The Luckiest Person in the World.

There's no one I know, and I know a lot of successful people, who haven't had a life filled with some ampleness of vicissitudes. As Buddha allegedly said, everyone carries a burden. 

As they say in Sanskrit, "Oy vey."

Real diversity, not diversity merely of the cosmetic sort, comes from a breadth of people who have lived a variety of experiences and have developed through the years a variety of mechanisms to cope, or succeed, or even rebound from failure.

Real diversity is independent thought. Real diversity is living while hearing the beat of a drummer that no one else hears. Real diversity can come from a variety of places--what you eat, what you read, how you hear the world and who you interact with.

We've made diversity less diverse by limiting its meaning. By limiting its meaning, we have actually changed its meaning.

All of us, I believe, have the capacity to bring diversity to the world, different points of views and different lives led. To regard white people as homogeneous is as wrongheaded as regarding any other group homogeneous. 

I just returned from the grocery store. 

I go just about every Sunday morning at eight, I think for two reasons. One, I buy all our food for the week. And two, I think my wife wants an hour alone where I am nowhere to grumpify my surroundings. To be clear, even seeing the world through a dark and cloudy prism is diversity. Not everyone is happy.

As I pulled my 1966 Simca 1600 into our 1920's garage (a garage from 1920 is about 35-percent smaller than modern garages. Everything, people, cars, houses, hamburgers, bureaucracy used to be more than one-third smaller) I somewhat dreaded the $338 of groceries I'd have to carry in. Groceries that actually outweighed the Simca that carried them.

I opened my trunk and with the alacrity of a practiced stevedore, I hauled my huge blue Ikea bags of groceries into our rickety cottage on the Gingham Coast. As I went through this logistical operation I said to myself, "I can't wait to get at my Mac, while my wife puts away everything I've bought, and write a blog post."

I thought about my ex-boss, Mike Tesch, a Hall-of-Fame creative who believed there was no marketing problem a great 30-second spot couldn't solve. 

Perhaps vaingloriously, I put myself in Mike's camp. 

I believe there is no marketing problem I can't solve with really good writing. Or, better, what I believe is really good writing.

But onto the title of this blog post.

I am the luckiest person in the world because I love to write. 

I am the luckiest person in the world because I live to write.

I am the luckiest person in the world because I believe in the power of the written word.

I am the luckiest person in the world because I am not afraid to face what Hemingway, real or apocryphally, called the 'white bull that is paper.'

I am the luckiest person in the world because I feed my brain constantly--with two books a week, maybe one-thousand pages, and ten book reviews and 100 articles that interest me from a dozen publications.

I am the luckiest person in the world because I don't feel I'm missing anything by not watching TV or going to superhero movies or watching asinine local news and bemoaning some quotidian bullshit.

I am the luckiest person in the world because I believe in the strength of what I do.

I am the luckiest person in the world because I get about 80,000 readers a week, a couple dozen of whom write to me, who decide to read what I write.

I am the luckiest person in the world because the tips of my fingers have a mind of their own and know what to say when I don't.

I am the luckiest person in the world because I can't touch type but somehow I think exactly as fast as I hunt and peck.

I am the luckiest person in the world because of dumb things like this: I stopped and got three gallons of gas on the way back from the grocery store. (My Simca has a six-gallon tank and stalls when I get to under half-a-tank.) A giant fuel truck was filling the tanks at the gas station. I am the luckiest person in the world because I had the curiosity to ask,

"How many gallons does your tanker hold?"

"9000."

"Have you seen the Cagney movie 'White Heat,'" I asked.

"Naw."

"Cagney and his gang hide in an empty fuel oil truck--like yours--to rob the payroll of a gas plant. When we still got paid in cash."

"I'll check it out."

I am the luckiest person in the world because I remember scenes like this.

Top of the world, Ma.