Time Talks page 20
The red script probably was written from June 5, 1989. Likely printed by hand in
Castellón, Spain. I was about four floors up in a high rise apartment building. The flat had at least three bedrooms.
Castellón, Spain. I was about four floors up in a high rise apartment building. The flat had at least three bedrooms.
_______________________________________________________________________
Wow! Page 20! Under 5 years, not bad. Cookies and Rambo. Some combo.
Anyway, it is a way of escaping temporary boredoms and pains.
I took four S.I.'s [sic] from this last year [OCT.] I ate those up quickly. Also I read a book called "Changing Times" by some perverted novelist. Enough stories of fictiousess (sp.) [sic] value!
Time for real life on print, thus changing it a surreal quality but true all the same.
I'm glad I have the same mind now as I did way back, in the young days.
When I get back to my house, I must put my life together more vividly.
But I have a pretty good idea now. For the benefit of future reflection and actions of posterity reminscings [sic].
Oh, how life's web is weaved.
The best thing is someday I can edit this. (Or someone).
My supervision. ["My" underlined twice]
The above was an honest rendering of page twenty, some almost 31 years ago, from my journal that started when I was 13. The first nineteen pages took from the beginning of eighth grade to the end of twelfth. I had an eye and thoughts to the future, to re-reading and putting together a work for the future, which I did not know what would be, exactly.
Here I am as a middle-aged father, collecting my old (former, previous) thoughts as a youth; old because of time but more youthful and immature because of my age, my having just graduated from high school and just left my home country for a few weeks.
I was writing this page after a week or so in Spain, some ten days or so after my graduation ceremony with my peers.
Here is some responses to myself, all these years later.
Wow! Page 20! Under 5 years, not bad. Cookies and Rambo. Some combo.
I had been in Spain for about a week. While I had studied the language for four years in high school with some good instructors and some pretty good effort in the classes, I had not done enough of the reading and writing homework in my home. I had taken an early morning Spanish class in third grade, which has benefited me my entire life, giving me confidence in basic facts and pronunciations. While choppy in speaking the language fluently, my ear definitely improved while there with Ricardo, my host, and the Salvador Boso family. I learned things everyday; although I did not go with the rest of the students of my school and perhaps as a consequence of this timing I saw less of the country and the cultural sites than the rest of my peers, my brain took in the country in jolts and waves.
Writing this journal: somnambulistic, chaotic, rambling, free-verse and whatever other crazy attributes you wish to ascribe it, these notes and comments bring me partially back to that time and place, times and places, 31 years ago y pico. I am very blessed this many decades y pico later to re-read, to reflect, and converse with my old self: the same me, a younger me, a different me, a forgotten me, a remembered me, an eternal me, a finite me. Me almost 31 years apart.
What has changed?
Everything. Nothing. The world. My hometown. Spain.
My world. My life. My family. My wife. My mother. The presidents.
Everything and nothing.
Nada a nada.
Thus spoke Hemingway.
I have read more Ernest Hemingway since, including an exhaustive biography, (from the local library), last year 2019, before the pandemic, in a different world.
Reflecting on those who wrote about Spain, lived in Spain, fought in Spain, loved in Spain, breathed and died in Spain. And perhaps they knew France and Portugal. Or even Andorra or the Baleares, or the Canaries, or the farther off Azores, or even Cabo Verde...
Paul Theroux, George Orwell, Jose Delibe, and others among my favorites. Those who know and have known the language, Spanish, castellano, well, and those who know and have known, and perhaps more importantly, shared about human nature well. The human condition. Steinbeck and other Nobel laureates... All artists have a way of dong it, yes?
Others too, of course, short time travelers, students, missionaries, ambassadors, poets, priests and politicians... (Thanks, Sting. Another great artist I was close to last year).
Oh how I could capture the words like these prosaic painters of the word!
I cannot recall what type of cookies they were. Rambo: a Sylvester Stallone impression to me since the early 1980s; of my parents as much as the film. The first 19 pages of this tome took me 5 grades to wend my way through. Looking for words, thoughts, impressions, dreams, paths, choices, experiences, loves, and worlds. New and old, timeless and finite.
How many cookies have I eaten since then, in how many places?
God is good.
Anyway, it is a way of escaping temporary boredoms and pains.
Apparently "boredoms" is not a proper word. The wonders and frustrations of Word spell check. How many times did I wish bodily harm upon Bill Gates and his Empire of Modernity... Microsoft, the new age of wealth and success, still a notion on the horizon in the 1980s, like so many other things quite commonplace now.
I met the co-founder of Wordperfect in Utah in 1995. That used to be a big word processor service we used in college, and before that high school. Words written, mostly forgotten. That man, Bill Ashton, sold it to Novell, an upcoming tech company. Technology became its own industry, another speculative trade and stock in the market.
Companies, ideas, feelings, and words and papers forgotten and now ignored.
Perhaps like these, the ones I write here in this blog, a "new" notion that I was preached to about in Angol, Chile in 2005. I started a couple of blogs by the end of that year in 2005, in California, with a popular sports competition online.
Things of the 1980s not forgotten: The fall of the Berlin Wall, November 1989. The operation to remove Manuel Noriega of Panama, the very last month of the decade. Perestroika and glasnost and Gorbachev of the Soviet Union. Mujaheddin in Afghanistan. (Back then spelled mujahaddeen, thank you Bill Gates!) Retaliating against Qaddafi in Tripoli. The intifada of Palestine. The anti-apartheid protests and divestment plans against South Africa. The U.S. military takeover of Grenada in 1983. The 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles boycotted by the Eastern bloc and Communists. The Iranian hostages freed with Reagan's inauguration. The Carter boycott of the Moscow games. New Coke. Bill Cosby. George Michael and WHAM. Boy George. Cindi Lauper. Guns 'n Roses. Run-DMC. The Beastie Boys. John Mellencamp. Bruce Springsteen. Chaka Khan. Whitney Houston. Harrison Ford. Sigourney Weaver. Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. Atari and Nintendo. Walkmans and Apple computers.
"Stairway to Heaven".
Ooh ooh, oh woe, makes me wonder! And she's buying her stairway to heaven. (Led Zeppelin).
"Pains", I wrote. I believe the study and understanding of Buddhism made me more aware of pain, desire, those existential essentials. Thanks Siddhartha Gautama. Thanks Mr. Courtney, my brilliant middle school social studies teacher.
While staying in Spain, sometimes isolated in that high floored apartment of Castellon, a city of many high rises, I suffered some boredom. But it allowed me to think. How often do we have these respites and vacations? As I wrote,
I took four S.I.'s from this last year [OCT.] I ate those up quickly. Also I read a book called "Changing Times" by some perverted novelist. Enough stories of fictiousess (sp.) [sic] value!
Sports Illustrated was a big part of my life from 1986-1989, when my dad (likely) bought the subscription for me. It became my go-to for prose and thought. For wording and crafting the idea, the feeling, the majesty of life, as it were.
Sports is bigger than a ball or a down hill course or the opponent one squares off against. It is culture, it is breathing, it is the metaphor and allegory of life.
Quest for the prize. Hemingway knew this when he wrote "Death in the Afternoon". It is more than sport, it is more than spectacle, like "The Old Man and the Sea" and Melville's "Moby Dick", perhaps it is everything that Harold Bloom adores in Shakespeare and all great poetry and prose: it is life, death, savor, flavor, love, hate, all emotion and all possible knowledge.
Another somewhat famous person said if you cannot write about sports you cannot write about anything. Perhaps I took that aphorism too seriously. My sister Jeannette asking my future wife of twenty years in the year 2000 about me, and her prospects of marriage to me: "Do you like sports? I mean: Do you really like sports? Eddie likes sports..."
Breathes, inhales, contemplates, analyzes, fantasizes, dreams, fetishizes, remembers, forgets, anticipates, avoids, absorbs, ponders, explores.
A future dentist at UCLA, very good at playing basketball of which we did together, related to professional athletes and a large sports fan himself, remarked about me: "I have never known another guy quite like you [in reference to my take on sports stuff]. That was in 2001 or 2002.
Now, thinking back on his comment about me at age 31 or so, in 2020 entering May during the mostly global sports shut down of COVID-19, I respond to that observation: Thanks?
But and however, there is more to life than only sports and competition: there is real life and real death, and everything in between. Economics and the science of scarcity. Hard science and the laws of entropy. Those two probably encapsulate it all. But we need some flavorful art, a little more than the cold, hard, dispassionate stews of the universe. We need the human and the forlorned; we humans crave the feelings and the passions, the flavors of living and loving.
Since the age of fourteen or so I battled between fiction and non-fiction as genres. This conundrum has not stopped as I approach 50 years of age, but I have better or more informed postures now. James McBride, a fiction writer that I randomly heard on the radio a few weeks ago while waiting for a mundane car inspection, gave me the insight, and I paraphrase: "Fiction allows us to tell truthes that are not normally shared."
So fiction obviously has its place, beyond its allure.
Time for real life on print, thus changing it a surreal quality but true all the same.
I'm glad I have the same mind now as I did way back, in the young days.
I had been in Spain for about a week. While I had studied the language for four years in high school with some good instructors and some pretty good effort in the classes, I had not done enough of the reading and writing homework in my home. I had taken an early morning Spanish class in third grade, which has benefited me my entire life, giving me confidence in basic facts and pronunciations. While choppy in speaking the language fluently, my ear definitely improved while there with Ricardo, my host, and the Salvador Boso family. I learned things everyday; although I did not go with the rest of the students of my school and perhaps as a consequence of this timing I saw less of the country and the cultural sites than the rest of my peers, my brain took in the country in jolts and waves.
Writing this journal: somnambulistic, chaotic, rambling, free-verse and whatever other crazy attributes you wish to ascribe it, these notes and comments bring me partially back to that time and place, times and places, 31 years ago y pico. I am very blessed this many decades y pico later to re-read, to reflect, and converse with my old self: the same me, a younger me, a different me, a forgotten me, a remembered me, an eternal me, a finite me. Me almost 31 years apart.
What has changed?
Everything. Nothing. The world. My hometown. Spain.
My world. My life. My family. My wife. My mother. The presidents.
Everything and nothing.
Nada a nada.
Thus spoke Hemingway.
I have read more Ernest Hemingway since, including an exhaustive biography, (from the local library), last year 2019, before the pandemic, in a different world.
Reflecting on those who wrote about Spain, lived in Spain, fought in Spain, loved in Spain, breathed and died in Spain. And perhaps they knew France and Portugal. Or even Andorra or the Baleares, or the Canaries, or the farther off Azores, or even Cabo Verde...
Paul Theroux, George Orwell, Jose Delibe, and others among my favorites. Those who know and have known the language, Spanish, castellano, well, and those who know and have known, and perhaps more importantly, shared about human nature well. The human condition. Steinbeck and other Nobel laureates... All artists have a way of dong it, yes?
Others too, of course, short time travelers, students, missionaries, ambassadors, poets, priests and politicians... (Thanks, Sting. Another great artist I was close to last year).
Oh how I could capture the words like these prosaic painters of the word!
I cannot recall what type of cookies they were. Rambo: a Sylvester Stallone impression to me since the early 1980s; of my parents as much as the film. The first 19 pages of this tome took me 5 grades to wend my way through. Looking for words, thoughts, impressions, dreams, paths, choices, experiences, loves, and worlds. New and old, timeless and finite.
How many cookies have I eaten since then, in how many places?
God is good.
Anyway, it is a way of escaping temporary boredoms and pains.
Apparently "boredoms" is not a proper word. The wonders and frustrations of Word spell check. How many times did I wish bodily harm upon Bill Gates and his Empire of Modernity... Microsoft, the new age of wealth and success, still a notion on the horizon in the 1980s, like so many other things quite commonplace now.
I met the co-founder of Wordperfect in Utah in 1995. That used to be a big word processor service we used in college, and before that high school. Words written, mostly forgotten. That man, Bill Ashton, sold it to Novell, an upcoming tech company. Technology became its own industry, another speculative trade and stock in the market.
Companies, ideas, feelings, and words and papers forgotten and now ignored.
Perhaps like these, the ones I write here in this blog, a "new" notion that I was preached to about in Angol, Chile in 2005. I started a couple of blogs by the end of that year in 2005, in California, with a popular sports competition online.
Things of the 1980s not forgotten: The fall of the Berlin Wall, November 1989. The operation to remove Manuel Noriega of Panama, the very last month of the decade. Perestroika and glasnost and Gorbachev of the Soviet Union. Mujaheddin in Afghanistan. (Back then spelled mujahaddeen, thank you Bill Gates!) Retaliating against Qaddafi in Tripoli. The intifada of Palestine. The anti-apartheid protests and divestment plans against South Africa. The U.S. military takeover of Grenada in 1983. The 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles boycotted by the Eastern bloc and Communists. The Iranian hostages freed with Reagan's inauguration. The Carter boycott of the Moscow games. New Coke. Bill Cosby. George Michael and WHAM. Boy George. Cindi Lauper. Guns 'n Roses. Run-DMC. The Beastie Boys. John Mellencamp. Bruce Springsteen. Chaka Khan. Whitney Houston. Harrison Ford. Sigourney Weaver. Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. Atari and Nintendo. Walkmans and Apple computers.
"Stairway to Heaven".
Ooh ooh, oh woe, makes me wonder! And she's buying her stairway to heaven. (Led Zeppelin).
"Pains", I wrote. I believe the study and understanding of Buddhism made me more aware of pain, desire, those existential essentials. Thanks Siddhartha Gautama. Thanks Mr. Courtney, my brilliant middle school social studies teacher.
While staying in Spain, sometimes isolated in that high floored apartment of Castellon, a city of many high rises, I suffered some boredom. But it allowed me to think. How often do we have these respites and vacations? As I wrote,
I took four S.I.'s from this last year [OCT.] I ate those up quickly. Also I read a book called "Changing Times" by some perverted novelist. Enough stories of fictiousess (sp.) [sic] value!
Sports Illustrated was a big part of my life from 1986-1989, when my dad (likely) bought the subscription for me. It became my go-to for prose and thought. For wording and crafting the idea, the feeling, the majesty of life, as it were.
Sports is bigger than a ball or a down hill course or the opponent one squares off against. It is culture, it is breathing, it is the metaphor and allegory of life.
Quest for the prize. Hemingway knew this when he wrote "Death in the Afternoon". It is more than sport, it is more than spectacle, like "The Old Man and the Sea" and Melville's "Moby Dick", perhaps it is everything that Harold Bloom adores in Shakespeare and all great poetry and prose: it is life, death, savor, flavor, love, hate, all emotion and all possible knowledge.
Another somewhat famous person said if you cannot write about sports you cannot write about anything. Perhaps I took that aphorism too seriously. My sister Jeannette asking my future wife of twenty years in the year 2000 about me, and her prospects of marriage to me: "Do you like sports? I mean: Do you really like sports? Eddie likes sports..."
Breathes, inhales, contemplates, analyzes, fantasizes, dreams, fetishizes, remembers, forgets, anticipates, avoids, absorbs, ponders, explores.
A future dentist at UCLA, very good at playing basketball of which we did together, related to professional athletes and a large sports fan himself, remarked about me: "I have never known another guy quite like you [in reference to my take on sports stuff]. That was in 2001 or 2002.
Now, thinking back on his comment about me at age 31 or so, in 2020 entering May during the mostly global sports shut down of COVID-19, I respond to that observation: Thanks?
But and however, there is more to life than only sports and competition: there is real life and real death, and everything in between. Economics and the science of scarcity. Hard science and the laws of entropy. Those two probably encapsulate it all. But we need some flavorful art, a little more than the cold, hard, dispassionate stews of the universe. We need the human and the forlorned; we humans crave the feelings and the passions, the flavors of living and loving.
Since the age of fourteen or so I battled between fiction and non-fiction as genres. This conundrum has not stopped as I approach 50 years of age, but I have better or more informed postures now. James McBride, a fiction writer that I randomly heard on the radio a few weeks ago while waiting for a mundane car inspection, gave me the insight, and I paraphrase: "Fiction allows us to tell truthes that are not normally shared."
So fiction obviously has its place, beyond its allure.
Time for real life on print, thus changing it a surreal quality but true all the same.
I guess this is true. God is good. And allahu elm. Back then as a 18+ year-old I was thinking back 14-15 or 16 years. Now I am looking back almost 31. Or 46-47. Time flies.
So grateful for memory and written, recorded, words and ideas.
When I get back to my house, I must put my life together more vividly.
But I have a pretty good idea now. For the benefit of future reflection and actions of posterity reminscings [sic].
Have I come back to my house? Has this happened yet? I am 49. Today is Saturday, a virtual working weekend for me.
I left the house--the childhood home of record on Manor Road in my college town of Indiana for Utah about a week or so after my nineteenth birthday. Two months there, and on to Mulchen, Chile, then Concepcion, next Santa Juana, Angol, Coihueco, and after two years back to Bloomington. The heartland of our great land. This North America so many South Americans ruminated about.
However, when I returned from my church mission my childhood house was bought and sold. That said, I didn't have too many complaints about the new domicile: I stayed over a year with my dad and step-mother in their new home (1991-2); it had better overall living conditions than what I grew up in, bigger anyway. Plus, my mother and step-father lived two miles away in the same home that I had known since 1986, when they purchased that house my sophomore year of high school at age 15, which, in fact is still maintained by Terry today, 2020; 6 years after my mother's passing.
Bloomington is home, always. I walk in the city park by my old childhood home, I drive through the streets of my old haunts, the neighborhood, campus, downtown, the schools that I attended, the businesses and locales that I frequented, banks, stores, restaurants. Even the trees and sidewalks and stop signs and billboards are homey. The farther out reaches, the roads and schools and homes of those where I played and associated, and later worked as a substitute teacher.
Have I come back to my house? Has this happened yet? I am 49. Today is Saturday, a virtual working weekend for me.
I left the house--the childhood home of record on Manor Road in my college town of Indiana for Utah about a week or so after my nineteenth birthday. Two months there, and on to Mulchen, Chile, then Concepcion, next Santa Juana, Angol, Coihueco, and after two years back to Bloomington. The heartland of our great land. This North America so many South Americans ruminated about.
However, when I returned from my church mission my childhood house was bought and sold. That said, I didn't have too many complaints about the new domicile: I stayed over a year with my dad and step-mother in their new home (1991-2); it had better overall living conditions than what I grew up in, bigger anyway. Plus, my mother and step-father lived two miles away in the same home that I had known since 1986, when they purchased that house my sophomore year of high school at age 15, which, in fact is still maintained by Terry today, 2020; 6 years after my mother's passing.
Bloomington is home, always. I walk in the city park by my old childhood home, I drive through the streets of my old haunts, the neighborhood, campus, downtown, the schools that I attended, the businesses and locales that I frequented, banks, stores, restaurants. Even the trees and sidewalks and stop signs and billboards are homey. The farther out reaches, the roads and schools and homes of those where I played and associated, and later worked as a substitute teacher.
In Provo, Utah in 1993 I lived in on-campus housing, multiple places, then off campus. I returned to Chile in 1994, seeing much more of the country, and calling the city of Chillán my home for the semester, then returned to Provo and lived in different apartments in Provo until 1997, with the break of the summer of 1995 in the Middle East.
I went back to Indiana for two years from 1997 to 1999, then proceeded to live in different settings of California for six years. Then Angol, Chile, to fill out 2005, then Virginia for a year, California for two more, Virginia again since 2009, minus all the time with the military, especially the year in Afghanistan.
I have been continuously living in Virginia since 2013, in the new house since 2017, almost 3 years in this abode.
Have I made it home? Will I ever? Yes and no. Writing this blog, this Page 20 helps me come home. I cannot rest until I have done and said what I need to do and say.
Thus these scribblings help me come home. Whatever that means.
When I get back to my house, I must put my life together more vividly.
But I have a pretty good idea now. For the benefit of future reflection and actions of posterity reminscings [sic].
Oh, how life's web is weaved.
Since I was in second grade (1978) I wanted to write something; I had the strong urge or notion to put a story or something compelling on paper . I have been paid a few times in my life to write things; I have enjoyed reading, observing, and experiencing things that I have found worthwhile, fulfilling, nourishing, and artistic or inspiring to be moved, informed, touched by a higher power or inner sense.
I have had inklings and actual fores into some writings, some stories, some book attempts, most not nearly finished or completed in a structural sense. All these years have passed and I have some of the same longings of age 8, and 18, and on and on...
Write what you know, they say.
Perhaps I have never quite had the confidence to really dig in and push out what I have known, what whims or fancies have tickled and even vexed my soul. I have blogged a bit, and written things on paper, much of it saved, but to no great public avail or acclaim. At the end of the day it is not about popularity or notoriety, it is about writing and fashioning ideas that makes the author, the creator and developer, the confident (if that is the word) owner of his or her craft, his doings, his stories and ideas.
The greats and the acclaimed and the lesser than acclaimed are able to do that. I have not.
My dad has done his own works, that have had some traction, and that has been interesting and enlightening to see. Perhaps I can do a bit more of it...
"Vividly", I write as an 18 year-old in Spain. With life, with joie d vivre, with panache or a number of other superb French terms. And as a 49 year-old, perhaps I might work together some type of Richard Russo novel or work, a Chaim Potok or Paul Theroux-esque story or tome.
Bring life to the stories and ideas in your head and heart, writing of what you know. Again maybe, it could be in these very words, today Saturday as the sun heads towards the horizon, the millions celebrating and sacrificing in Ramadan, my daughter along with them in solidarity for her friend.
This moment, this hour, this day, this season, this year, this time. Making it timeless and finite. A work, which implies it is done. And as always, I look to the future and the family.
It is who we are. How can I not think of them? of us? Of me and you eternally.... It's all or nothing, including time and the universe. Nirvana is all of it, right?
"But I have a pretty good idea now." Perhaps I did back in the 1980s, pretty far from home and isolated from the normal American milieu, done with that chapter of my life, a chapter that was not my best but one I would survive and a few times reach a level of contentment. High school. Four years of life. As I suggested or implied, have a "good idea" how to flesh out the books and writings that I should go on to produce. But like so many other years of my life, or as I allow life in general with its so many needle pricks of distractions and duties that I chose to keep me from the writer's art and craft, a possible younger style, voice, or persona.
Yes, always distracted. I would return to the United States at the end of June, re-impressed by the U.S. television stations and movies, the basketball news and the baseball games, ESPN highlights and the talking head's chatter, like Roy Firestone, the newspaper columns and their endless fascinating chatter. Mike Leonard was a curious local one who captured my attention in the local section or some such thing of the Herald Telephone. Looking back he was a blogger before the Internet. There were other things and side amusements: Time and Newsweek, the T.V news. Books and things, scriptures and religious texts, a work life with my father, and at a restaurant, and the newspaper route, and church attendance, the last Massachusetts vacation with my mom, the basketball games at the park, the late hot tub jaunts, the regular comic book retrievals, and perhaps a couple other things like home teaching the local members within the flock.
I took an anthology of Ernest Hemingway with me to Boston and the Cape, reading at intervals in the journey, but even then mightily distracted by the road visages and peripheral ephemera. America, or Montreal in Canada, or anywhere, can be hard to take your eyes off.
The weeks and months passed until that flight to Salt Lake City. Utah, at last. My first time. A land known to me as a special earth set apart.
And thus life continued without the books... Or that artist's intense and necessary focus. Could I find it ever? have I found it now? The last minutes of Saturday ticking away (May 2, 2020) ... Time stops for no one.
A little flourish with an allusion to the Bard. Harold Bloom, of whom I read from 5 or so books subsequent to his passing last fall, would forever allude and acquiesce to his greatness, so there's that.
Since I was in second grade (1978) I wanted to write something; I had the strong urge or notion to put a story or something compelling on paper . I have been paid a few times in my life to write things; I have enjoyed reading, observing, and experiencing things that I have found worthwhile, fulfilling, nourishing, and artistic or inspiring to be moved, informed, touched by a higher power or inner sense.
I have had inklings and actual fores into some writings, some stories, some book attempts, most not nearly finished or completed in a structural sense. All these years have passed and I have some of the same longings of age 8, and 18, and on and on...
Write what you know, they say.
Perhaps I have never quite had the confidence to really dig in and push out what I have known, what whims or fancies have tickled and even vexed my soul. I have blogged a bit, and written things on paper, much of it saved, but to no great public avail or acclaim. At the end of the day it is not about popularity or notoriety, it is about writing and fashioning ideas that makes the author, the creator and developer, the confident (if that is the word) owner of his or her craft, his doings, his stories and ideas.
The greats and the acclaimed and the lesser than acclaimed are able to do that. I have not.
My dad has done his own works, that have had some traction, and that has been interesting and enlightening to see. Perhaps I can do a bit more of it...
"Vividly", I write as an 18 year-old in Spain. With life, with joie d vivre, with panache or a number of other superb French terms. And as a 49 year-old, perhaps I might work together some type of Richard Russo novel or work, a Chaim Potok or Paul Theroux-esque story or tome.
Bring life to the stories and ideas in your head and heart, writing of what you know. Again maybe, it could be in these very words, today Saturday as the sun heads towards the horizon, the millions celebrating and sacrificing in Ramadan, my daughter along with them in solidarity for her friend.
This moment, this hour, this day, this season, this year, this time. Making it timeless and finite. A work, which implies it is done. And as always, I look to the future and the family.
It is who we are. How can I not think of them? of us? Of me and you eternally.... It's all or nothing, including time and the universe. Nirvana is all of it, right?
"But I have a pretty good idea now." Perhaps I did back in the 1980s, pretty far from home and isolated from the normal American milieu, done with that chapter of my life, a chapter that was not my best but one I would survive and a few times reach a level of contentment. High school. Four years of life. As I suggested or implied, have a "good idea" how to flesh out the books and writings that I should go on to produce. But like so many other years of my life, or as I allow life in general with its so many needle pricks of distractions and duties that I chose to keep me from the writer's art and craft, a possible younger style, voice, or persona.
Yes, always distracted. I would return to the United States at the end of June, re-impressed by the U.S. television stations and movies, the basketball news and the baseball games, ESPN highlights and the talking head's chatter, like Roy Firestone, the newspaper columns and their endless fascinating chatter. Mike Leonard was a curious local one who captured my attention in the local section or some such thing of the Herald Telephone. Looking back he was a blogger before the Internet. There were other things and side amusements: Time and Newsweek, the T.V news. Books and things, scriptures and religious texts, a work life with my father, and at a restaurant, and the newspaper route, and church attendance, the last Massachusetts vacation with my mom, the basketball games at the park, the late hot tub jaunts, the regular comic book retrievals, and perhaps a couple other things like home teaching the local members within the flock.
I took an anthology of Ernest Hemingway with me to Boston and the Cape, reading at intervals in the journey, but even then mightily distracted by the road visages and peripheral ephemera. America, or Montreal in Canada, or anywhere, can be hard to take your eyes off.
The weeks and months passed until that flight to Salt Lake City. Utah, at last. My first time. A land known to me as a special earth set apart.
And thus life continued without the books... Or that artist's intense and necessary focus. Could I find it ever? have I found it now? The last minutes of Saturday ticking away (May 2, 2020) ... Time stops for no one.
A little flourish with an allusion to the Bard. Harold Bloom, of whom I read from 5 or so books subsequent to his passing last fall, would forever allude and acquiesce to his greatness, so there's that.
The best thing is someday I can edit this. (Or someone).
My supervision. ["My" underlined twice]
Ha! Prophecy fulfilled! I have done this, or am now in the process as I keyboard these characters, perhaps as a serendipitous consequence of the modern plague of 2020. Sequestration and shelter-in-place, leading to staying at home, my college daughter rooting through my collections and books, me teleworking long hours within the house, getting the angst and drive to re-arrange my collections and memories, spurred by conscious, sub-conscious, long pent up desires or pangs of guilt, and understated restlessness. The quest to organize and analyze, collect and assess, remember and cross-examine, scrutinize and order by priority, prioritize by some kind of madcap or even cold rational order.
Apropos then, that this is in fact, indeed, indubitably, my supervision.
Happy to to talk to myself again. And thank you for coming along, for sharing.
Blog page 20, then.
Star date: 11:45 pm EST, 2 May 2020. Another Saturday en casa.
Thanks for the talks about time, over time, and again, about time. 31 years into the future, or 31 years into the past, depending on how you think of it, conceptualize it.
Lucky me. Thus is Time Talks page 20.
Ha! Prophecy fulfilled! I have done this, or am now in the process as I keyboard these characters, perhaps as a serendipitous consequence of the modern plague of 2020. Sequestration and shelter-in-place, leading to staying at home, my college daughter rooting through my collections and books, me teleworking long hours within the house, getting the angst and drive to re-arrange my collections and memories, spurred by conscious, sub-conscious, long pent up desires or pangs of guilt, and understated restlessness. The quest to organize and analyze, collect and assess, remember and cross-examine, scrutinize and order by priority, prioritize by some kind of madcap or even cold rational order.
Apropos then, that this is in fact, indeed, indubitably, my supervision.
Happy to to talk to myself again. And thank you for coming along, for sharing.
Blog page 20, then.
Star date: 11:45 pm EST, 2 May 2020. Another Saturday en casa.
Thanks for the talks about time, over time, and again, about time. 31 years into the future, or 31 years into the past, depending on how you think of it, conceptualize it.
Lucky me. Thus is Time Talks page 20.
Oh, me...
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