The election season has made me question the value of self expression. I’m experimenting with the idea that it just may be better to say as little as possible in public, about anything.

When I first lived in the District I learned quickly that discussions about political issues and personalities were considered declasse among those who lived here. Oh, there were plenty of people who got mad at the Metro, or the behavior of some public officials. But few exhibited the frothy fury that has become so ordinary on the Internet. Among those I met employed in government, in think-tanks and retail shops, the strategy was to sit back and try to look, not at who is making so much noise, but whatever it was who inspired that person to make the noise.

And say as little as possible. Not only did you never know whom you may be working for in D.C., you didn’t know whom you may be working with.

Anyone in power D.C., no matter how little that person seemed to deserve that power, was treated with deference, especially after an election, when divisive issues and righteous rage had to be replaced with conciliatory respect for “consensus” and “shared values.” Hatchets were not only buried, but bitter enemies behaved as if they had never brandished them–and for a very good reason. Politics then and now (though it may not appear that way) is about getting things done. You didn’t have to read Machiavelli to know that the acquisition of power is temporary. What you do with what you have, when you have it, can encourage people to forget what you had to do to get that power and keep it.

Alas, the Internet is overrun with individuals and organizations who have found ways to make a living keeping track of how elected officials respond to every political issue that blows in, out or somewhere in space. These score keepers tend to be see those in power as either for ’em, or agin ’em. To err may be human, but mistakes made in the political arena are never permitted to go away. Forgiveness and compassion are perceived as weaknesses. A politician who changes her mind is simultaneously praised for coming to her senses, and damned as a disloyal, untrustworthy “flip flopper.”

The result of so much score keeping has been to make representative democracy much more perilous. It has created a miserably deadlocked Congress, and stoked a turbulent anger among so many different social groups that we are no longer shocked at the almost daily violence against police, minorities, women, old people, disabled people, innocents who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, poor people, teachers and those whose practice of a religion makes them a bit more obvious than those who don’t.

When the violence strikes, too many people have too much to say, and the result of so much expression is to use up energy that, in a quieter world, we would have used to grieve, to heal, to find in ourselves the values that lead to the mutual respect that can bring people together.

How ironic that I should come to this observation, having spent my youth during a period of social upheaval, when “if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”

Is that true? Sometimes. Is it always true? No. Sometimes we cannot identify a causal connection to a troublesome situation. Other times, we wish we were part of something larger that can solve problems and make things better. We may not know how, but we should make some kind of effort.

I was raised to be an expressive person. Though I am actually quite shy, I discovered the actor’s ability to ignore that shyness if I had a role to play, or something to say to an audience whose response would render a judgement. I found this useful in high school stage plays, journalism and teaching.

But it also developed in me a lingering contempt for those who did not value, or who denigrated what I said or did. The trap of this almost-but-not-quite narcissistic behavior is to base ones sense of self on how others respond. I’ve interviewed hundreds of comedians, entertainers, musicians, artists and writers who could not get out of this.

If we give ourselves a chance to find, somewhere close to that immeasurable thing we call our soul, a sense of self worth, we can then go on to craft an anchor that we may lower in the storm of public opinion. I still have problems with this. I’m easily pleased by those who like what I do. I’m a sucker for applause.

And I can’t help but feel bad when I see the few negative reviews about my work that still cling to my book web pages like bird droppings on a windshield.

I used to think that I’d have a sense of self worth when I’d achieved things. It’s taking me a while to discover that self worth does not come from having money in the bank, or reciting a Shakespearean sonnet, performing a karate kata almost perfectly, making a good loaf of bread or any other kind of accumulated sense of accomplishment. Goals come and go. What I wanted for myself as a young man is not the same as what I wanted as a teenager, or as the adult I’ve become.

Let us not forget that, sometimes accomplishing nothing can be better than forcing yourself down the wrong path.

But if I’ve been to that peaceful, watchful, inner place enough to know that it is a source of strength. You can turn to it almost any time (though it’s very easy to forget that when you’re caught up in emotional turbulence). It doesn’t cost anything. It’s that gift of discovering who you are, and being satisfied with that.

Such satisfaction can make it easier to hold your tongue just long enough to relish the silences between thoughts, words, statements, opinions.

Socrates infamously stated of himself (if we’re to believe Plato) that he could not live in Athens as an active participant in civic affairs. He needed moments of privacy and reflection. Without them, he would have the unexamined life that he insisted was “not worth living.”

It’s a mistake to tell angry people that they could be doing something other than shooting off their mouths. It’s also a mistake to ignore them. Somewhere, in this extraordinarily divisive election season, a path exists by which we can get things done.

I’m not sure where this path leads, but I know where it begins.

For a brief moment, quantum physics was cool. College intro physics classes rebranded themselves with such titles as “physics for poets” and taught a mostly mathless version of a science that remains our best way to explain how and why things work.

The courses inspired a tiny philosophical renaissance among those who, like me, weren’t quite satisfied with reality and the way things had worked out so far. When the professor described how light could be a particle, if you designed an experiment looking for particulate phenomena, or a wave, if you wanted to find a wave, those of us who preferred to sit in the back row of the lecture halls would universalize that as a relativism: life is a matter of attitude! If you accentuate the positive (as the song goes) you find the positive. If you look for the negative, you end up with…dark matter?! Gee whiz! The stuff I’ve always wanted to believe is true! Science says so!

Well, not quite. Just because we have rudimentary explanations for what happens at the sub-atomic level does not mean that these explanations apply to, or somehow supersede, the dependable, boring and unforgiving drudge of Newtonian physics, which is still the best explanation for why that alarm clocks ring, cars start, toilets flush, coffee gradually cools and a fan can catch a fly ball at a baseball game.

My favorite bit of gee-whiz quantum mechanics was non-locality, a rather complicated paradox that is often over-simplified as a psuedo-Newtonian law: two particles that interact with each other will continue to interact no matter how far apart they may be. This has actually been established experimentally, but only at the sub-atomic level.

Apply that to a relationship gone sour and you get a powerful rationalization to keep holding the torch for that lover who jilted you so long ago. You can imagine that, somewhere in a distant city, during a private moment, the one for whom you yearn just may be yearning for you.

So I carried a torch for my high school sweetheart and found out, after too many years, that it was true. I never got over her. She never got over me. We found each other again and married.

My once and current sweetheart teaches physics, She is the first to say that people aren’t subatomic particles. She easily draws a metaphysical line between quantum physics and the perceived world of everyday reality. Not only that, but she feels that dark matter isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

So how was it when I was in Miami, Hong Kong, Jerusalem and Oberlin, Ohio (where I attended college and did not take the Physics for Poets course) and she was in Tucson, San Francisco, Colorado Springs and Edgewater Park, New Jersey,  we were missing each other?

How is it possible that though a friend and I see each other every two or three years, the conversation we’ve had going since we graduated high school has not ended? Life has brought many changes, but the things that matter to us not only remain vital, but continue?

The word “science” means too much. It once meant a way of knowing, and may derive from a root word that means to split, divide or distinguish. The scientific method is a procedure that tests an assumption by abstracting or isolating a phenomenon, observing that phenomenon, using the observation to confirm or discredit the assumption and then documenting everything with the hope that others will duplicate your results and that some consensus will result. Though this consensus has been wrong occasionally (dietary cholesterol is no longer considered a direct cause of heart disease, so it’s okay to eat bacon and eggs and use real butter on your bread!), it has been correct so often that it must be respected.

Science can discredit superstition. Its methodology is rational, rather than emotional.

Science is not, as some would wish, an enemy of religion, or a fraud perpetuated by an academic elite. A great deal of contemporary scientific study is sponsored by organizations connected to religious institutions. Though science continues to change our understanding of ourselves and where we are in the universe (sometimes to the annoyance of doctrinalists and traditionalists who resist points of view that challenge their certainty), it will never remove all the mystery, uncertainty and the miraculous from our lives.

I can’t speak for subatomic particles.  But, as for my wife and I, miracles happen and love matters very, very much.

Yes, it’s a reduction, and the great things about reductions is that they are easily true: when Shakespeare has the Melancholy Jacques tell us “All the world’s a stage,” we say, “sure. Life is a performance. Why not?”

We don’t extend the metaphor: we don’t ask, if the world is a stage, who is in the audience? Must we please the audience (Shakespeare’s simile suggests that actors don’t care about the consequence of their performance–they just do their “many parts” and then–pun intended- depart). Who is on the stage crew that raises and lowers the curtain and moves the props around? Who wrote the script? And (most important of all), can we players who strut and fret our hours–improvise? Can we deviate from the script? Can we ignore it and still put on a great show?

My reductionist metaphor regarding storytelling, specifically the kind of writing that goes into a novel, is “character is the key.” For me, this means many things.

1. The most attractive and compelling element of a story is the way the audience perceives itself in the characters, plot and setting. That means people must make a quick, sympathetic connection to elements in the story, which happens mostly by seeing themselves (or elements of their personal experience) in the characters, plot and setting.  Alfred Hitchcock once wrote “Without wanting to seem immodest, I can’t help but compare what I try to put in my films with what [Edgar Allen] Poe put in his stories: a perfectly unbelievable story recounted to readers with such a hallucinatory logic that one has the impression that this same story can happen to you tomorrow. And that’s the rule of the game if one wants the reader or the spectator to subconsciously substitute himself for the hero, because, in truth, people are only interested in themselves or in stories that could affect them.”
2. If we look at a story as a three-legged stool, the setting and the plot can be deficient and still compel a reader. This is typical of mysteries, whose plot outcome is known to the reader in advance, and fantasy or science fiction settings based on marvelous but unrealistic aspects of our own world. If the character of the detective hero, the wizard’s apprentice or the spaceship captain fails to interest–or his action conflicts with what we know about ourselves to be true–we put the book down, change the channel or do something else with our lives.
3. The way to “fix” difficulties, contradictions and logic flaws in a plot, or determine how much detail is necessary in the setting, is also through the examination of the story’s characters.

It is this last understanding that, for me, has been most useful. I’ve frequently “hit a wall” when writing. This wall usually takes the form of a question: How would your character be able to do that? How would your character know that? Why would your character want to do that? Where will your character get that? What will your character see-hear-smell-feel when she goes into this room, and how much of that will be important later on?

This wall has stopped me so many times. But, in retrospect, this stopping has been, at most, a pause that requires me to look deeper into my characters and get to know them better. Sometimes I must build into the story a scene that shows how a character may develop a specific skill, taste, body of knowledge or predilection. Other times I must bring forward the very natural fear and anxiety that uncertainty can inspire, and then have the character improvise her way through.

In doing this, I duplicate with my characters a very human hope: that we all have the inherent means to cope with what life can throw at us, and that, in coping, our lives become more rewarding and meaningful.

This is why I think art is a necessity.

1. We make it for reasons that are rarely sufficient or clear–even those who do it for the money eventually come to the point when they realize that there are better ways to make a living.
2. We may like or even love an aspect of creation, or performance. but, every good feeling authorship may bring us, it pays us back in worry, woe and insult when our work is rejected, denigrated or ignored.
3. If we crave recognition and don’t get it, we plunge into a tightening downward spiral of bitterness and despair as we blame others, or, worse, discover deficiencies in our work and ourselves.
4. If we get a little bit of fame, we find that we can’t manage our reputation. People we don’t know hate us because we’re famous and make us a target for their unrealized ambition. People we don’t know ascribe to us faults and calculations: we’re accused of “selling out.”
5. Those who persist soon realize the cost: the rest of the world is having fun on a Saturday night, or consuming themselves to a blissful delirium, while we’re struggling with the placement of a comma.
6. Those who become “successful” realize a different cost: people we don’t know, who work in industries we will never fully comprehend, depend on what we do for their identity, status and livelihood. We are revered only as long as survival (the ability of our products to make money in the marketplace, or generate attention on the Internet) seems secure. If we should appear undependable, hesitant, inconsistent, “flawed” or merely human, or our products–for no fault in ourselves–fail to meet expectations, we are cast down, like false gods, to make way for the next savior.
7. When we must turn our backs to these things, when the world with which art helps us cope seems thoroughly unacceptable, we remember the art we experienced in our past: the great stories, great pictures, great music, great movies, great TV shows that we enjoyed so much that we innocently thought, wouldn’t it be great if I could do this?

Another reduction is that the process of making art, and experiencing it, returns us to cherished innocence in which we believe, not just that anything that can happen, but that the right things will.

I’ve always wanted to be a team player, but…

As a fat kid with allergies whose lawyer father let him carry his briefcase into court but never played catch, I had no athletic skills, beyond standing so massively in touch football that no one on the offensive team could knock me over. I was never chosen voluntarily for any sports team and, even with my specific gravity, was resented on every team on which I played.

I found basketball incomprehensible, and still do. To me, its virtue is in rules and procedures that make simple things more difficult to do, and thereby evoke a sense of drama and skill similar to writing a sonnet or watching British people push their peas on convex edge of a fork, and then transport those peas into a mouth without dropping any.

I was never in the military, or in a paramilitary organization, but I respect those who have been in them. I honor their courage, their sacrifice, their resourcefulness under stressful situations, and–most of all, their ability to get along with others.

For a few years, I was in the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts. Both organizations seemed (to me) about wearing a uniform and getting dirty in the woods. My mother communicated to me, not a horror of dirt (I got my share, playing with die cast metal tractors in her rose garden) but an appreciation, if not outright admiration, for places that other people have cleaned. Though I’ll admit there have been moments of scenic splendor and tasty campfire cuisine, I’ve hated every camping trip taken. To me, camping is a hotel room with a view, and room service.

Though I have worked very hard for my employers, I have too frequently lacked the social skills that assure my employers how grateful I am for the opportunity to work for them. When people greet me by asking me how I am, or how I’m doing, I answer the question as accurately as I can. Yes, I know that anyone who asks isn’t interested in me. They’re being civil, polite or merely pleasant. I’m also aware of the vital human affectation of tact: one of many personal compromises, big and small, that help you fit snugly into a group.

But, when I’ve had a choice between sucking up, swallowing what I’ve been fed, admiring how adept my superior is at superiority, I err.

I don’t know why I haven’t learned from so many mistakes. The truth is, I’ve always wanted to find a group to which I could belong. I’ve wanted to wrap myself in the gift-wrapped security, mutual respect and camaraderie that groups are supposed to deliver. I’ve dreamed of belonging to a salon like those in Paris where eccentric expats dithered and squabbled, listened to a Chopin nocturne and came up with great art.

I even learned about some of these legendary salons and their hosts. About the best I can say is that the world would be a different place if not for these incredible gatherings. The worst is that the salons were sometimes no more than a free drink or meal for artists who resented flattering the host, that the conversation was no better than gossip, much of which was heartlessly cruel.

A difficulty I have at some family gatherings is hearing gossip about those who are not in the group. If you listen to someone trash someone else behind her back, chances are you’re going to be trashed by that every same person when you leave the room.

I even studied group dynamics during a brief foray into cultural anthropology. I learned about ethnocentrism: the behavior that creates and enforces group identity and membership. Those in groups, whether they’re a bullying leader, or a zealous follower, can do terrible things to perceived inferiors, or outsiders, as a way of reinforcing the values of their association. This has been used to explain how it is possible that more people have died in the name of God than that of every human villain.

Maybe it’s genetic: I’m missing a part that would make me more socially sensitive and a better fit for the teams, tribes, newsrooms, academic English departments and other groups that determine what is real, safe and proper for just about everyone alive today. If I had that gene, I wouldn’t be so rude as to tell people precisely how I was feeling when they asked. I might have even found a steady job in the media, worked long enough until my publication downsized or went out of business.

Or I could have used my incredible, nature-nurture-enhanced people skills to rise to the heights of management. I could have been an editor, with an office filled photos of myself standing next to famous people, folding my hands on a desk while explaining to some snarky reporter that “we’re not the government.”

Instead, the fat kid with allergies grew up to be a guy who got into the martial arts, not because he wanted to beat up the bad guys, but because he couldn’t understand why, so often, he was his own worst enemy.

I remember Gerald Evans, a karate teacher who broke away from the American organization to found his own school, telling us to “love your punch. Love every block, kick and throw. Love every technique. When you punch, give yourself an ‘ahh, that felt good’ or ‘that felt right.’ And if it didn’t, look for that feeling. You’ll find it. Put it into everything you do.”

You can hear that in a group, but you learn it on your own.

Warren Zevon, whose songs celebrated (and mocked) violence, was an alcoholic who cleaned up his act.

I will never understand why the sober but no less brilliant singer songwriter never returned to the success he had during his drunken, drugged up days of  “Poor Pitiful Me,” “Excitable Boy,” “Lawyers Guns and Money” and “Werewolves of London.”  The Wind, his final album (recorded while he was dying of cancer) is an achievement unequaled by any in his generation.

I had the privilege to interview Zevon after he turned his back on alcohol. I asked him why it became a compulsion. His answer was that for a while alcohol “worked”–it would loosen him up and help him forget his fears and anxieties. Alcohol brought him quickly to that “zero point” where he could begin composing, walk on to a stage or record a song.

But, after a while, it took more alcohol to bring him to that zero point. He said he’d spend a whole day drinking and sometimes never reach that loose, comfortable, forgiving state that was necessary for him to work.

He wasn’t specific about when he realized that drinking became an obstacle, but he did say that, having dried out, he had more energy, was more competent in his dealings with people and had more control over his emotional life.

I’m fortunate in that my addictions have been mild. I have gone through periods where I’ve kicked caffeine–the headaches, drowsiness, grumpiness, moments when my brain just didn’t function the way I wished it could. I had my coffee this morning and I don’t regret it, though, when I exercise, or write for long periods of time, I notice that, as high as caffeine may lift you, it can leave you lower than zero.

I never liked tobacco: one puff was all I needed to put the cigarette down and never try it again. I’m even luckier that, though, as a child of the 1960’s and ’70’s, I was around many “controlled and dangerous substances,” I never became dependent on them. In fact, I had a good excuse not to indulge, when I noticed on the morning after a binge, I couldn’t add a column of figures.

In many ways, addiction is the signature disease of our global, market-driven, consumer society. The entities that make things want us to be so thoroughly hooked on their products that we buy them, to the exclusion of others.

In a world in which “choices” are the source of our values, fate, morality, the people we love, the way we love, and the stuff with which we surround ourselves,  addiction becomes a preference that dominates all others. We are told in our very commercial mass media that we need stuff in order to start our day, feel good, be healthy, impress people, be liked, be a success, achieve our dreams.

Are some addictions good? If so, I have been addicted to that lightbulb that goes off in my head when I learn something cool, or when I experience the world in a new and meaningful way. I am an autodidact: a person who teaches himself. I read history books and biographies. I listen to recorded lectures of college courses. When I travel, I research a place before I go, so I can understand the narratives that can make a street corner, a rock outcropping or an old house more than just passing scenery.

I know, from conversations with an addiction therapist who is in my writer’s group, that kicking compulsive substance abuse is more than breaking a habit. Just about everything we do (and some things we don’t!) changes the chemistry and physiology of our brains. It can be genuinely painful, and seem impossibly difficult, to ween ourselves off the things that once got us to that zero point.

Keith Laumer, the science fiction writer who influenced me in my college days, told me he couldn’t live without what he called “the Beautiful Thing,” that aesthetic uplift you get from experiencing the sublime. Keith found the Beautiful Thing in sunsets, Puccini operas, cruising off-road trails in his green metal-flake Cadillac convertible (which ended up in a lake with Tosca gurgling from the sound system–another story), good food, good writing and watching flames climb over the pine logs in his home’s fire place.

As a creative person, I am regularly confounded by the fear of beginning. I don’t know why it happens, but it does. I sit down in front of the word processor and a creeping, skittish anxiety takes hold, with a voice that says that whatever I’m about to do will be rejected by agents and editors, or just plain no good. I, too, want to feel confident and loose enough to get to that zero point and jump in.

More than that, after I jump in, I just want to swim, effortlessly, in comfortable water. I don’t want to spend hours chewing over a passage, trying to make it better. I don’t want to stop short and realize that I’ve made some serious mistakes, or I forgot to do something I should have done and now I have to tear it all down and start over again.

I’ve heard that the benefit of being a hack writer–and some of the most popular, most beloved writers of the last two centuries could be considered the kind who just pumped the stuff out and didn’t look back–is that you don’t have time to care too deeply about what you do: you need the money, or the deadline is approaching, or the writing is a compelling fantasy in which you create a world in which you compensate for everything you like.

A great example of a truly masterful hack is Raymond Chandler–Keith Laumer’s favorite writer. In “real life,” Chandler was a short, shy, pudgy drunk who lived with his mother. Philip Marlowe, Chandler’s detective hero, was tall (until Humphrey Bogart played him in The Maltese Falcon), muscular and a sucker for pretty women, who were either seducing him, or in the kind of trouble only he could get them out of.

I’ve had moments as a journalist when I didn’t have the luxury of approaching the zero point. I had to write the stuff fast for a deadline.

But, with novels, I blew deadlines because I worked really hard to make the books as good as they could be. One novel took ten years to finish Was it any better than a book that took only one year?

Agatha Christie rarely spent more than a few days writing a mystery. Yes, she wrote to a formula, but what she wrote remains delightful. Her stage whodunnit, The Mousetrap remains the longest continuously running play in the history of English theater.

I know many strategies to get to the zero point, and all have failed me at one time or another. What I don’t know, but am intrigued by, is the notion that a way through may involve more of what Keith Laumer found.

And that is, instead of looking for a method, or a substance, to avoid the metaphorical stage fright that presages most creative activity, why not just appreciate it more?

Is it possible to appreciate, or merely accept, the fear of failure, and the anxiety of not being good enough, as part of a greater process that brings new things into the world?

I’m old enough to give it a try.

On Sunday, September 18, the Washington Post published an article on linguistics on the front of its Outlook section. The article was supposed to be about a tendency for phony nostalgia among Internet social media contributors but was really about the overuse of the expression “that time when…”

Here’s the link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/09/15/that-time-when-that-time-when-took-over-the-internet/?utm_term=.af2f9ed255ec

The author, Britt Peterson (identified only as a journalist in Washington) riffed on the word cited a “Northwestern University linguist” Gregory Ward (he’s actually a professor of linguistics at Northwestern–is it no longer important to be a professor?) explaining that “that” is a demonstrative “which often signals a common, shared knowledge or a reference between a speaker and a hearer….Using ‘that,’ Ward says, creates a sense of closeness.”

In the next paragraph, Peterson tells us when “that” is used on-line,  it “refers to an experience not shared by the writer and the reader. In fact,” Britt continues, “the expression is often employed as a framing device for obscure, bizarre, or personally meaningful information that the reader would otherwise have no access to.”

To quote Jack Benny, “Well!”

When I was an arrogant teenager, my future wife’s mother referred to me as “that Bill Kent.” She was Australian and practiced a characteristically English reserve that indicates contempt but is too polite to describe it.

I was also called “that Bill Kent” when I was an arrogant contributor to some publications.

When my first novel was published, I did internet searches of my name, hoping that reviewers would say nice things about it. Most of them did.

I also found out that there is another Bill Kent, a reporter for a Seattle newspaper. I sent him an e-mail about how amusing it is that we’re writers had the same name. He never replied.

There’s a Bill Kent who drives racing cars, too. I didn’t write him because I didn’t know what to say. That I used to drive Saabs but I had to trade the cars in for a Subaru because it was hard to find parts?

I needed a name for a blog that I hoped wouldn’t become an embarrassment.  I tried “ThatBillKent” as a name for this page. It was mine for the taking!

And now, here I am, dishing out “obscure, bizarre or personally meaningful information that the reader would otherwise have no access to” to a public that is over-served by such things.

To quote a famous journalist who occasionally hung out in Washington:

“And that’s the way it is.”

Make a pun and, sometimes, you get a new truth.

The Unified Weird Theory is an observation that can never be proved: that those who find themselves at odds with the universe, will form groups in which they are themselves not odd.

This explains many social phenomena, including (but not limited to)

Fan clubs.  I once interviewed the leaders of the Tom Jones and Englebert Humperdinck appreciation societies. They were NOT alike, but both felt that the objects of their affections were misunderstood by the public. I interviewed members of the Sherlock Holmes and  Laurel & Hardy, Campbell Soup collectors

Science fiction conventions. The first happened before I was born, in Philadelphia in 1936. I loved science fiction, even if most people (including my professors at college) put me down for it (this was before the late Twentieth Century fusion of “high” and “low” culture, inspired by the 1980s “whatever makes money is good” attitude when Star Wars became an international hit, Star Trek fandom took off and arch movies about psychologically conflicted comic book superheroes became the norm.

Clubs and societies in which people wear clothing that has no practical function, that would appear strange in an office or street setting.

“Splinter” groups, or off shoots of larger groups. It’s naive to explain sectarianism this way but…it works.

When I came to Northern Virginia, I decided to create a writers group that I had always wished existed for me, but never did. I thought I’d do a little teaching (I previously taught writing at the college level, and to senior adults) and then have students share their stuff in a compassionate way. I gradually discovered that people joining this group didn’t want to be taught that much. So I let them teach the group, which can be empowering (as well as show me a thing or two about teaching) for individuals, but not always relevant to others. Finally I just let go and, with me as the monitor and moderator, permit the group to be itself.

It’s lasted for more than five years, with dedicated regulars and new people coming in all the time.

And I’m very, very grateful that I don’t feel so weird anymore.

“We must repeat.” –Devo

I enjoyed the band Devo when it appeared during the 1980s. Brian Eno had produced their debut album, “Q:Are We Not Men? A: We are DEVO!” with its rhythmically off-kilter version of The Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” The record’s title song had something to do with a college project, with accompanying video, created by Mark Mothersbaugh, the band’s lead singer, about the tongue-in-cheek notion that human beings were DEvolving, that is, getting worse, and that the band could only celebrate this.

At one point in the song, Mothersbaugh gives up any kind of lyrical sense, singing to the tune of the chorus, “We must repeat. We must repeat. We must repeat. We must repeat.”

What happens when you repeat something? As a child I’d repeat some words until they became meaningless, not knowing that this was a technique used in some forms of meditation. A few years later, I tried chanting “Om” but stopped, intrigued by the sound of so many other voices in the room saying the same thing.

Later I learned that much of martial art teaching involved repetition. Forms, or katas, as we Shotokhan people called them, were a series of movements that contained offensive and defensive techniques. I did some of them so many thousands of times that they became more meaningful. I saw techniques within techniques.

Or maybe it was just due to my mind rewiring itself. I was was told that when we practice, when we do something over and over again, our brain assigns more nurons to that movement. What begins as a simple movement becomes boring, done over and over. And then it seems incredibly intricate and complex. Finally, it’s simple all over again.

Today I did the 34 karate katas I know on the lawn near my house, with my dog watching me, assuming, as dogs may, that this was one more crazy thing this two-legged guy did to fill up his day. I found myself forgetting some parts, a symptom of age, or, maybe, not having done them frequently enough. I marveled how, each time I do the set, the end feels different from the beginning.

Some of the movements are eminently practical–a punch here, a kick there, a simultaneous block and strike. Others are mysteriously fragile–a wave, a gesture, a block that is more like a wave. A few I’ve never been able to do well: the flying double-kick, the 360 degree spin.

And, as it happens, I see something, feel something new. This thing may have nothing to do with karate. It could be just the result of my mind wandering. Or maybe it’s that endorphin rush when what started as tedious physical activity becomes fun.

We can admit that everything we do is new. As the wise folk are eager to tell us, each moment is unique, and precious, though few of us bother to live that way. Most of us categorize our lives into times when we’re getting ready to do what we want, times when we wish we could do what we want, times when we’d do what we want if it wasn’t for that other creep giving us something else to do, times when we’re too hungry, sick or tired to do what we want, times when we’d be doing what we wanted if this hadn’t happened…

This “new” feeling was similar to others: a rare moment when it didn’t matter if I was doing what I wanted (which was executing the katas at a higher level of skill than I seemed capable). Just doing these things was good enough.

It helped that the weather was nice. A breeze blew away the bugs. The ground was dry under my feet, and the dog didn’t wander off, chase after a squirrel or growl at another dog. For a moment, I was in that place in which just being alive was enough.

The most I ever spent on a home computer was my first: $5,000. I bought it from a typewriter and office machine store in Atlantic City because the newspapers for whom I wrote wanted me to send my articles electronically (instead of Fed Ex, or going over to the apartment of a guy who had a computer and typing it into his machine).

In addition to filing articles about Atlantic City and the Jersey shore, I wrote my first novel on this machine. I would have written it faster if the hard drive didn’t crash so often. When it crashed, everything was lost that wasn’t backed up on a flippy floppy.

Because creative work reinforces obsessions and compulsions, I became very, very nervous when my page count reached 161. That’s because the damned hard drive crashed so many times at, or near that number.

Each time I had to REWRITE, or retype (if I had printed out that much), the story up to that point, and the story changed each time. Like any artist frustrated with his medium (I recall music students at the Oberlin Conservatory having dark, twisted mood swings when they had difficulties with their instruments), I would want to throw the machine out the window of the one story summer home I was living in that winter.

What stopped me was remembering how Keith Laumer would fly into a rage whenever machines didn’t work right for him. Many times he was more at fault than the device. He once smashed an electric drill on the floor because his finger fumbled with the safety lock on the drill’s trigger. He told me to throw the machine on his garbage pile and set it ablaze. When I didn’t do this (I still have respect for mechanical diversity and the rights of the innocently fabricated), he dragged the drill out by its cord, kicked it on to the pile, spat on it, doused it with turpentine, lighted it up and watched it burn.

“Never take crap from machines,” he told me triumphantly  as the fire turned the drill’s casing to black smoke.

I saved my first computer from a similar fate by carrying it into the car and driving uptown to the typewriter repair store, where they either gave me another machine or they sent it out and I went back to my IBM Selectric, where I typed stuff that wasn’t so fragile, aware that I’d have to type it into the computer when my machine was fixed, and certain, also, that I would not be able to type the thing in without changing it somehow, because the effort of revisiting the work was too dull, or (more likely) that I had this urge to make things better.

So my computer came back from repair and I typed (or, rather, inputted) the new stuff and did my best to make things better. I told myself, every time the machine crashed or the floppy was bad and I REALLY lost everything, that I was being asked a question: how much do I want to finish a novel? To me, the only answer was, enough to put up with this and maybe, use it as a way of improving the story.

Good news: the novel was published to mostly good reviews and adequate sales. Better news: I got another computer that didn’t crash all the time.

But there are still times when I think I’m saving the work, and I’m not. Or, as it happened a day ago, I mistakenly delete a file.

I lost many very good pages of a novel. Instead of getting mad at myself, I remember the question: How much do I want this thing to live?

A lot. I’m going to start over and recreate what is lost, just because it’s worth doing.

L. Sprague de Camp was a science fiction and fantasy writer with a name you couldn’t make up. He also looked the part: tall, lean, with a goatee, you could imagine him fending off monsters with a sword. DeCamp went to Cal Tech, and, as an officer in the Naval Reserve during World War Two, collaborated with Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov on a radar-masking project at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Nothing much came of their efforts, but, having grown up in southern New Jersey and known some kids whose fathers worked in the Navy Yard, I enjoyed knowing that some of my literary heroes had briefly occupied a space near mine.

I had read some of de Camp’s work when he was just one of a number of writers in the book store’s science fiction section when, after the success in paperback of J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, he and fellow writer Lin Carter together dusted off and republished some of the older classics of the fantasy genre. and began to republish them as paperbacks. Because of de Camp and Carter, I read Lord Dunsany, Mervyn Peake and the founder of the contemporary horror genre. H.P. Lovecraft.

The books that really took off for de Camp and Carter were a series involving a crude, brawling, not-quite prehistoric oaf named Conan. Written by the long dead Texan Robert E. Howard, the Conan the Barbarian became even more famous when illustrated by Frank Frazetta, who imagined him as a body builder defending scantily clad damsels from ape-like ghouls and other nasty beasts.

When I found out de Camp lived in Villanova, Pennsylvania, I decided to interview him. I had written articles about science fiction previously for Philadelphia Magazine and others. The Sunday magazine of the Philadelphia Inquirer gave me the green light.

De Camp’s house was a Main Line mini-mansion on a very small plot of ground. De Camp was dignified and cordial. His wife Catherine drank a bit too much. When I mentioned that one of my favorite writers was R.A. Lafferty, de Camp lent me a book from his collection.

One thing de Camp said to me during the interview stuck with me: “When you’re a writer, you can wear out your old clothes.” Though he was elegant to English tweeds, he stated this with gusto, as if this were a perk on the level of having unlimited use of a corporate jet.

I should have identified this as the kind of posturing I’d heard from many in the creative fields, who mask the high degree of discomfort, insecurity, rejection, exploitation and low pay with self-aggrandizing bluster. But, as a person who considered himself a creative, and was certainly having his share of discomfort, insecurity, rejection and low pay, I found it all quite thrilling and, after our interview ended, resolved to wear out the few clothes I owned at the time.

As a fat kid, I hated shopping for clothes, especially that one dress outfit that every kid has to have. After a long, tedious hunt for baggy “husky” suits that almost fit, I’d have to wear the thing and stand in front of a three sided mirror while a tailor made strange marks on the cloth and stuck pins into strategic places. I hated the wool pants my parents preferred. They itched all the time.

In college, where everyone else was in blue jeans and flannel shirts, I had  “mod” department store duds. When these were devoured by dormitory washing machines. I was not sorry to see them go.

Later, while earning a whopping $25 and $50 for newspaper articles (I did earn more eventually), I had to buy clothing that lasted. I went through a “noir” period, wearing only black. I soon learned that there were many shades of black, some with more red, others with more blue, and that they faded oddly. I was slowly supplementing this with other colors and fabrics, mostly preppy earth tones in gabardines and corduroys.

I liked the idea of wearing the clothes out, instead of discarding them, as my more affluent acquaintances did when styles changed or they just got bored with “the look.” Fortunately for me, Ralph Lauren, capitalizing on the hippie affection for well-worn blue jeans, decided that clothing appeared to be lived in said more about the wearer than stuff that was fresh off the rack. So I just about fit in.

Then I found out something I did not expect: that it took a LONG time for clothes to wear out. And some fabrics felt better, like a comfortable shoe, as they aged.

I know have shirts in my closet that are older than my son. I have jackets and pants that hint at earlier fashion trends, but don’t look so out-of-date that I can’t pull them out occasionally, and enjoy the memories.

When I lived paycheck to paycheck, as many writers do, I had only one outfit for meeting editors, and a precious few for interviews, when dressing up, or down, can be a subtle way to encourage your sources to tell you what you want to know. For a while, I only had one pair of shoes. They got old quickly.

But I found that gentle joy in letting a garment become familiar, even loved. One of my hats cost $5 from a street vendor in Philadelphia–I bought it on a day when the wind was too cold on my balding head.  I have a shirt that reminds me of a hasty shopping trip in Quebec City when the airline lost my luggage. Another recalls a breezy night on a beach in Bermuda. A third was part of a survival kit given to me by Air France when weather stranded my wife and I in Paris. I have a few tweed jackets that made me look positively professorial when I taught at the University of Pennsylvania.

Faded, worn thin in places, they still feel good. They have become loyal companions, faithful friends.