Some thoughts, vague and rambling, on writing.

There are times that, I'll admit, despite my melancholic nature, I feel I am the luckiest person in the world.

I am sitting now at home with Whiskey, my nearly five-year-old golden retriever at my side. I am typing this one-handed because Whiskey insists that I pat her soft head with my left-hand.

Yet, I can write this.

I have trained myself throughout the years--working on catalogs, working on busy retail accounts, working on high-tech behemoths--to write.

Write despite the noise and the pressure and the laws of entropy which, in my humble opinion, are most in evidence when it comes to making sense, or trying to, of a bouillabaisse of a brief. You know, a brief where every ingredient including fish-heads seem to be tossed in, usually in eight-point type.

Sometimes writing is a bit like Mao's long march through China in the 1940s. It involves putting one foot in front of the other for as long as you can and hoping you gain momentum and followers along the way.

As I approach 5,000 posts in this space, I find that writing is more and more like that march. There are times you don't know where you're going, how much time you have, or what will happen along the way. But you start, you build, and you hope for the best.

I had a friend when I was a young boy who had very strict and domineering parents. When the world got too much with him, he would find one-hundred nails and a log out in the vacant lot across the street from his house. He'd head out to that lot and drive those nails into that log. If he was still frustrated after an hour or two of hammering, he'd either find more nails, or remove them with the hammer's claw and start over again.

Sometimes writing is like that.