Fear in the morning.

In the ten years I have been writing in this space, I have somehow managed to gain a considerable readership. According to the various trackers I use to monitor such matters, I receive between 1,500 and 8,000 views a day--about what a good small-town paper would get before TV ruined the minds of our entire nation.

Like a small-town paper, I start each day with a blank. Most often, I don't plan my daily posts before I actually write them. I usually plop down in front of my computer around seven and try to have something written and posted by 7:30.

Which brings me to fear.

Like most writers, like Hemingway himself, I fear the white bull that is blank paper. 

And I face that white bull every morning.

Truth be told, as a very prolific copywriter (I'm probably producing more today than at any other time in my prolific career) I face the blank page three or five or ten times a day.

There's something that needs writing, or a meeting and we have a gap, or a crisis or an opportunity. Something, in brief, needs to be done and someone has to do it.

That's facing fear.

Because just like in this space, I am exposing myself to bosses, colleagues, clients and boss' bosses every day.

Neurotic as I am, I will never get over the fear of failing, the fear of coming up empty, the fear of one-day or one-assignment, not having it.

But the best way through that fear is to trust what comes out of your head and is typed by your fingers.

There are a lot of courses you can take, and books you can read, and round-tables and seminars that purport to teach the art and craft of writing.

I've never taken one.

But every morning, whether I want to or not, I give myself this stress test. Can I find something funny, or interesting, or thoughtful and put it down in words.

The pressure can curl my hair sometimes--after all, the most heightened pressure is the pressure you put on yourself. 

But I do it, for better or worse, every morning. And after nearly 5,000 posts--a million or so words--it's made me a better writer.

I couldn't ask for anything more from this blog, or from you, a dear reader.

Special end of the world edition.

Our idiot in chief continues to play chicken with the most powerful weapons ever conceived and built.

Two things to consider today.

John Hersey's "Hiroshima." A look at the first atomization of humans from the victims' point of view. "The New Yorker," which first published Hersey's piece (it took over an entire issue in 1946) has made this seminal article available to all for free. It's 86 pages--but worth reading. Way more than that status meeting that's eating up two-hours a day. You can read it here. 

Below is Hersey's first paragraph. Which should make your skin tingle, if not burn:

I—A Noiseless Flash

"At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6,1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk. At that same moment, Dr. Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital, overhanging one of the seven deltaic rivers which divide Hiroshima; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, stood by the window of her kitchen, watching a neighbor tearing down his house because it lay in the path of an air-raid-defense fire lane; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest of the Society of Jesus, reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s three-story mission house, reading a Jesuit magazine, Stimmen der Zeit; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical staff of the city’s large, modern Red Cross Hospital, walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen for a Wassermann test in his hand; and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, paused at the door of a rich man’s house in Koi, the city’s western suburb, and prepared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated from town in fear of the massive B-29 raid which everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer. A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition—a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next—that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything."

And, just to be sanguine about it, a bit of Vera Lynn, by way of Stanley Kubrick.

Scaramouche in the Sunshine.

It's one of those rare days in New York. The sun--even the sun at 7:30 AM seems high in the sky. The air has a hint of autumn in it, and the lighting is like the kind you pay for when you hire a great director.

People, the millions of people you see walking their dogs, getting their dry-cleaning, filling up on caffeine, running for a bus, slumping to the train, or hustling to a cab, seem happier and more alive on a day such as today.

Even with the arrested-penile-development heads of two countries, North Korea and the United States, rattling nuclear missiles at each other, the world seems to wear a smirk, bordering on a smile.

I think about Rafael Sabatini's legendary opening of his novel "Scaramouche." "He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad."

No one's read Scaramouche for probably 70 years. Yet that sentence, on a day like today, when so much of New York seems to be smiling while fallout potentially falls out our way, killing further our earth, not to mention hundreds of thousands or millions of innocents, caught in a battle of egos between two diseased immature psychopaths, yet that single sentence, which I committed to memory twenty years ago, seems more adroit and resonant than ever.

Flip taught me the line. 

Flip worked at the old Gotham Book Mart--the bastion of civility in the middle of the Diamond District, until it closed for real-estate profit 15 years ago. Flip accosted me when I was doing research on a book I was writing on the history of Jewish pirates.

"You haven't read Sabatini?" he accused. 

"No. I had a cruddy childhood," I therapied.

"He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad," he recited. "It's up there--if it doesn't surpass--'Call me Ishmael.'"

I bought two copies of Scaramouche, and read the opening over and again.

New York used to be the kind of place where even with a Master's degree in English Literature from Columbia University you were less well-read than half the denizens of a dozen good bookstores.

I went through Sabatini like the Nazis through Poland, taking no literary prisoners. I read The Sea Hawk, the Black Swan, Captain Blood and more. I read Scaramouch and saw the fairly perfect movie with Stewart Granger, I think, in a pair of truly absurd spandex leggings. 

He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.

We could all use a bit of Scaramouche, today, on this beautiful day on the edge of the world being blown to smithereens by two immature madmen. 

How to grow old, continued.

The few tips below were penned by another excellent writer I know, my wife. Currently freelancing. 

1. Don't wear reading glasses. They used to be called "granny" glasses for a reason. Even if you cannot see something, that's way better than putting on reading glasses.

2. When people are talking about something being for an "older group or >50" seem just as puzzled as to what those ancient individuals could be like, don't offer any insights.

3. When the kids mention their parents' ages and it is way younger than you, just nod. You may even be younger than their grandparents.

4. Keep pics of your kids on your desk from when they were under 5 so their ages won't give away your age. Most of your co-workers are probably now younger than your kids.

5. When anyone mentions what they are doing over the weekend, don't let on that you are visiting the kids (or grandkids), taking naps, etc. Just say something about Dumbo/Brooklyn and they'll all nod.

6. Never shut off. Routinely send unimportant emails, texts, even phone calls late at night, early in the morning and weekend. Nothing says old more than not being willing to be on-call 24/7.

7. Scrub your reference points. Don't mention movies or plays or even music that are older than three-weeks. Mentioning "Citizen Kane," and you might as well be wearing the mark of Cain.