This Life of Letters
I love how technology has forced us into the moment, has insisted nearly upon connectivity and transience.
I've adapted. Let almost everything I've written go.
But what happens when every once in a while something still should be preserved?
My friend Steve Despain wrote a fun little thing for me today.
I feel like I’ve now passed through some kind of Writer’s Rite of Passage. Thanks Nath. Did you consider I might have pen fright? I came across Nath when doing a search on Kerouac’s BIG SUR. I had lived near Big Sur for a couple of years. She read a few pages from Kerouac’s book where he was getting out to the cabin in the woods. I lived up by Cannery row, and visited where Henry Miller rested for some years by the ocean’s rhythms (to wash away his days in Paris, I assume). On Friday nights, I’d get together with a dozen others to go through dream symbols. Everyone kept a detailed log of their dreams, and old man Joe, a retired Marketing Executive from Madison Avenue (and good friends of Marshall McLuhan), would lead the group. You haven’t understood dream symbols until you’ve spent a year playing spin-the-bottle around a large coffee table and being prompted to read from your diary when it lands on you. Joe was in his 80s and got a woman in her 40s pregnant. By the time I met him, his new wife had one or two more. He and Marshall would exchange letters sharing conquest stories. I’ll never forget the woman who talked about a dream where her tongue was furry. What did that mean? So we went around the table. Afterwards, I went with a friend to Clint Eastwood’s Saloon in Carmel. We were having a drink by a fire and a sleek Middle Eastern woman in a trench coat approached and talked to us from a distance. After a while, she flashed her coat wide open and she had nothing on except the straps on her boots. I thought of Joe, Henry Miller, and Kerouac. The last summer I was there, I volunteered to work at a Marathon that passed through Big Sur and finished at Point Lobos. I was assigned the task of being the “special fluids guy.” When the top three (ranked) women runners passed through the station I was at, I was coached on how to run alongside of them to hand them their special fluids and keep up with them until they had finished the bottles. Fortunately, they didn’t all come through all at once. It was nice to have some part of that – my slice of the Jericho Mile. I left the Pebble Beach evening fires behind and moved up to Seattle. I then moved further east to the Cascades where Lynch filmed TWIN PEAKS. When I first moved here, that’s when I came across Nath’s video on Big Sur, because I was reminiscing about my past through Jack Kerouac. And I discovered she was a writer, and blogging her trials of self-publishing. I have several things I have intended to write since leaving Chicago for California. One of them having to do with the theme in Stephen Wolfram’s A NEW KIND OF SCIENCE and the other to do with a stone that depicts the foundations of ancient Egypt (Narmer Palette). Nath’s blog gives the hope that it can be done. An interviewer once asked her, “Who do you write for?” She simply replied, “I write for you.”
No more paper. No more special places to preserve the best of what matters. Throw what's glorious on Facebook. Copy and paste some kind of stop motion hope onto Goodreads, knowing the sands will shift.
Writing is different. Love is the same.
I've adapted. Let almost everything I've written go.
But what happens when every once in a while something still should be preserved?
My friend Steve Despain wrote a fun little thing for me today.
I feel like I’ve now passed through some kind of Writer’s Rite of Passage. Thanks Nath. Did you consider I might have pen fright? I came across Nath when doing a search on Kerouac’s BIG SUR. I had lived near Big Sur for a couple of years. She read a few pages from Kerouac’s book where he was getting out to the cabin in the woods. I lived up by Cannery row, and visited where Henry Miller rested for some years by the ocean’s rhythms (to wash away his days in Paris, I assume). On Friday nights, I’d get together with a dozen others to go through dream symbols. Everyone kept a detailed log of their dreams, and old man Joe, a retired Marketing Executive from Madison Avenue (and good friends of Marshall McLuhan), would lead the group. You haven’t understood dream symbols until you’ve spent a year playing spin-the-bottle around a large coffee table and being prompted to read from your diary when it lands on you. Joe was in his 80s and got a woman in her 40s pregnant. By the time I met him, his new wife had one or two more. He and Marshall would exchange letters sharing conquest stories. I’ll never forget the woman who talked about a dream where her tongue was furry. What did that mean? So we went around the table. Afterwards, I went with a friend to Clint Eastwood’s Saloon in Carmel. We were having a drink by a fire and a sleek Middle Eastern woman in a trench coat approached and talked to us from a distance. After a while, she flashed her coat wide open and she had nothing on except the straps on her boots. I thought of Joe, Henry Miller, and Kerouac. The last summer I was there, I volunteered to work at a Marathon that passed through Big Sur and finished at Point Lobos. I was assigned the task of being the “special fluids guy.” When the top three (ranked) women runners passed through the station I was at, I was coached on how to run alongside of them to hand them their special fluids and keep up with them until they had finished the bottles. Fortunately, they didn’t all come through all at once. It was nice to have some part of that – my slice of the Jericho Mile. I left the Pebble Beach evening fires behind and moved up to Seattle. I then moved further east to the Cascades where Lynch filmed TWIN PEAKS. When I first moved here, that’s when I came across Nath’s video on Big Sur, because I was reminiscing about my past through Jack Kerouac. And I discovered she was a writer, and blogging her trials of self-publishing. I have several things I have intended to write since leaving Chicago for California. One of them having to do with the theme in Stephen Wolfram’s A NEW KIND OF SCIENCE and the other to do with a stone that depicts the foundations of ancient Egypt (Narmer Palette). Nath’s blog gives the hope that it can be done. An interviewer once asked her, “Who do you write for?” She simply replied, “I write for you.”
No more paper. No more special places to preserve the best of what matters. Throw what's glorious on Facebook. Copy and paste some kind of stop motion hope onto Goodreads, knowing the sands will shift.
Writing is different. Love is the same.
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