Tag Archives: writing

Horizon line

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we’re in rented
beach chairs on
Pompano Beach,
it’s late November – two days
before Thanksgiving
when she asks me how far it is
to the horizon
and I tell her it is 3 miles
give or take a foot or two…

I further explain:

…that it’s 3 miles from the point
where her lavender painted
toes touch the water
to where the water touches the sky.

I go on:

That’s fifteen thousand
eight hundred forty
feet I say to her —
from your toe tips to
horizon line

then I say…

That’s one foot
for every year that
we’ve known each other…

she laughs

then she tells me that I am not
the world’s most renown

mathematician.

You’re no Euclid, she says
you’re no Blaise Pascal,
no Pythagoras, and
certainly you are no
Archimedes…

then she tells me that
we’ve known each other
much, much longer than that

On reading great writers

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If he were still alive, June 28th would have been the 122nd birthday of legendary author Eric Ambler. Ambler is considered by many to be the ‘father’ of the spy novel/thriller genre. Graham Greene called Ambler “the greatest living author of the novel of suspense”, and indeed his post World War II novels have withstood the test of time and make for fine reading today. Ambler had an uncanny eye for staring into the future and his great, 1935 prophetic novel “The Dark Frontier” discussed the atomic bomb and the rise of nuclear weaponry nearly a decade before the first atomic weapon was dropped upon Hiroshima.

Since his death in 1998 at age 89 his books remain as popular today as they were a half dozen decades ago. But this blog is not a bio about Mr. Ambler, but rather something that I read about him in a 1998 online obituary.

The obituary noted that in a conversation with Eileen Bigland, herself a well-known, serious author, Ambler told her that he had been reading a lot. When she asked him what he was reading, he said that he was reading Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello and James Joyce. Upon hearing this, Bigland offered this advice: “Never read very good writers while you are trying yourself to write good trash. You’ll only get depressed.”

At first, upon reading this, it appears to be a nod to mediocrity. But upon further examination, Ms. Bigland’s words hold some worth. I recall talking with a member of our Ft. Lauderdale writer’s group a number of years ago. She was writing a romance novel set in 1940s New Mexico. But she had been reading a lot of Nicholas Sparks and Nora Roberts and she didn’t feel like her work measured up. She had become so disillusioned with her work that she had walked away from her writing project twice. At the time of our conversation, she had just picked up her novel where she had left off months earlier, and she really wanted to see it through to the end, just for the sake of completion. I told her that it might be wise to resist comparing her work to that of the great writers of the genre. Another member of the group said that she should avoid reading romance novels by anyone until her novel was complete.

So, can reading the work of great writers be detrimental to our writing projects? I think that if we compare our work to theirs it can, and in the case of my friend from the writer’s group, such comparisons had caused her to lose focus and discontinue a project that she really wanted to complete. A painter who compares her work to Rembrandt or Picasso will surely be disappointed if she is trying to paint like Rembrandt or Picasso.

I recall a radio interview with singer songwriter Jimmy Buffett many years ago, Buffett told the interviewer that he was aware of the fact that he was not the best singer in the world, or the best guitar player in the world. But he went on to say that he was the best Jimmy Buffet in the world. Maybe that is the key to it all – being the best that we can be without comparing ourselves to the best of the best.

So, all of that said, I will not be reading Eric Ambler for some time. Not until my project is complete.

Post-pandemic remorse

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The company that I work for in Florida shut down one day in March 2020 with a single email from our corporate office.  The email announced that due to the corona virus outbreak, our local office would close,  until further notice. All employees were told to work from home until otherwise instructed. It was a short email and it said that further directives from corporate would be forthcoming.  In a conference call with management a day or two later, we were told that the closing could last as long as two to four weeks.

Should I go on?

Today, as I sit in my home office, I think a lot about the past year and a half. Now as businesses are starting to open, travel restrictions are being lifted, and employees are being redirected from dining room tables back to corporate cubicles, I think of the past year more in a blur than anything else. Will we return to normal, I mean, completely normal anytime soon? In doing a bit of research on this question, I came across something that seems to fit well with some of the time use/management/ topics that I have been writing about on this blog the past few weeks. I am talking about post-pandemic remorse.

Post pandemic remorse is a feeling many people are experiencing which is akin to guilt. Guilt over squandering time. Time which had been awarded them to produce, to create, to do something they have always wanted to do. Now many are feeling that they have wasted this ‘gift’ of time. They are thinking that this negative pandemic experience should  have been parlayed into something positive. They are thinking that they should have written that screenplay, novel, or deeply researched non-fiction essay. Maybe they should have become certified in something, learned a new skill, mastered something…anything.

As I look at my own, incomplete, novel, I am tempted to fall into the pandemic remorse trap myself. I mean, with the restaurants all closed, what did I have to do but write a best seller?

But maybe we are being way too hard on ourselves. Maybe our desire to achieve and create needs a reset. Maybe on the other side of this whole pandemic lies fallow soil in which to plant. Do we really need a worldwide shutdown to inspire us to sit down at a keyboard and write something we want to write? Is our time such a commodity that we need rely on global disaster to access it?

How about you? Are you dealing with pandemic regret? Or were you far too busy coping with this worldwide disaster to consider self improvement?

This afternoon as I was writing this, I was listening to a fine song that I hadn’t thought of in some time. It is a song by Chuck Mead called “On a Slow Train to Arkansas”. It is a great song to listen to if you want to forget all about post-pandemic remorse. It is also one of the few songs that I know that talk about Arkansas.

Yeah, I know… how about “Uncle Elijah” by Black Oak Arkansas, so don’t go there.

But Slow Train is a great song so I will leave a link to it here.

Thanks for reading…

Ed

Planning with Seneca

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A few days ago, I was cleaning out an old Franklin Planner, prior to disposing of it, looking for any phone numbers, business cards, etc. that I might want to save. Now if you aren’t familiar with the FranklinPlanner company, they are the makers of some of the finest time management tools anywhere. I was a devoted user of the Franklin system for over twenty years, and during my all too many years in Corporate America, I have gone through more daily planner pages, binders, and calendar pages than I like to think about.

But that said, I  hadn’t used my old paper calendar planner in a couple of years. Being a home worker, I found a big spiral notebook and small desk calendar provided the same time management results for a fraction of the cost, so my old planner sat on the shelf collecting dust, until I decided it was time to clean house.

In the process of cleaning out my planner, I ran across a quote that I had copied from the internet and pasted on one of the monthly divider tabs in my planner. I read this quote daily for a very long time, and since it seems to dovetail in with some other things I have been blogging about here on EEOTPB, regarding mindfulness and our time and how we spend it, I thought I would pass it along to you.

The quote comes from Seneca the Younger, the stoic Roman philosopher (b 4BC – d 69 AD). If anyone’s words can be said to have real staying power, it’s Seneca’s. They are as true today, as they were in the first century:

“No one will bring back the years; no one will restore you to yourself. Life will follow the path it began to take and will neither reverse nor check its course. It will cause no commotion to remind you of its swiftness, but glide on quietly. It will not lengthen itself for a king’s command or a people’s favor. As it started out on its first day, so it will run on, nowhere pausing, or turning aside. What will be the outcome? You have been preoccupied while life hastens on. Meanwhile death will arrive, and you have no choice in making yourself available for that.”

Talk about a guy who has a way with words…that Seneca…

Time misspent

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A few weeks ago, a friend mentioned to me that whenever she started reading a book, she always finished it. No matter if the book was good, or bad, she always finished the book before starting another. The act of finishing the book was of greater importance to her than the lost hours of time spent on the task. I told her that I felt exactly the opposite. I feel that time spent on a task that reaps no reward is time misspent, and the older one gets, the more one starts to look for misspent hours. They are slices of time that cannot be returned to us.

I was thinking of this today – time and how we spend it, when I remembered an online article that I read some years back. It is one of those (very) few online pieces that has stuck with me. Unfortunately, I didn’t bookmark it, or I could share it here today.

The piece was written by an inmate on death row in Texas who was about to be executed. The article detailed the last 24 hours of the inmate’s life in excruciating detail. He described his transfer from his cell in one prison, to a cell outside of the death chamber in another. He described the food he ate, the people he talked to and the black and white television that was set up just outside of his cell, so he could entertain himself in his last hours. He described a table of snacks that was set up just beyond his cell and he described a final cigarette that was given to him by a kindly corrections officer. The detailed execution protocol commenced to the point of securing the inmate to the lethal injection gurney before the phone rang and it was announced that he had received a stay of execution. The inmate was returned to his cell, his date with death delayed.

I don’t know what happened to this inmate, nor do I want to begin a conversation about the pros and cons of capital punishment (so don’t even go there in the comments section). But what happened next made me stop and think. The inmate said that after he had been returned to his normal, day to day prison life, and he’d had time to reflect on his near execution, he came to see how the scripted execution protocol being followed by everyone involved in the event (if you can call it an event), was designed to distract all people involved from the actual execution. It was designed to fill every single minute until his death with an activity. Something to be signed, watched, written, eaten, smoked, drank or in some way sensory consumed. It was designed to keep everyone occupied so that there would be no time to consider what was really about to occur until after it occurred.

Few of us, apart from condemned prisoners, know the exact day and hour of our demise, but I do wonder how much time we spend upon meaningless pursuits as the clock ticks down. Are we all guilty of time misspent? Will we wish to retrieve portions of it one day? Are we too involved in social media (an easy target, I know), pointless relationships, unfulfilling tasks, or reading uninspiring books? Have we all fallen into the twenty first century ‘protocol’ of life? That is what I am thinking today. As always, your comments are welcome.

Thoughts from the road

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Yesterday, I took a break from my day job as a technical writer for a large corporation, a corporation with many technical writers on three continents, so I am really just a small cog in a large technical writing wheel. But I took a day off to drive for two and a half hours down the Florida peninsula to visit my dentist in the leafy, family-friendly (their words, not mine), Ft. Lauderdale bedroom community of Coral Springs. I have always been averse to the term ‘bedroom community’ as it infers that little else happens in those communities, other than that which occurs in the bedroom, and I find that very restrictive and narrow. I have never heard of a community described as a ‘kitchen community’ or a ‘garage community’, or God forbid ‘bathroom community’. So, I cosign ‘bedroom community’ to the list of words and phrases that I dislike (‘bucket list’ being another that comes immediately to mind, but that’s another blog).

But I digress, and it’s not the trip to Coral Springs, Florida, nor the expensive dental work that I will soon require that I am thinking about today, but rather the journey on the highway, Interstate 95, an especially neutered stretch of road that strays just far enough from both the Atlantic Ocean on one side, and Florida’s Everglades on the other, so as to give the traveler a taste of neither. The great New York to Miami artery pumps commerce in both directions (north and south); there are big trucks, little trucks, Lexus, Hyundai, Fords, Silverado trucks, and ninja bikes all on their way to everywhere, and to nowhere.

There are no named rest areas on I-95 either, just numbers – MM 302 St. Augustine; MM225 Mims; MM133 Ft. Pierce. No need for snack bars or fuel. Take care of yourself fellow traveler. This is America, learn to fend for yourself. Look for your bootstraps cowboy, they’re right where you left them. Check the names of the missing teenagers on the bulletin board by the restroom and move along. Do your business. Say your piece and get out. South Beach waits at the end of the road. The mouse is an hour to the west.  A couple of  hours past that, sultry Tampa Bay hoists a subtle middle finger, asking us not so politely to  stay away.

The particular journey that I was on yesterday was only a couple of hundred miles, but it was enough to remind me of longer road trips I have taken, and the therapeutic benefits that I have achieved while on such journeys. And there is therapeutic value, believe me. Try driving from Spokane to St. Paul and you’ll see what I mean. Nothing can connect you with the voice inside your head like the high desert. The current buzzword, ‘mindfulness’, or being extremely aware of the moment and focusing on it and living in it is a close description but does not do the experience justice. Hearing yourself can be achieved through use of a number of relaxation techniques, but actually paying attention to what you are hearing is quite another matter and becoming excited about what you are hearing is still another.

Frederic Will, in his classic 1992 book, “Big Rig Souls” explores this phenomenon among America’s long-haul truck drivers. In this book, which is a short, but scholarly look at the American truck driver, Will strips away the media conjured myth of the truck driver as the last American cowboy and explores their relationship with their jobs, their families, their machines, the trucking industry, and more importantly, their personal journey both in and out of the trucking world.

In one chapter, Will interviews a driver who says that it is not unusual for drivers to stop at a coffee shop after a long run on the road and begin to unload with a plethora of ideas to anyone who will listen. ‘Foolishness’, this talk is described as being, and the driver will often continue to unload his thoughts for several minutes until realizing he has made no sense at all.

But what if this phenomenon is not nearly as foolish as it first appears. Maybe these long-haul drivers have simply tapped into a source of creativity that is lying just beneath the surface ready to be revealed. Maybe this type of mental brainstorming is not detrimental at all and may in fact be more transformative than it first appears?

I have always found writing and long-distance driving to be compatible partners and I have felt some of my greatest bursts of creativity while ‘on the road’. So, don’t go out and push yourself on a nonstop Seattle to Atlanta cannonball run just to finish the last chapter of your novel, but if you have had similar experiences with this type of focus and clarity coming to you while driving, I would like to hear from you. Disclaimer: Of course, obey all traffic laws, don’t drive when you are too tired, buckle up and most importantly — no drinking (until you are safely back at the keyboard).

National Poetry Month

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I know that it’s been quiet around here at the EEOTPB website. So quiet that my friend Tulip, who disappeared into the depths of Southern California (somewhere near Toluca Lake) nearly two years ago, finally surfaced. She called me the other night to find out if I was okay. I told her that I was fine, but because of my current professional situation, I had been forced to spend most of my time concentrating on paying writing jobs, and my day job of writing technical books had left me creatively drained.

In the course of our conversation, she reminded me that April is National Poetry Month. She went on to say that if I had any true appreciation for the art form of poetry, I would not let the month go by without firing off at least one post into the blogosphere mentioning this fact.

So to recognize the month, I will respond here, to the reader who wrote to me some time ago to ask if I actually ever READ any poetry. I told that reader that I did read quite a bit of poetry and someday, when I got time, I would go into details.

Recently (ok within the last six months), I have read these three books of poems. I recommend them all for anyone with the slightest interest in poetry, writing, or in the assemblage of words in any unique and meaningful order:

  1. Weldon Kees, The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees – Probably the finest poet to come out of Beatrice, Nebraska to date, Weldon Kees is perhaps best known for his dramatic, albeit suspicious exit from life, rather than his fine body of work. Known by some as the “Missing Poet”, Kees committed suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge on July 18, 1955. Although some believe that Kees staged his own death and fled to a new life in Mexico, his typewriter fell silent after that date. Known as “a bitter poet”, I didn’t read any of his works until fairly recently, and I wish I had discovered him sooner. But bitter…yeah, a little.
  2. Louis Jenkins, Before You Know It: Prose Poems 1970-2005 – I was never a fan of the prose poem, until I read Louis Jenkins. I enjoyed his work so much that I tried writing a few prose poems myself, and although they fall far short of Jenkins’ poems, I have gained a new appreciation for the form. Jenkins is a native Oklahoman, but he lived for decades up in Duluth, Minnesota. Why that’s worth mentioning, I can’t say, but there is something about that neck of the woods that brings out the poet in some people. Bob Dylan is from Duluth, and I have always suspicioned that his talent may have been in someway channeled by the large iron deposits underlying that part of the country – but that is just my theory.
  3. Ernest Hemingway, Complete Poems – A couple of years ago, my wife and I attended a reading of Papa’s poetry at the Blue Heaven Bar on Thomas Street in Key West. It was during Hemingway Days, which occurs each year in July – not the greatest time of year to visit Key West. It is truly a 24 hour sauna in the Keys that time of year, but if you are up for it, head on down, order a cold one at the bar, and sip it slowly as you listen to The Old Man’s best poems read by dedicated members of the Key West Poetry Guild. Up until that time, I had never considered Hemingway a poet, and from what I’ve read that’s the way he liked it. He never really wanted be remembered for his verse. In any case, I picked up a copy of his Collected Works on my way out of town. It sat on my bookshelf untouched for more than two years until I recently picked it up and read it. I shall consider him a poet whether he likes it or not, and as things stand right now, there is little he can do about it.

So that’s what I’ve been reading. I would like to hear what you’ve been reading as well, so feel free to comment here.

I will close my tribute to National Poetry Month with a short, whimsical poem that I wrote several years ago. It’s been collecting virtual dust on my hard drive since 2009, so this seems as good a time as any to let go of it:

 

ON WRITING A POEM

Writing a poem is often like,
pushing a wheelbarrow full of bricks,
up a steep hill, for absolutely
no reason, whatsoever.

Nobody really needs the bricks,
nobody cares if you make it
to the top, or if you spill half
of the load on the way up.

In the end, you’ll be just
another forlorn, but tired
wheelbarrow pusher, you’ll never be
a real bricklayer.

If you were a real bricklayer,
you’d write a novel,
And carry your bricks up…
…one at a time,
and position them very carefully.

But you’re no bricklayer – so,
be content with your task,
concentrate on the load,
rejoice at the summit.

tax time

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Naked
and afraid?
Who, you?
me?
Not a chance
dig your
pink painted toes
into the sand and
file the extension.

Then kiss me
like we have no
real chance
of going home.

It’s a two and
a half hour
flight to
Tegucigalpa, so
call up the relatives
and pretend
there’s a new investor
named Ferdinand
and he’s burning
cash like there
is no tomorrow.

Just kiss me
again and
say if there
is such a thing
as real love
you’ve found it here
on deadbeat beach.

In a week we will
be on the bus
to Choluteca
drinking warm beer
and laughing about
the last check we
left for the
landlord.

The Upper Keys bagel poem

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after all
the skiff is still upright
the shadows have
hastened away, and
you and I are upright
as well…
and waiting for the next
thing to happen
AS we wait for the
quiet of mid-morning
to slink in like some
old washed up
guitar player,
like some has-been
drugged out rock star
like some careless,
busted, fishing guide.

We wait until the traffic slows
on the OS Highway
so we can walk up to the
bagel shop where that
guy named Nigel says
he has the best damned
bagels south of Brooklyn
but you say he hasn’t got
a clue as to what goes
into a bagel
you tell me that he’s
too self-absorbed.
You tell me
there is not
a fucking
bagel
worth
eating
south of Cape May, New Jersey.

We eat our bagels
in peace – on the deck
of the best damned
Brooklyn Bagel dive
in the Upper Keys.

You wave to
some driver in
a furniture truck
barreling
south on US 1
you tell me, that
he’s driving too fast
and in the end
it’s all just another
accident waiting
to happen.

 

don’t change a thing

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don’t change a thing
please
don’t move
the McCoy pottery vase
that has stood
on the cherry wood table
in the front room
for the past 16 years,
leave it where it is…
…
leave the paper roses
where you found them
on the porch swing,
crumpled and soaked
in port wine,
leave the keys to the
’75 Chrysler New Yorker on the
Grand Hotel Key Rack
beside the basement
stairs
remember
it’s all in the details,
so don’t move anything
if you don’t have to
…
pretend
it’s morning again
So just – roll over,
it’s only 8 am
sleep for another hour
after all, the trains
don’t run on Sunday
later on
we’ll take the dogs out and
let them run
along the shore of the lake
just don’t change a thing
I’ll turn my hat around
and wear it backwards
I will offer you a clove cigarette
and a cup of black coffee
we’ll walk to
the railroad bridge
and we will put our back
to the summer wind
but we won’t change
a damned thing
ever, if we know
what’s good for us.