Every morning Daisy the Dog and I go down to the edge of our short driveway and, while she watches for squirrels and any other four-legged neighborhood denizen on her friend-or-foe list, I located and pick up the daily newspapers.

I read two: the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. I share them with my wife. We each have favorite sections that act as antidotes to the mostly grim news radiating from the front page and, in the post, the Metro section, which could be retitled, “Why the District of Columbia is Really Messed Up.” I tend to read book reviews, editorials and op-eds, the Style section and cultural reviews. I’m also a fan of the Journal’s “A” heads–human interest articles that used to be positioned at the center of the front page. Now they’re somewhere at the bottom. I thank the grimy gods of journalism that the A head survived the Journal’s most recent page, content and staff reductions.

A few days ago, as I read a 618 page (with more than a hundred subsequent pages of footnotes and bibliography) biography of Samuel Beckett, I gave myself a moment of sadness for the loss of the letter, that thing some of used to write on paper, put in an envelope, add a stamp, put in a mail box and then wait, with some anticipation, for a reply.

I started writing letters when I spent a summer month backpacking around England. My best letters, written on that thin, blue “air letter” tissue, went to my girlfriend (who is now my wife). I had so many things to say and, because I believed I’d become a writer someday, I said those things as cleverly as I could. Later, I’d write to her in college on a typewriter. My letters could be five to ten pages–yes, I was lonely and I missed her very much. She’d write back, too, sometimes letters just as long. The letters stopped when we broke up.

I wrote letters to other people, some of whom were intimidated by how much I needed to write. I didn’t always get the response I anticipated but, for as long as the correspondence lasted, the letters created a relationship unlike those experienced on the telephone or in person.

I thought that this custom would translate to e-mail. It hasn’t. During the brief time that I taught in a high school, I wrote long e-mails. I may not have been the only one to do so, but I could not help but feel targeted when the principal had a faculty meeting in which he aimed to teach us all how to write e-mails. Long e-mails (anything that wouldn’t fit on the small screen that pops out) were deemed ridiculous, tedious, boring and dangerous because those taken up in the foment of prolix passion may let slip comments, cliches, controversy–that they may regret later.

I shortened my e-mails from then on, but, every once in a while, I let fly a big one.

From reading the Becket biography, and so many others, I see how a letter is a precious and precarious document for an historian. Precious, because it offers an insight into the heart and mind of a human being; precarious, because it is contextual, familiar and not always honest, or accurate.

Today I saw a full page advertisement in the newly slimmed down WSJ showing what appears to be a photographic reproduction of a handwritten letter written by “Cliff” referring to the suicide of a 16-year-old brother and asking for peace at Christmastime.

The ad is from the Paper and Packaging Board, which, I guess, is a trade group for the paper making industry that “asked five people whose lives have been touched by violence and cruelty to write Letters of Peace [capitalization original] that reflect their enduring faith in humanity.”

The purpose of the ad is to make you go to a website where more letters exist. The cynic in me reflects that the industry, fearing a decline in the sales pricey stationery, wants to revive the civilized custom of writing letters. If so, what a strange way to resurrect what has become an anachronism.

And yet, with more blogs being written than will ever be read, I find a quixotic nobility in this. Unlike Internet logorrhea, words committed to paper take up space. Things that take up space have the potential of hanging around and things that hang around more than fifty years become charming. Things that hang around longer can even become important, such as the 2,000 year old scraps of parchment found in the dry desert caves of Qum Ran now called the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Or they can be ironic, like the uncounted bits that have been inserted in the nooks and crannies of Jerusalem’s Western Wall, on the hope that God will read them.

What stories, wisdom, advice or message would you want to leave your children? Your children’s children?

A better question: assuming you write this letter for posterity, where would you put it so that the right people will find it and read it?

We need a National Association of Nooks and Crannies to sell us hiding places. And a Council on Maps and Trailmarking to provide hints.

And more than a little bit of hope that our words will be their words so many years from now.

Much too often I feel that I never should have “been” a writer. Way back when I was in fourth grade and my mother helped me revise a homework assignment into a wonderful little fable–I should have stomped on any thought that this would be a worth while thing to do for the rest of my life.

Later, when Damon Knight said that great science fiction and fantasy provided readers with a “sense of wonder,” I should not have believed him. I should have have forgotten those many, many times I was thrilled with what I was read,  and I should never have imagined that I, too, may develop an ability to string words together that would create such awe and astonishment.

Back then, I was a fat kid with allergies who went through the public library’s science fiction section and then graduated to paperbacks from the local bookstore that would eventually give me my first job. They let me stock the science fiction section, recommend titles to order and encourage customers to try new authors.

I was convinced beyond doubt that I would write stuff that would find a place on the bookstore shelves, and my books did, but not in the science fiction section, because I worked so hard on science fiction, I cared so much about it, it was so very important to me, that the rejections from agents and editors hurt so deeply that, in an urge to be published, I turned to journalism where, to my surprise, my writing appeared in publications that would never print a letter-to-the-editor from a science fiction writer.

I still have an unpublished fantasy novel and fragments of a few others. The novel is beautiful to me. It contains my affection for folk music, my understanding that love is the most important thing that happens to us, and the necessity of the sense of wonder.

The farthest the book got up the chain of gatekeepers was a rejection from an agent who said she was confused: did I want to write a real novel, or a fantasy novel? that I wanted to write a real novel instead of a science fiction novel and you really can’t have both. When I heard that, I flippantly replied that you can have both, that it had been my ambition to write science fiction that could stand up as literature.

I shouldn’t have bothered. A rejection is a rejection. They all hurt, and, no matter how many awards I’ve won, how many famous publications have printed my stuff, they make me feel that I should never have thought I could “be” a writer, that my specific bundle of flaws had disqualified me from birth.

From reading biographies of writers, I’ve learned have that writers need a armor-plated “thick skin” from which the rejections will just bounce off. They also need an unshakeable self-confidence, a tireless work ethic, a cast-iron constitution that can resist that numerous “substances” consumed to make the words flow, a significant other who believes in the writer and the writer’s work, a BIG BREAK, and, later, when fame and fortune overwhelm them, an agent and editor who will defend their need not to repeat themselves, a small group of friends who endure their low moods and laugh with their rare manic highs, and  nice hideaway in a scenic location where they can write stuff that critics will think is inferior to their earlier work.

Of course, there are always exceptions. Samuel Beckett was born into a functional (NOT dysfunctional) middle class Irish family, failed at teaching, met James Joyce and wanted to BE James Joyce, failed at being James Joyce, was depressed almost all the time, was broke almost all the time, went into psychoanalysis, bummed around, published poems and short stories that were ignored, had thin skin, met a woman who believed in him, drank, narrowly avoided arrest when he helped the French Resistance during World War Two, tried to write a lot of things, finished a few difficult-to-read works and, while suffering through larger works, wrote a play in French called Waiting for Godot that is, in my opinion, one of the greatest Modernist works ever, alongside the Seagrams Building in New York, Picasso’s Guernica, The Three Penny Opera, Falling Water, the Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock…

I never had the thick skin. I never had the self confidence. I discovered early that all the substances that are supposed to make words flow leave you worse off than if you never consumed them. I never found an agent I could trust, and, consequently, they all let me down. I had a few great editors in journalism but the only good one I had in books rejected my second novel and then died before I could finish the third.

Somehow, I continued to write and, not because I needed the money. Samuel Beckett’s famous dialectic–“I must go on. I can’t go on. I will go on.” I hit so many, many walls, and, after hurting and whining and asking myself how I could have been such a fool–I came back to that original feeling.

I wanted to do this.

I wanted to string words together that communicated how wonderful things might be, could be, and, every once in a while, are.

And I still do.

Why? I really don’t know. I do know that, as long as I’m still capable of putting one word in front of another, I may reach that point when I realize why I wanted to do this.

Until then…I go on.

I called the Apple support line and was informed that, not only would my conversation be recorded, but that, while I was on hold, I had a choice of music with which I could pass the time.

Though my memory isn’t what it was, I believe I was told that I could press 1 for pop music, 2 for classical, 3 for jazz and 4 to wait in silence.

I picked jazz because I feel that music that is based on improvisation is the most vital in that it contains all other kinds of music (I say this knowing that classical, or what I prefer to call European historically composed music that was mostly favored by priests, ministers and the aristocracy until those 20th century malcontents took over, has its improvisational opportunities). I pressed 3 and was horrified.

What came out was so distorted that it was worse than unlistenable: it was audibly offensive. I couldn’t bear to have the phone near my ear.

I could imagine some Apple “genius” telling me that if I had only used an Apple phone to make my call, the music would play perfectly. Apple is the triumphant American version of that Germanic esthetic that you find in BMWs and Mercedes: we’ve figured out what you need from a vehicle. Do what we tell you, drive the way we want you, and everything will be okay.

Until, of course, the machine breaks, as my Ipod did, or it wears out to the extent that maintaining and repairing it costs more than the machine is worth (as has happened to my wife’s Mercedes). Then you have one choice if you want to maintain the cool, clean, seemingly effortless elan of technology ownership: buy the new model.

I wish I was the kind of person that Steve Jobs imagined, who immediately understands ergonomic design, speaks geek and so thoroughly trusts a corporation as to let it tell me what I want, even if I don’t know that I want it and can’t quite figure out how to get it.

A few years ago I replaced a Dell laptop with a MacBook Pro because everybody–including my two sons–said it was the absolute best laptop made. I unpacked it, noticing how clever Apple was in constructing an experience with packaging. I fired it up and…

I didn’t get it. It wasn’t intuitive for me. It was confusing in a maddening way. I couldn’t do what I had learned to do with bulky, blocky, greedy, clumsy, lobotomized and preternaturally evil Windows: start the thing and just write. I was assured by so many, many people that this is exactly what happens with the MacBook Pro, that I would come around, step into the light, accept Steve Jobs as my savior and realize that Apple (a company in which I own stock!) was on this earth to help me discover myself (or some such gassy ideal).

It didn’t happen. I avoided the thing and finally gave it to my wife, who made the transition.

I went back to my clunky desktop, feeling somehow betrayed by the future that, as a youthful science fiction fan, I so wanted to embrace.

So I was listening to the horribly distorted music, got to some person in a strange corner of the world who barely understood what I was saying, and got an appointment to see a genius. I asked for an e-mail confirmation and didn’t get it. So I called back and this time, I chose silence.

I sat there, hearing nothing and…it made sense.  Music, an art that I love that has saved my mind, heart, soul and life so many times, was no longer a thing to fill air, occupy space, distract, or remind me how limited my cellphone was.

I got my e-mail confirmation but then found out that my Ipod probably couldn’t be fixed. It’s the old 160, and Apple not only doesn’t make them anymore, the Apple stores don’t even have the parts. I could go someplace that my be able to do something with it or….buy myself a shiny new Ipod Touch 128 for $399!

And, you know I wanted to buy it. I wanted to hop in my car, zoom down to that place and strut out of that store with my new toy, so I could carry my music with me, wrap it around me like a cloak as I exercised, let it surround me while I was stuck in traffic in my car, pop it in the player in the kitchen to augment the occasional romantic dinner.

Then I remembered how I liked that little bit of silence.

Just a little bit.

Now, I’m not giving up on music. Never, never, never. But, is it possible that our greatest feats of technological brilliance have something to teach us…when they break down?

Listen…

The title of Frank Zappa’s silly, free form studio piece never seems to go away.

Almost nine minutes too long, it was a part of the Mothers of Invention’s first release, a two record album called Freak Out! What was a Freak Out? As a verb, to freak was hippie-speak for a reaction, typically drug-inspired, that ended in a change of hair style, clothing and political attitude.

Ironically, Zappa despised hippies almost as much as he loathed the “establishment” world of 1950’s conformity and racial repression. For him, freak outs could make you laugh, annoy you, or maybe just become what it truly was: an exuberant, innocent, blatantly adolescent exercise in social rebellion.

Zappa’s group, the Mothers of Invention, liked to stage their form of musical anarchy during live performances. As some of Zappa’s biographers pointed out, it wasn’t what it seemed: as arrogant, talented, disgusting, satiric, lewd and funny as Zappa could be, he equated artistic freedom with the ability to record and release anything, and everything, he composed. He’d churn out a record every three or four months with the hope that, sooner or later, something would connect with the mass culture and he’d finally get the freedom–and respect–he thought he deserved.

(I want to add parenthetically that I don’t feel, as some culture critics have insisted, that an artist must first master rules and conventions before breaking them. The truth is that most artists have a very short productive life span and it is the nature of our market-driven global economy to ignore just about everything that isn’t easily accessible, so, it’s more important to reach your creative goals quickly than to fret about split infinitives.)

As a pop culture denizen, Zappa exuded a wonderful arrogance: he modeled himself on the avante garde composers of the early 20th century whose experiments with varying rhythms and dissonance infamously shocked the bourgeoisie (as a birthday present, his parents permitted him to have a telephone conversation with one of his idols, Edgar Varese). Zappa had a fierce belief in his own necessity: he maintained that everything he wrote and performed–even if he was merely revising or re-editing old material, was a vital contribution to the human race. He composed constantly, even when he was ill. He railed against censorship of any kind, and wrote pieces calculated to offend, believing that art could, and should, change those who didn’t understand it.

His wish came true exactly twice: he got radio hits with a repellently silly novelty single called “Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow,” and a goof that mocked teen slang, “Valley Girl.” He did not indulge in alcohol, marijuana or any of the illegal drugs of his generation. He liked cigarettes and coffee, and died from prostate cancer.

And he recorded, on his first album, a song about people repeating to themselves that “it can’t happen here,” that those who feel safe, be they hippies, adolescents or conforming adults anxiously raising their children in monotonous suburban paradises, eventually discover that what they fear, loathe or find discordant, can, and does happen, and that when it does, few people wonder why: they just say “who could have imagined…” until the next thing happens that captures their attention.

Zappa’s vision isn’t sophisticated in this piece. He presumed an inevitability: that harmless freak outs would continue to occur throughout American society and that, after a while, we would just become accustomed to them.

We have always lived in times that have shocked, amused and infuriated the complacent. Any historian would have difficulty finding a period in time when things were “just okay,” when the rigor of change did not greet us on so many mornings like a blast of cold air.

A glance at our nation’s coarse, crude and overwhelmingly current political disarray shows one remaining truth: as much as it may be a hoot to sing, or write about other people freaking out, it’s no fun when it happens to you.

A year ago I almost died. Or maybe I didn’t and I just believed what I was told by medical professionals who, after all, aren’t right as much as any of us may wish.

I remember leaving an appointment with my cardiologist, who said my blood pressure was under control and that I was in good shape. I could lose a few pounds but this is nothing to worry about right now.

A little more than a week later my arms became so weak and painful that I could barely hold them up. I thought my body was telling me something, so I went out for a two mile run. Yup. Two miles, during which I waited for that moment when the endorphins kicked in and I felt good again.

It didn’t happen. My blood pressure began to soar. I was short of breath and, after a scary drive to the hospital, I was given all kinds of things that gave me a very sunny disposition, put into a bed, “observed” and, after an very long while, taken into the cath lab, given a stent, and, after more observation, let out.

Eleven days later, I was back in the hospital with another heart attack (whose symptoms were identical with the first), back in the cath lab, given two more stents.

I never wanted to turn into one of those guys who, instead of talking about the weather, sports, cars or whatever else guys talk about most of the time, go on and on about their illnesses. But illness, when we experience, can become a way of understanding.

Or, in my case, a paradox that is better than a simple truth.

The paradox is easy: would I have behaved any differently if, at that fateful appointment, my cardiologist had been able to identify that I was DEFINITELY a heart attack risk? Certainly! Would I have been able to prevent the heart attack? Probably not.

I’m troubled by those avid reductionists, the kind who prattle “there are two kinds of people in this world” (what, only two? ) or “life is all about choices” (it isn’t, even if you choose to believe that, because some things happen to you that you did not chose, and other things happen before you can make that choice), or “life is about information.”

I remember Leo McKern’s Number Two, saying smugly in The Prisoner TV series, “we want information, information, information.”

Patrick McGoohan’s Number Six reply: “You won’t get it.”

Reposte: “By hook, or by crook, we will.”

In the series marginally incomprehensible ending (written in haste by McGoohan, who, before he died, claimed that it said all he wanted to say about the individual in society), Number Six escapes, the Village (the hi-tech prison against which he rebelled) implodes precisely like a deflating balloon, and we are given, in the very last seconds of the episode, the impression that the task of being an individual in society is never over: we’re all prisoners until we deny the power of society to control us.

Wonderful stuff, this. It influenced me for most of my life.

But now I’m older and, ever since I developed high blood pressure (it runs in my family, alas), the prescriptive (things you should do) enticements are piling up. Exercise–which used to be a source of my individual freedom–has become a chore.

And I could, and probably will, have another heart attack.

But I should–I must–live in denial: exercise is still a grand statement of freedom and strength (especially when I do my karate katas). Food remains pleasure and necessity. Life requires bliss: I must manage my emotional state so that I can believe that, maybe–just maybe, the good things that I’d like to see happen will find a way to happen, before the door I imagined I saw when I was in the Emergency Room opens and someone I’m supposed to be able to recognize takes me to the Other Side, where, I’ve been told, paradoxes don’t exist, all questions are answered and faith is replaced by certainty.

They tell you when you’re young to make the most of it, that what we know as life could be snuffed out at any second.

What happens when you get older? You have fewer people hanging around, so you have to tell it to yourself.

Time to exercise.

When reading a biography about Ralph Waldo Emerson, I discovered that the eminently quotable American Transcendentalist philosopher’s favorite breakfast  was a slice of apple pie and coffee.

He’d have this every day, usually early in the morning. Then he’d sit down to write. About two an a half hours later, he’d finish and go for a walk. Returning from the walk, he’d busy himself with correspondence and then have supper.

I’ve been intrigued with Emerson ever since high school, when I adorned my English papers with his quotations. Those I selected had a crisp, strident, optimistic ring, implying, or sometimes stating outright, that problems were strewn in our path so that we may benefit from solving them, that nature was our greatest teacher (this was poignant for me, as I suffered from hay fever and loathed the out-of-doors) and that so many difficulties in life, love and whatever happiness one wished to pursue (for me, reading, and writing science fiction and fantasy under the blast of a rattling window mounted air conditioner that was supposed to filter out the nasty pollen that made me sneeze) could be traced to a failure to trust yourself completely.

“To believe your own thought,” Emerson wrote in “Self Reliance,” the essay that became the lecture that made him nationally famous,  “to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost.”

When my short stories were refused publication by science fiction pulp magazines, I could take heart in Emerson’s observation that “in every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else to-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another.”

“Trust thyself,” Emerson proclaimed, “every heart vibrates to that iron string.”

It would take the 20th Century to show us that it’s possible to follow this guidance and find yourself in a barrel floating toward Niagara Falls. In high school, I lost weight, fell in love and was absolutely certain that by writing often and trusting myself, I’d become the writer I always wanted to be. In college, I took whatever courses interested me, eventually accumulating a double major in English and Religion, with minors in History and Classics–all on the assumption that this would lead me someplace.

Later, when I entered the exploitative world of journalism, every underpaying editor I met (beginning at The Georgetowner in Washington, D.C. and climaxing at the New York Times) assured me that the great experience from being overworked and underpaid was would take me places.

But I had the occasional doubt. They began when my parents divorced and I couldn’t get a sensible answer from either of them as to why it happened. Then my high school girlfriend broke up with me and I couldn’t figure out why that happened. I loved her. She loved me, but…

I continued to write science fiction stories that were rejected by the magazines. I applied for jobs at publications and was turned down for reasons that didn’t make any sense. I encountered the cruelty, hypocrisy and strangeness of a human nature that was profoundly disinterested in my survival, and thoroughly estranged to providing the comforting self-confidence that comes from “success.” Book publishers kept coming up with new ways to disappoint me, especially when they published my work!

But every once in a while, I’d stumble on those Emersonian quotes and smack myself on my forehead for not trusting myself enough. I’d look back on my immediate history and see where I’d gone wrong. I even found a villain: doubt! I’d doubted myself, doubted others, doubted the benevolence of the natural world that Emerson was so certain about.

Later I studied Emerson’s life and saw that, before he wrote his essay and became famous and wealthy, he suffered terribly. His father had been a respected clergyman who died when Emerson was eight.The New England congregation Emerson’s father had so earnestly led promptly put Emerson’s family on the street to free the parsonage for the next spiritual leader, thus dooming them to poverty. Emerson went to Harvard on what we would call today a work-study scholarship and was insulted, humiliated and hazed by the wealthier students. He had ill health. He studied to be a clergyman but delivered sermons so tedious that few understood him. He married the love of his life only to watch her die of tuberculosis.

This made him doubt the faith he was educated to espouse. He quit the ministry and wandered through Europe, miserable most of the time. He met the English romantic poets Wordsworth and Coleridge and began thinking about their ideas of the purity of nature, the integrity of natural forces and the inherit dignity of all men.

He settled in Concord at the home of a relative, and began to write, and talk, about his travails. He married again. Things began to look up when he wrote about Nature, not as something dark and nasty that was given by a paternalistic God to mankind to be exploited, but as an inherent, integral and inescapable part of us.

People began to listen to what Emerson had to say. His ministerial training gave him a powerful, commanding speaker’s voice. His ideas appealed to an emerging American nation searching for an identity that would transcend those offered by institutional religion and European notions of social structure.

Emerson told us to love, and learn from Nature; to trust ourselves and have the confidence in our fellow human beings to discover our own, innate goodness.

Of course, American transcendentalism was never one specific thing. Henry David Thoreau, who slept in Emerson’s house until he built his shack on nearby Waldon Pond, had a significantly different understanding of nature and American society. American “nature worship” had obvious contradictions: look outside your window and you see human begins enslaving others (Transcendentalism joined some of the New England Protestantism of the Second Great Awakening in condemning the ownership of human beings) and being less than accepting of the poor. Look in your garden and you’ll find things killing other things, things eating other things, regardless of how much, or whom, they trust.

But it really feels good when you decide to have faith in your own gumption. No need to feel guilty about what you haven’t learned or experienced: all those books you didn’t read, the college classes you slept through, the magazines that didn’t publish your stories, the jobs you didn’t get and those awful exploitative jobs you worked that were supposed to lead someplace but didn’t, They aren’t as important as that one singular, epiphanic rush of emotion that encloses you in a glow that is close to the spiritual ecstasy promised by some institutional religions, but feels even better because it comes from within.

Emerson found himself losing his memory as he aged. He may have had a stroke that made it difficult for him to speak the long, sonorous paragraphs for which he was renowned. He never lost his equanimity. People who met him regarded him with the reverence the French had for the aging Voltaire, or students of Princeton had for the fuzzy-headed Einstein wandering in a daze about the Institute for Advanced Studies.

This great story about a great man left me curious. What was it about this breakfast that Emerson liked so much? One morning I decided to make apple pie and black coffee the first meal of my day.

A qualification: it is likely that the apple pie of Emerson’s time does not taste like the sugary, cinnamon-scented dessert of ours. The crust was probably made of lard from apples that, in the 19th Century, were grown to be pressed into cider.

We can only guess the provenance and roasting technology of Emerson’s coffee beans. His drink was certainly bitter, made from boiling ground beans and letting the grounds settle before serving the liquid.

This said, coffee and a slice of apple pie has an immediate effect: the sweetness of the apples and bitterness of the coffee cancel out, almost like milk and chocolate chip cookies. Caffeine, fat from the crust, and fruity sugar embrace and go right to the brain, in the same way that coffee and a donut arouse a powerful surge of energy.  You get an amazing and thoroughly delightful rush of emotion that, for a writer, leads compulsively to a gush of words that continues on and on. You are almost overwhelmed with the rightness of what you’re doing. What you’re writing makes sense! It even seems to lead somewhere until…

It stops and you crash and you get grumpy or merely sluggish and…

Time for an Emersonian walk!  After touring the lanes and paths of your village in bracing autumn air, you’re back at your desk where, in the fading embers of your creative fire, you check e-mail where, as recent events in the last election remind us, the less you write, the better. Use those acronyms, abbreviations, grammatical short cuts as the last…spark….dies….out.

Before it’s time to sit down for supper, a question remains. Did the most admired American philosopher in our history gain his luminous insights into Nature and the human condition from enduring an early life of loss, humiliation, ill-health and a ministry for which he temperamentally was unsuitable?

Or was it all due to a sugar-and-caffeine rush from a cup of black coffee and a slice of American apple pie?

Try it, and see.

So I made it to the gym today. I used to go every day, exercising for two hours, sometimes longer. I did this for reasons that had little to do with physical health.

One reason that motivated me was that I thought I had an ugly body. This comes from childhood:  when you grow up overweight, and you don’t like being overweight, or you haven’t made peace with it, you stay fat forever, no matter how lean, trim, muscular or grown up, you may become.

The second reason was that, as a creative type whose mood took the occasional depressive plunge, I found that exercise sometimes dragged me away from the blues. Better yet, I could get that delightful endorphin rush that has a marvelous way of awakening my imagination and restoring my mind to a playful state: I enter the world of the book I’m writing and see what could be the road ahead.

Back then, I could walk to the gym. Now the gym to which I belong is a somewhat taxing bicycle ride away. The bikes have stayed in the garage ever since, in a fit of fitness foment, my wife and I decided to a nine miler on a hot day.

I typically use a car to get there, but before I could grope for the keys, I was overwhelmed by dull, aching pains in my legs, arms and back. These pains could be due to the heart meds I’m taking. Or they could be a magnified version of that yucky, haven’t-exercised-and-don’t-wanna vibe that, I think, is like a physical depression.

A major don’t-wanna had to do with karate. I have one of those black belts, and I taught morning classes for about ten years until my teacher, a bodyguard for celebrities, lost his school. For many years I was learning a new kata (a series of movements containing offensive and defensive techniques) every year, relying mostly on video clips, diagrams and written steps found on the Internet.

The gym has a yoga room that isn’t in use in the mid afternoon. I use it to do the katas I know, and learn the ones I don’t. For the last few years, it took me about three weeks to get the movements of a new kata down, and then about six months of practice for it to settle in and become interesting.

Then I hit Junro Yondan. The name means the Way Number Four. It’s one of five katas developed by Tetsuhiko Asai, a Japanese master of the Shotokhan school who, like so many martial arts instructors,  founded his own style.

Junro Yondan, one of many new katas Asai created, involves a lot of counter-intuitive spinning. Instead of merely turning to the right or left, Asai has you turn in the opposite direction, using your hips to build momentum so that when you finally arrive, whatever technique you’re performing has more power in it.

Also, when you’re in a fight, it’s always good to have skills that can confuse your opponent. It is much more efficient, and predictable, to turn clockwise when you want to go right. By going counter-clockwise, you travel farther but, for most of the trip, you’re not where you’re opponent expects you to be.

It took me two years before I could begin to get the spins right. During those years, I began to take a variety of medications for high blood pressure and cholesterol (welcome to your Sixth Decade on the planet!), had an operation on my wrist that rendered it immobile for six weeks, and two heart attacks.

The pills I take every morning and evening tend to drain my energy during the first hour or so after I swallow them. In the mornings, I listen to lectures about philosophy, history and economics that can be found free on Youtube (the Yale Open Courses are among the best–about ten years ago the university recorded many undergraduate buffet of introductory and second level courses–see them now while before they go out of date!). I try to write after I’ve seen one or two, and the results tend to be spotty. Some days, I can do a page or two, especially if it has lively dialogue. Other days, nothing much happens. I’ll read, cook, run errands and walk the dog.

In the evenings I watch streaming TV with my wife. Sometimes, I have so little energy that I can’t keep my eyes open.

Yes, I’m getting old and the essence of this process is the mastery of doing more, with less. But sometimes, all I can do is…less.

I’ve noticed that I’m becoming more forgetful, clumsy and less energetic. Yes, my blood pressure is under control and there is no indication that I’ll have another heart attack any time soon. But I have moments when my mind is not at its best. I hear lectures on topics and personalities that I lectured about, and it will be as if I am learning about these things for the first time.

I carry a great deal of grief about disappoints related to my work and the publishing industry. Though I know others share this, I was surprised to see this quote, from the prolific and very highly regarded science fiction writer Robert Silverberg, from one of two books about Silverberg reviewed  by the Washington Post’s book critic, Michael Dirda:

“Most publishing deals. . . begin with high hopes, warm feelings, and glowing promises, and generally end with catastrophic bungling on the publisher’s part and disappointment for the writer.”

Dirda adds that “this repeated pattern…gradually wore him down.” Silverberg is no longer writing.

The process by which creative people realize their dreams is impossibly difficult. One way to begin to understand it is to see it as bringing something utterly new into the world. Another is to consider how unlikely it is that ANYTHING worthwhile happens.

I know too many writers who worked very hard, did their best and had their spirit crushed by the publishing industry. It’s not that the industry makes the occasional mistake, failing to publish writing that will eventually find their audience and be considered important, delightful or just plain fun. It’s that they do this all the time, and they do it no matter how compliant, agreeable, pleasant, eager-to-please or sympathetic you–the author–aim to be.

That’s why, when I am teaching, I cannot tell my students that “hard work pays off,” because amount, kind and intensity of labor required to bring their new things into the world are different every time. Persistence helps. Not taking yourself too seriously helps. Silverberg’s “Laws of Literary Success” may also help:

“Read a lot. Write a lot. Read a lot more, write a lot more.”

Then there’s  Joseph Conrad’s recommendation:

“In the destructive element immerse. That is the way.”

To which I’ll add: Exercising helps. Learning new things helps. Appreciating what you’re doing, and how lucky you are that you can do it, helps best of all.

So I went to the gym and started learning Junro Godan: the Way Number Five. This kata is about short, quick position shifts to gain distance and power.

Or so it seems right now. I’ve learned enough to anticipate that when I begin, I can never be sure where I’ll end up.

I hope to be able to let you know at the end of a year.

Gregory Frost is a science fiction and fantasy writer I met in Philadelphia, when I wrote a round-up article about the local science fiction scene for Philadelphia Magazine. He was living near another writer, Tim Sullivan (who eventually moved elsewhere). The two, with others, were in the orbit of Gardner R. Dozois, editor of one of the few remaining science fiction pulp publications, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

Greg and I became the kind of friends who don’t see each other that much, but, when they do, they wonder why they don’t see each other so often. Later, when he moved to the Philadelphia suburbs, I followed, though for reasons that had nothing to do with wanting to live near each other.

Greg told me once that he got some of his best ideas for his writing while he was in the shower, and that he had attached a small whiteboard, with a marking pen, to the wall of his shower stall so that he could capture any fleeting notion before it went down the metaphorical drain.

I retold this anecdote in my novelwriting classes at Penn as part of a larger talk about the getting of ideas. I also included a quote I got from Atlantic City entrepreneur Reese Palley, who said ideas were like seeds–most of them don’t sprout and bare fruit, but a few do. “Nature is very wasteful,” he said.

Nature seems to be somewhat wasteful, in that there are more ideas than are written down, more writing that doesn’t get past the first page, more stories that are finished than published, more writers whom you’ve never heard of, than the few you have.

Etc.

This morning I was in the shower and…I got an idea.

I just wrote it down.

I’m listening to the Rebirth Brass Band and I’m going to New Orleans.

A day after I wrote a post about wanting to go to Nawlins, but letting extenuating circumstances permit me to rest in place, my wife surprised me with airline tickets to the Crescent City. I immediately booked us a room at the Montelone (I hope it’s not near those big exhaust fans of which someone on TripAdvisor complained). After that I found Season Four of Treme in the library.

And I kept the music on.

Given that it is the great habit of our moderately evolved brains to connect the dots, fill in the blinks and find causes to effects, you’d think my wife read my previous blog post and change up what would have been a quiet weekend at home.

Nope. She didn’t. It was one of those…things.

They say that God knows when a tree falls in the forest, even if nobody hears.

So I’m going to New Orleans, with my ears wide open!

I’m listening to the Dirty Dozen Jazz Band and wishing I could be in New Orleans.

I’ve never been. I planned a trip there once that included accommodations at the Montelone, a drink or two in the hotel’s Carousel Lounge, numerous inebriated stumbles through the French Quarter, a concert at Preservation Hall, beignets and coffee, meals at the Commander’s Palace, Brennan’s, Galatoire’s and Antoine’s.

I had seen some seasons of Treme (they should NEVER have killed off John Goodman’s character!). I’d cooked blackened this and that. I interviewed the late Paul Prudhomme. I’d read books. I’d seen Streetcar Named Desire, the Big Easy and just about every other movie shot there.  I’d listened to Dr. John, Professor Longhair, Louis Armstrong, Trombone Shorty,  Jelly Roll Morton, the Neville Brothers, and Captain Beefheart, howling that he was “gonna go down ah Nawlins, get yourself lost ‘n’ found.”

It never happened for reasons numerous and silly. Then I became a “medical consumer” with the kind of ailments that make specialists happy.

After a few months, and too many co-pays, I was judged fit to travel, and I went on those travel booking sites almost every day. How about a return to Venice in winter? Or Florence? The “Crooked Road” of Virginia’s Blue Grass country. A long New York City weekend with tickets to a Broadway show and a visit to the fancy brand shops on Fifth and Madison avenues? A San Francisco sojourn? An archaeological dig in Tuscany? A motor trip through Sedona? Melbourne and Sydney, Australia? Christmas in Bethlehem (not the casino-adorned  steel town in Pennsylvania–the original, in the Palestinian Territory)? A return to the Canary Islands, with three days in Barcelona? A return to London and the Savoy Hotel? Cross country skiing (with a reindeer sleigh ride) in Finland? Smoked meat in Montreal? Paris? Amsterdam? The Andalusia?

Where another generation would spin a globe and point, I’d plug in a destination and glory in the cheapo hotels that would pop up. I’d pour over maps, consult the reviews, parse the airline flights until all I had to do was tap that final button and-

Something always came up. But I kept looking because, like most people, I’d gone through many years when fun travel wasn’t possible. I learned to “travel  in place,” that is, take different paths to familiar local destinations, discover local history and seek out those little museums, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, public parks and great people watching places.

Now I have the time, the slackening commitments and just enough money saved up to dream about faraway places and…

I asked my wife, of all the places in the world, where would she liked to go when the next vacation came up?

She wants to stay right here, enjoy the holiday, sleep late, visit family, eat well at home, maybe go to the gym (we keep trying but it seems soooooooo far away) and soak into this pretty place. Yes, we live in what would be called suburban sprawl, but the autumnal color change here is just as lovely as it may be at some mountain resort.

And by staying here, we can control what we eat and rest–genuinely, easily, comfortably.

As for Nawlins? It’ll be there when I’m ready.