandemic, is evidently so dangerous that the government, the CDC, and the WHO have all urged people to stay indoors and avoid contact with others. Self-isolation and social distancing are the buzzwords of the day, and for many people, this means a somewhat annoying adjustment. For Valerie and me, it’s just business as usual. Keeping to ourselves is what we have always done best. Indeed, for years, our primary approach to life has been constructed around this concept of social distancing. The rest of the world is just now catching up. And quite frankly, it’s about damn time.

II.

All my life I’ve wanted a good study. Most people would probably call this room their home office, but for me, “study” is the only word that will do. I have a study at this time, but it is not at all the study of my dreams. Such a room, if I could have my way, would include the following: a large, Gothic-style woodburning fireplace, hardwood floors, walnut paneling, copious shelves of books, a mahogany desk, an old-fashioned bar well-stocked with scotch, brandy, and port, a humidor filled to the brim with Montecristo cigars, a leather reading chair situated very near the fireplace, a huge floor-standing globe (preferably an antique), a scale model of the RMS Titanic or Lusitania on the mantle, and a nude Kim Kardashian as my willing personal assistant. Okay, strike that last one; some desires, no matter how reasonable, are just wildly unlikely.

My current study falls woefully short of this standard, but it is nevertheless a rather comfortable space. It’s essentially an unused bedroom that I’ve painted and adorned to act as a sort of 1800s man-cave, and in this role it serves quite well for the time being. The walls are filled with reprints of various scenes from old St. Louis, most from the 1890s, though one’s a bird’s-eye view of the 1904 World’s Fair. A chunk from a crumbling 1890s gravestone sits on my desk (though the cemetery from whence it came shall remain nameless). A replica of an 1840s steamship, the kind commonly found cruising the Mississippi River at that time, rests next to that chunk of stone, just to the left of my computer monitor. And the lampshade next to that is a print of Frame 1 from Compton and Dry’s 1875 Atlas of St. Louis. Also on my desk is an empty humidor (it’s seldom filled with cigars because my tastes are so pricy), my pipe collection, my tobacco, several books about St. Louis, and an armillary. A lovely electric fireplace stands below one of the two windows, that same window that looks out at the extensive woods of our backyard. To the right of my desk, just a few feet from where I sit, with only a bookshelf between us, my wife usually reclines on the threadbare loveseat that’s pushed snug against the wall. It is here that I do my research and write my books, often with her reading or playing solitaire on her laptop. And it’s currently where we’re spending this Sunday afternoon, while the rest of the world hunkers down amid the coronavirus outbreak.

III.

While Valerie is presently engaged in a life and death game of solitaire, I’m here at my desk wondering what to write about. I have a quota of 3,000 words per day, as the reader undeniably knows well by now. And this is seven days a week, mind you. None of that Monday through Friday bullshit for me. I seldom get a day off. That’s why working for yourself is a terrible thing if your boss happens to be a complete asshole, as mine is. (I’m hoping the reader understands the dark humor there.)

Sometimes, when I can’t find anything else to write about, my natural inclination is to write about writing… the craft, the art, the headache, and the joy of it. There are some writers, E. B. White and Ernest Hemingway among them, who I’d classify as writer’s writers. Nabokov and Pessoa are also names that come to mind. These are literary giants whose works not only do well with readers, they also stimulate other writers to reach their own greatness and, in some cases, even redefine exactly what constitutes a great work of literature or, at the very least, reopen the question to new answers. A writer’s writer typically has something important to say about his craft, and when he says it, other writers listen.

I endeavor to be one of these, though I cannot profess with any certainty to have accomplished this in my own tinkering with the art of prose. But he who doesn’t try never amounts to anything.

It is perhaps apropos, then, that I say something about my medium, which is the technique known as prose. Some artists work with clay or stone, others with paint, some with cameras, and still others with computers. Some people utilize poetry to express their experiences with reality, and others write songs. And though I have toyed with mediocre poetry now and then, my true mastery has always been prose.

The word “prose” first appeared in the English language in the 1300s and was derived from an Old French word that was based on the ancient Latin phrase “prosa oratio,” which literally translates as “straightforward or direct speech.” Prose differs from poetry, therefore, since the latter employs verse, rhythm, and occasionally rhyme to express sentiments lyrically, while the former is just the inscribed thoughts or recorded stream of consciousness from the writer, often done in an academic style but sometimes fashioned to mimic the conversational tones of regular life. Perhaps the best example of conversational prose is the personal essay, of which this entire book in your hands consists.

Prose is my chosen form of writing because it perfectly coincides with the way my strange mind works. The thoughts in my brain literally arrange themselves as though they’re meant to be put on paper, so sitting down to write, for me, is typically little more than channeling, or training my fingers to type fast enough to accurately catch all my thoughts and transfer them to the page before they seep and trickle out and exist no more. So, one might say writing is really just my way of emptying all the thoughts in my head while documenting them at the same time, so I don’t have to remember them later on. I’ve just been doing it for so long that I’ve developed an aesthetic manner of stringing words together in a pleasing fashion, even if they are pleasing only to me.

As I sit here typing all this, with my lovely wife’s soothing presence nearby, a question occurs to me: of all the books you have read, of all the writers whose works you have devoured, who would you say is the absolute master of prose, second to no one else? This is a great question, though I don’t know how qualified I am to answer it since there are still so many books by so many famous writers I have yet to read. But right away a predictable answer emerges in my mind: Jack Kerouac… duh. Of course, and who could argue that? Even a casual glance at just one page of “On the Road” should persuade the staunchest critic. And why not? Who could possibly beat Kerouac? Right? Well… I don’t know. Maybe there is someone else. Interesting, I think, packing my pipe and lighting it. Yes, it’s quite possible. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced I’ve got the perfect answer…

As I said earlier, there is a bookshelf (one of several in this house) between my desk and the loveseat usually occupied by Valerie, and the forgotten book on my mind right now, written by the other author in question—not Kerouac—is, I think, resting on one of its shelves. I lean over to search for it, directing a fast, flirty glance at the wife, who smiles at me. “Ham,” I say to her, and she responds, “Ham” (“Ham” is a code word between us, that’s all the reader needs to know).

I know the book’s spine is orange, so it shouldn’t be tough to spot. And—lo and behold!—there it is. Bingo, I think, taking it from the shelf. For the next few minutes, as I puff wonderful blue pipe smoke into the air, I thumb through the small book, remembering with joy the first time I read it. I turn to the first page and re-read the very first paragraph. Yep, I say to myself, I was right. No one does it better than this.

The book is “Travels with Charley,” my absolute favorite offering from the man who, I think, was the greatest purveyor of prose in the 20th century: John Steinbeck. I’m not saying he is my favorite writer of that century, but I do think he was/is the greatest. Jack Kerouac and F. Scott Fitzgerald would possibly be very close seconds. But Steinbeck, I think, is the king. He is the “real deal,” the consummate writer, a master of the written word above the fruits of anyone else’s labors. There is a reason he is touted as one of the best writers in history, a very simple reason: that’s exactly what he was and is.

“The Grapes of Wrath,” “Tortilla Flat,” “Cannery Row,” “East of Eden,” “Of Mice and Men”—these are some of the best works in American—nay, world literature, and I loved all of them. True, I never had much use for “The Pearl” or “The Red Pony,” but I can and do acknowledge their literary worth. But, for me, nothing, absolutely nothing, can outdo “Travels with Charley,” one of his works of nonfiction, and one of his last books, written only six years or so before he died in 1968. The full title is “Travels with Charley: In Search of America.” And who is Charley? Oh, only the French poodle who accompanied him on his long road trip from New York, to Maine, to California, and back to New York in the late summer and fall of 1960. For this voyage, Steinbeck bought a 1960 GMC pickup with a camper attached to the bed. He named the truck Rocinante, after Don Quixote’s horse, and he used it to take both himself and Charley across the country to see America one last time. According to Steinbeck’s son, he knew he was dying and wanted to experience the countryside he loved so much before his weak heart finally gave out. Along the way, he had conversations with Charley, and these, paired with Steinbeck’s own introspective observations, make up this short but fascinating book. (Some scholars believe the book is highly fictionalized and doesn’t really account for Steinbeck’s travels in late 1960. Even if this is true, the effect, to me, is the same.)

It is Steinbeck’s prose that sets him apart. It’s exquisitely to the point, stated with austere eloquence, a paradoxical trait I try to emulate in my own work. He says so little and yet says so much, choosing just the right words necessary, no more, no less, much like Thelonious Monk did with piano notes, saying with two or three notes what other musicians needed thirty to say. To be honest, I find myself haunted by the writing of John Steinbeck. It reminds me of what Wynton Marsalis said about the trumpet work of Dizzy Gillespie, that there was no sense in listening to it, for who could play any better than that? That is how I feel about Steinbeck. There’s almost this sense of defeat in me before I begin. Steinbeck already nailed the execution of perfect prose. How could I possibly hope to do better? There’s no point in trying. Steinbeck’s writing is like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; it’s an instance of singular greatness achieved long before you arrived on the scene, and no matter how good you think your stuff is, there’s only one Michelangelo. Still, my wife kindly reminds me (as I read the last sentence to her) that variety is necessary in art, so I soldier on anyway.

To anyone who has the means (and with the Internet that basically means everyone), I give the following challenge: read the full first paragraph on the first page of Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley.” Not only will you examine prose from the hand of one who seemingly created it almost as an afterthought, you will also be persuaded to read a book that, I assure you, will no doubt add something to your life. And then, when you’re done with that, if you haven’t already, read all his other books, too.

IV.

I was a fervent reader as a young boy. By the sixth grade, I was already reading books prescribed for high school seniors and beyond. I was ten the first time I read Voltaire’s “Candide,” and thirteen when I completed “The Book of Disquiet” by Fernando Pessoa. I remember a Friday night in middle school when all my friends were meeting at the mall (which is what kids did in the 1980s and 90s to have fun). I chose to stay home because I had recently acquired a book about the Barbarian hordes that brought down the Roman Empire and I couldn’t wait to read it alone in the quiet of my own room. And when I was about five or six, I used to pass the time by scrutinizing both the dictionary and the set of encyclopediae that my parents had on their shelf. Other six-year-old kids were outside in the sun, learning to play catch, learning how to ride a bike, or hopping about on swing sets; meanwhile, I’m sitting in the corner of my parents’ basement with my nose deep in the “P” encyclopedia, reading about philosophy and Plato and polytheism. It wasn’t what I’d call a normal childhood.

Once, around that same time, I distinctly remember being in school—probably first grade or thereabouts—and answering an absurd question asked by our teacher, a question she asked all of us. I use the word “absurd” because it’s wholly ridiculous to ask a child that young what they want to be when they grow up. It’s not like a five-year-old can even really understand the conception of a career or even “growing up.” Nevertheless, our teacher issued the query, and we all responded in turn. I sat in the back of the room, since my surname began with a “T,” so I was able to hear most of the answers before I had to say mine. I remember that most of the girls said, “a mom,” or “princess.” Most of the boys said whatever their dad was, be it a mechanic or a firefighter or a lawyer or whatever. When it was my turn, I said very clearly with all the conviction of an adult that what I wanted to be when I grew up was a writer. The teacher’s question, absurd for most kids, wasn’t so absurd for me.

I was already writing at that age (I’ve been writing since I learned how to hold a pen), though clearly not the intellectual sort that came in my college years. Still, I knew even then that it was what I wanted to spend my life doing, whether it paid or not. I don’t know how I knew; I just did.

I tried to write my first book when I was about nine. It was a relatively crude affair, a handwritten story about pirates (the only other thing I ever considered being when I was a boy was a pirate—if writing didn’t pan out, it was the high seas for me). When I was twelve, I tried to write the definitive history of the American Civil War (not knowing that many qualified historians had already done so). Believe it or not, I actually got close to completing that endeavor—the twelve-year-old’s version, at least. That same year I snail-mailed my first manuscript off to publishers, a half-finished story about Wyatt Earp’s evil twin. One publisher actually sent me a reply, stating that though my book wasn’t for them, they did applaud my youthful tenacity.

I remember lying on the hardwood floor of my bedroom as a kid, longingly eyeing all the books on my little bookshelf (I’d gathered a modest collection for an adolescent), daydreaming that one day I’d see my own books on the shelf, with my name printed on the spines, and my words covering the pages. Now, over thirty years later, that dream has finally become a reality. One dream down; one to go. Now all that’s left is finding ways to make these books pay the bills. Once that’s accomplished, I can die at least moderately content.

V.

As this lazy afternoon rolls on, I take a break from writing and check the news online. I’m not encouraged by what I see. This coronavirus seems to be a very serious threat to the stability of our modern world (although one might argue that the stability of this modern world needs to be rattled a bit). So far, no one I know has the disease or is being adversely affected by the fallout it’s creating—i.e., the ripples of its impact on an otherwise very confident race of beings.

Valerie is done with solitaire and is checking her email. I look over at her and marvel, not for the first time nor the last, at how this sweet, comely woman came into my life and set so many things right for me. She’s so deep into reading her email that she hasn’t yet noticed that I’m watching her. There is just something about the way her dark brown hair drops down her forehead and touches her cheek, laying against her skin like a blanket you want to snuggle under, and it’s all I can do to stop myself from going over there and taking her by force. But then again, perhaps that’s not such a bad idea?

As I’m debating this notion, her smartphone rings and she answers it. It’s her mom, wanting to talk. Valerie smiles at me, then graciously excuses herself from the room, leaving me and my sudden carnal desires thwarted for the time being. “Damn,” I think, “I missed my chance.” But it’s okay; there will be others.

I turn back to my writing, pausing to note once again how the lure of an empty, white page provokes all kinds of creative longings inside. I think doctors see a tumor and they just want to remove it. Firefighters see a fire and they want to put it out. Sculptors see a chunk of marble and they want to chisel it into something beautiful. I see a blank page and become consumed with the need to fill it. Few things make me feel so alive.

And then I recall something Franz Kafka wrote in a letter to Max Brod in 1922: “A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.” Only a writer could know how true this statement is. There is an urge within our kind that goes beyond what even we can communicate with words. Something about a blank page calls to us, arousing some mystical, transcendent need to etch onto the walls of reality statements that didn’t exist before. And if a writer isn’t doing that, if he is not filling the page and heeding that call, something inside him begins to decline, and he is, as Kafka observed, apt to go mad. In this way, we might even say that writing is a compulsion. I know it certainly is for me.

Some might disagree with this, and perhaps they are right to do so, but I think a writer is something you first have to be before it’s something you do. I genuinely believe it is a calling, it’s something you feel within yourself, a kind of fundamental knowledge that has always been with you, long before you sat down at that first blank page. It is an instinct, deep inside you from the beginning, and the act of filling that first blank page is merely the fruition of what you’ve known about yourself all along. The act of doing it is just the consummation of who you are, the first step in becoming a truer you.

Writing is one of those things you don’t have to be good at to do it well. Even a man with scant education and a rudimentary command of his language can still put honest words down on paper. If he is expressing a sincere thought, something that lives inside him, something that he feels needs to be said, he’ll make a mark with his words even if they’re ill-chosen. Does it really matter that he can’t understand the nuance of grammar or the intricacies of punctuation or the so-called superior active voice as opposed to the passive voice? No, not really. This man might not win a Pulitzer (then again, maybe he will), but I would buy his book if we wrote one, and I’d read it, too. Anytime anyone has something honest to say, I’ll listen. I can’t be sure that my own writing is any good, but I know it speaks the truth; I’ve taken great care to ensure this.

I have always been better suited to nonfiction than fiction. Storytelling isn’t my bag, unless it’s a true story that happened to me. Making up some sort of riveting tale is not my notion of how talent, if I have any, should be employed. I’ve always been much better at commenting on life and reality and the experience of just being human, particularly as it pertains to my own journey through existence. This sounds selfish, but really, it is the essayist’s job. As I’ve said before, I defer to Mr. Thoreau, a literary hero if ever there was one—in my eyes, at least. I offer the following two quotes from “Walden”: “Moreover, I, on my side, require of every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life, and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives.” And: “I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.”

I keep these simple thoughts with me every time I come to that blank page, comfortably knowing that, even if it is selfish, the most honest thing I can write about is myself, for there is nothing else in which I am an expert. Fiction doesn’t feel like a lie, I wouldn’t say that. I just think my fiction feels a bit like a lie (but don’t tell that to those readers who loved “The Offbeat Rhythms, “my series of poorly executed novels). I’m not meant to write fiction, no matter how much I love it. That would be a sorry example of me not remaining true to myself.

These meditations are interrupted by the return of Valerie, who plops down on the loveseat after chatting with her mom.

“What did you guys talk about?” I ask.

“The coronavirus.”

“Ah, yes, of course.”

It’s the subject on everyone’s lips just now. Some folks say it’s a lie the media is spreading about, though this seems quite improbable to me. Others think it’s the beginning of the end of the world. That also seems improbable to me. My guess is that it’s likely something in between, existing somewhere near the center of polar extremes, as are most aspects of this reality.

VI.

Though I’d grown up surrounded by his influence on culture, I didn’t discover the literature of Stephen King until I was in my thirties. I was smitten with his books mostly because the main character is typically a writer. I love when writers write about writing, it’s as if they are sharing secret knowledge with their peers, knowledge nonwriters don’t know and can’t appreciate.

It was reading Stephen King that made me fall in love with the craft of writing, though he and I have some different ideas about what writing should look like (the reader should ignore my ideas and trust his, there is no question about that). And it was reading John Steinbeck that made me fall in love with the aesthetics of writing. Something about how Steinbeck’s words and sentences look on a page is utterly intoxicating to me. He didn’t just write prose that sounds good, it actually looks good, no matter the font. I decided early in my writing attempts that I too would craft sentences that didn’t just read well (presuming they do), they would also look pleasing to the eye, just like Steinbeck’s did. There is something attractive about prose like that, it somehow makes a reading experience all the warmer.

It was reading Henry David Thoreau, E. B. White, Aldous Huxley, and Joan Didion that led me to believe the essay was the province to which I belonged, and I began writing my first essays in college. One has to write a fair amount of them if one wants to graduate, particularly when your major is history, as mine was; but I began writing personal essays for myself, and few of them ever fell under eyes others than mine. Once, when I showed one of these essays to my girlfriend at that time, she stopped reading halfway through and said, “You have this way of making regular things enthralling.” Then she finished reading it and declared, “This is what you should do with your life, you know.” As if I didn’t know. Of course I did. I had no plans of doing anything else.

VII.

I have no idea how it happened, but I recall being conscious of a quote by William Wordsworth by the time I was ten: “Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.”

I guess I must have seen those words written somewhere. They clearly burrowed deep into my mind. I’ve pondered these words many times over the years, and I definitely think about them every time I come to a blank page with the hope of filling it. At one point, many years ago, I had the quote scribbled on a scrap of paper which I taped to the top of my computer monitor. It was there for a long time. As a writer, that’s what I try to do each time I take on the arduous task. There may be readers who don’t understand what that means or even how one could do that, but for those who write and write often, filling a page with the “breathings of your heart” is essential… and we know how to do that.

Another quote I keep close by in my mind when I’m pecking away at the keyboard comes from Franz Kafka: “Writing is… the descent into the cold abyss of oneself.” It’s fucked-up, but I’m very drawn to the idea of venturing “into the cold abyss of oneself.” I’m not sure, but I think that is something a lot of people don’t want to do. If the deepest place inside is an abyss, and if it’s cold, I’d assume that most people would find the prospect of exploring the abyss to be somewhat uncomfortable at the least and frightening at the most. Again, I don’t know for sure. But the writer is aware of Kafka’s words, even if he’s never actually heard them before. We know about that cold abyss. We know all about that descent. We know that there be dragons and beasts and all manner of things unkind and vicious and dangerous lurking there, yet we go headlong into the abyss regularly and willingly. Why? Because we must. We have no choice. Anything else is self-destruction, a reality Isaac Asimov understood well when he remarked: “I write for the same reason I breathe… if I didn’t, I would die.”

I also recall Rad Bradbury saying that a writer has to stay inebriated with his craft so that the harsh conditions of reality do not destroy him. The degree of accuracy in this statement is clearly indisputable. I can’t imagine the sort of person I would be did I not have the highly therapeutic and agreeably curative outlet that is my writing. Once, when a friend heard that I give myself a daily quota of 3,000 words (no day is complete until I have written that quantity), she remarked that it must be near impossible for me to fall asleep after that, since my mind must surely be on overdrive. It is, in fact, quite the reverse. If I don’t get all of that out onto the page during the day, I have no hope of falling asleep at night. Not that I have ever had an easy time falling asleep, mind you. But my battles with insomnia, bleak though they are, would multiply tenfold if I had to lay there in bed with my heavy head on the pillow and all those words and thoughts spinning about in my brain. But I get them on paper each day, and thus they’re one less thing I have to worry about in the wee hours when sleep won’t come.

VIII.

Hemingway said writing was as simple as just sitting down at a typewriter and “proceeding to bleed...” He was notorious for being surrounded by stacks of typewritten pages. Jane Austen might have agreed with that sentiment, except for the fact that she wrote her books by hand, and as such was likely to be surrounded by a debris field of scribbled papers. Then you’ve got Jack Kerouac who like Hemingway used a typewriter but who wrote On the Road on paper taped together to create a continuous, unbroken scroll. One can only posit what his workspace looked like. And then there are much older titans like Geoffrey Chaucer and Dante Alighieri who no doubt penned their well-known medieval works to the dim and dancing flames of weak candlelight, meticulously etching on vellum parchments with scratchy quills. And if you go back far enough, you’ll find those nameless writer(s) who employed the strange technique called Cuneiform to compose the “Epic of Gilgamesh” on clay tablets. Go back even further and you have the Paleolithic cave paintings—pictures, the only kind of writing primitive humans had.

The point is, wherever you go in history, you will no doubt find peculiar, somewhat misanthropic people segregated away somewhere, using the technology of their time to record their thoughts. These are the writers, the scribes, those who capture for posterity the collective consciousness of a given time. They usually toil in anonymity, experiencing little or no recompense for their efforts during their lifetime, and are sometimes even persecuted for daring to express what everyone else thinks but is otherwise too frightened to say. Sometimes, their words are weapons or even instruments of overdue change. A writer can, simply by transferring his thoughts to paper (or parchments, or tablets), light a fire within the minds of a society, triggering revolution. Or perhaps they use their talent to spin sustaining stories that deeply resonate in the hearts and minds of all who come after them.

In any case, it is us—the writers—who are perpetuating the human story (and perhaps the human condition as well) down through the ages. We are the conveyance by which the history of this species is told. Whatever humans are or were or will be, writers have always been watching from the shadows, recording the experience, thereby grasping some of reality’s infinite nature in a finite form for everyone else.

I flatter myself to be counted among these.

I flatter myself further by seeing myself as a relentless and uncompromising educator who never ceases to communicate the truth. I treat my brain like it’s an ongoing receptacle of as much knowledge as can be shoved in (educating myself). But as I store up this knowledge and file it away, I’m searching for occasions to share it with everyone else (educating others).

Consequently, my writing, especially that of my personal journals (from which most of my essays are sewn together) is constantly a dumping ground for whatever tangent bit of random information I see fit to deposit here. My approach to life (and my approach to writing) is to acquire, comprehend, and disseminate as much information as I can. Some of it may end up seeming useless to those who might one day read my work, but I stand on the principle that there is no such thing as useless information—it’s what we do with it that matters.

Moreover, I believe the writer’s primary task is to take the reader somewhere. For the fiction writer, this means leading the reader away from real life and toward something false or make-believe for the purpose of entertainment and distraction (although there’s no question that fiction can be used to comment on certain aspects of reality). For the nonfiction writer, it means leading a reader into the very heart of real life, to meet and confront what is found there. Both are important, yes; but I feel much more at home with the latter.

Not that I necessarily have anything to say that can match the importance found in the works of people like Nietzsche or Thomas Paine. The best I can hope to do is offer my thoughts, however insignificant they may be, for the scrutiny of anyone who cares enough to notice. And so that is what I do. I labor to record whatever my mind is chewing on at any given moment, which usually has something to do with my ongoing curiosity about life and/or reality. Not for the first time, I’ll confess that I am an insanely inquisitive person. I’m always thinking about this, thinking about that, considering one concept or another, researching some problem that has been nagging me, and recording my experiences and thoughts in notebooks, on blogs, in emails, and on scraps of paper. I do this not because I want to impose my thoughts on everyone else, but because I simply need a forum for these thoughts before they drive me insane. And I publish them not to shove my thoughts down the reader’s throat but because the reader, should he stumble upon my work, might find something he can relate to, and if so, the task was worth it.

IX.

Henry David Thoreau, ever my ongoing literary hero, said: “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” I cited this quote in “Letters from a Dissident Philosopher” and I’ve been thinking about it again lately. I think it’s easy for a writer to lose sight of real life if he’s shut in his study for too long. Much like John Steinbeck, who in 1960 embarked on his cross-country road trip to rediscover the America he’d written about for years but had thereafter grown distant from, we who write about life must force ourselves away from our notebooks and typewriters now and then and return to the simplicity and subtle pleasure of just being a person rather than a writer. I’m often so involved in my wordsmithing that I forget about lifesmithing (I just invented that word). Alas, occasionally I must make myself put my pencil down.

It can sometimes be hard for me to do this. My brain, ever the definition of a runaway train, is always writing, even in my sleep. Many are the nights I’ll wake up to a beautifully worded sentence already formed in my mind. I used to keep a notepad on my nightstand for these occasions, but now I just reach for my phone and hit the Dictation App. Quietly, so as to not wake my wife, I’ll speak the sentence into the phone. Then I go back to sleep until the next sentence wakes me up again. I replay all these recordings the next day and then get it on paper.

Other times, it’s extremely difficult to get through a movie or a Netflix show. Someone on the screen will say one thing or another and my muse is suddenly unleashed. Twenty minutes later, I come out of my deep introspection wherein I wrote two or three paragraphs in my mind and I discover that I missed a large chunk of the film.

And I can’t walk or drive anyplace where I’m not endlessly observing everything I see and compulsively trying to arrange my reactions into attractive phrases in my head. It’s like I’m a walking, breathing blank page and nothing can keep me from filling myself with words and phrases from the moment I wake to the moment I sleep and even in between.

And so the quote from Thoreau nags at me. It reminds me that everyone needs the freedom to leave their work and walk away from it for a while. No one is a doctor or a carpenter or a lawyer twenty-four hours a day. Most jobs have a thing known as “quitting time,” that moment when the clock tells you to go home and rest and do other things. My obsession with writing often gives me no room for this. So I look for ways to turn off my writer’s brain. I look at a tree and try to see only a tree. My mind wants to make it more than that, to liken the branches to something poetic and the leaves to something existential. But it’s just a tree sometimes, and there’s a simplicity in that idea which, at times, can be elusive to me. I wouldn’t say I hope for dementia in my old age, but if that fate does befall me, maybe it won’t be entirely unwelcome; it might be my fatigued mind’s first chance since birth to get some much-needed rest.

X.

I stop writing for a moment and look out of the window in my study, the one that faces our backyard. If I didn’t know better, I’d be tricked into thinking it was a beautiful day out there. It’s not. The sun is shining, and the crisp blue sky is utterly cloudless, but I know well that the temperature is below 40°. While it’s true that I’m a man who prefers the cold, something inside of me right now wishes I could go roll around in the grass outside and feel some hot sunlight on my skin, on my face. There are instances, not often but every now and then, when I feel so disconnected from the Earth, when something primitive in my DNA, some wayward bit of strand left over from my Paleolithic roots, needs to be touched by the beauties of nature. Ah, but these are some seriously foolish thoughts.

Sighing, I turn away from the window and walk over to the loveseat, where I give Valerie a soft kiss on the forehead. Then I return to my desk, suddenly in the mood for some music. “It’s a Miles Davis sort of day,” I think. Usually, my first inclination is to play “Birth of the Cool” or “Kind of Blue,” but neither of those feel right today. No, I need something different. I open up my music library and browse through Davis’s albums. Nothing is grabbing my attention. Then I see my McCoy Tyner collection; alphabetically, he is just above Miles Davis. Surfing that, I find pay dirt almost immediately. Oh fuck, yes. After a few clicks of a mouse, the song “Contemplation” from Tyner’s 1967’s album “The Real McCoy” rends the silence, adding the absolute perfect soundtrack to this lazy yet meditative Sunday afternoon.

And so the day goes on—me doing my thing, Valerie doing her thing, and both of us relishing the luxury of being cooped up together during these days of quarantine. My belief is that a lot of married couples are upset with social distancing since it basically means they’re forced to be together way more often than they might like. But Valerie and me? We love it. It’s like a dream come true, a small slice of what retirement will be like, minus the old age. And it doesn’t hurt that we’re being paid to stay home. I don’t think it gets much better than that. Indeed, I find our current situation to be most satisfying… and I am, at this moment, quite happy.