Tuesday, February 2, 2021

Some poetry. Some sweat. Some laziness.

Of late, I've been as busy as a mosquito at a nudist colony. When you're blessed like I am and genuinely love what you do for a living, busy is good. Busy keeps my mind from tripping down a Dantesque conical collapse fearing that the next Fascist regime bred by the far-right--who almost by definition will have to be more efficient than the Mussolini meets Mickey Mouse of Donald Trump--is out there now, gaining grassroots support from television programming supported by your eyeballs and mine.

Busy also means that I haven't had much time to breathe. About three months ago, I stripped the paint off an old wooden bench we bought, prelude to painting it. It sits, unpainted still, where I left it, when urgent phone calls from a vaunted handful-and-a-half of clients started calling.


It also means that I go into Sunday, having no blog posts written for the week ahead. As someone whose consecutive-game-blog-post-streak makes the streaks of Cal Ripken or the great Iron Horse look like slackers, this is a frightening prospect for me.

In fact, life as a writer, a writer of sorts--a solo-flyer in a world that seems to prefer the loose-lipped lily-liver beige pablum of collaboration--having blankness looming over you like the sheer rock of El Capitan, is a frightening prospect. 

My life as a writer, my life as a soloist, is a life of facing nothingness.

There is no magic book of great ads from which I can borrow or steal. There is no next-door creative neighbor, or electrically-energetic planner brimming with thoughts, ideas, research and other stray cosmic particles that make ideas. There's none of that for me now.

The insistent water-torture of Microsoft calendar, or Google calendar, or Apple calendar, or my own Gregorian head that keeps better track of everything I have to do than ten-thousand superegos, reminds me twenty times a day that I have something that I have to come through on.

That's in addition to a post daily in this space. And an advertisement three or two times a week that I run on LinkedIn to keep the wheels of Georgian-commerce well-greased.

It's a lot to do.

It's my head and my typing fingers in an ever-tightening vise.


My little dog must think it queer
To stop without a due-date near.
She gives her floppy ears a shake
And asks if there is some mistake.

The only other sound the beep,
Of Microsoft, a Zoom to keep.
My life is lonely, dark and deep,
And I have miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep.

But as I have said so many times before--a broken record, as we said in days of yore, before records were ironic--the best way to do something is to do it.

The best way to do something is to find faith--even ye of little faith, like me--faith in your brains and your reading and your thinking and your ears for listening. Faith that success is one-percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.

So consider this post sweat-soaked.

Yet another sweat-soaked post.

As I rack up yet another day of living, another day of writing, another day of faith and doing.

It smells like an old gym in here.


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