On Writing In The Bath

Or, How Fourteen Words by Douglas Adams Cost Me Several Weeks of Research, and the Better Part of $400

I was rereading The Salmon of Doubt recently and one of the essays really stuck with me this time through. I had always found it entertaining, but this time it was more than that.

Cult of Observation

 

On Douglas Adams, James Burke, and the People Who Taught Me to Notice.

This essay started the way so many of mine do. With an observation that leads to one of my patented wandering conversations.

While They Can

A dance recital, a middle school ceremony, and the brief gift of childhood. 

I was struggling to find a follow up to my Old Roads essay series. As I said in the last one of those, I wrote them out of my own desire to discover why I felt the way I did and now I understand why.

Old Roads: The Road Forward

 

On Understanding How We Got Here.

So this series finally comes to a close. It's been some journey. It was, for me anyway. I always find the best way to work through things is by writing about them. This time it actually led to an interesting discovery. I'll try not to do that again.

Old Roads: Where You Find Yourself.

 

When music finally tells you how you feel.

This most recent bout of maudlin nostalgia, which I have apparently been writing through for over a month now, has been an eye-opening one for me. One could almost apply the Aristotelian concepts of anagnorisis and peripeteia to it. Though, in a most anti-Aristotelian way, my reversal of fortune was for the better, not worse. We can discuss catharsis and hamartia as they pertain to me in another essay.

Old Roads: The Stories That Shape You

In my earlier essays, I briefly touched on how the stories you experience can stay with you, can become close friends, can feel like home. Whether you experience them through movies, TV shows, books, or by listening to someone speak, they become part of you, sometimes without your even knowing it.

Old Roads: Old Friends, Always Welcome

 

  What makes us go back to our enjoyments, our enthusiasms, if you will, of the past over and over again? Every time I use the word enthusiasms I am reminded of the movie The Untouchables with Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, and Robert De Niro. The scene where Al Capone has his capos around a table, making a speech. "A man becomes preeminent, he is expected to have enthusiasms, enthusiasms. What are mine? What draws my admiration? What is that which gives me joy? Baseball." 

Old Roads: Returning to the Books That Made Us

In You've Got Mail Meg Ryan is writing an email (via AOL, speaking of old roads. Though to be fair, the UI looks more like an IM than an email, but it's been decades and I could be wrong.) and she writes "So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?" It probably should be the other way around, but I know, for myself, that so much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book, or saw in a movie.

Old Roads: Paths Though Memory.

 

Some films are favorites. Others become places we return to. For me, one of those places is the 1977 animated The Hobbit.

Music, Movies, and Memories, Oh my...

Music, who knew? Well, everyone, I suppose. Everyone but me, apparently, because this is one of those I was this many years old when I discovered it moments. 

Sometimes the Past is Past. (Or, How to Put Your Behind in the Past)

Sometimes, no matter how great the past was, it's the past and it's gone forever.

Back in the day (WAY back in the day) my high school had what would now laughably be called a computer lab. We had about 25 Atari 8-bit computers (a mix of 400 and 800 models) that we used to learn how to type, budget, write, program, and (though they didn't know it) play games. This isn't about those computers. I still have a working Atari 400 and a working Atari 800 (and countless other older computers) This is about the other thing in the lab. 

Coffee, Neurosis, and wit.

 

When I power-watch a TV series that I have already been through any number of times one of two things happens. Either I mostly ignore it, knowing exactly what is going to be said by whom and when, using it as background noise or filler. Or I pay extra attention to it wringing out new meanings, new details, and little in-jokes that I somehow missed the previous times through the show. 

Decision Making Paradigm re-evaluated.

 

So while I had hoped that I was done writing about friendships it turns out I am not. 

Time to re-evaluate my decision-making paradigm...

Rita Mae Brown, in her 1983 book "Sudden Death" wrote, "Unfortunately, Susan didn't remember what Jane Fulton once said, 'Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.'”

When the fall is all there is...

One of my favorite movie scenes of all time is from "The Lion in Winter" (1968) (and 2003 for that matter...) when Geoffrey, Richard, and John are in the dungeon waiting on the king to come for them. They have a little back and forth and Richard is going on about how he is going to meet his death. There is an interchange between them that I really like a lot. It goes like this:

Richard: He'll get no satisfaction out of me. He isn't going to see me beg.

Geoffrey: Why you chivalric fool—as if the way one fell down mattered.

Richard: When the fall is all there is, it matters.

The Inner Light

 

I recently watched the Star Trek The Next Generation episode "The Inner Light" (Season 5 episode 25). This is far from the first time as it is one of my very favorites from the series. This time however it started me thinking and if you know me at all there are only two possible outcomes of my thinking: Very BAD things happen or very PROFOUND things happen. I guess you will need to read on to see which it was this time...

Short Fiction, the Internet, and Everything.

I have been reading what you would call short fiction since I was very young (is there anything that more epitomizes short fiction than a Little Golden Book?)  and I was probably 9 or 10 years old when I got my first magazine. I am reasonably sure it was a copy of Asimov's Science Fiction magazine; I still have a couple issues from back then, though not all of the ones I read by any means.

To have lived through some of the heydays of fantasy and sci-fi short fiction and the magazine boom only to then to see it falter, almost disappear completely, and then start to recover was an interesting experience.

Out In The World

Every day on my way to work and then back home from work I see people out in the world.

They look like they are having fun, doing things, living lives. 

Changing Sentiment

When I was a kid a bookstore was a magical place. A holy place. Full of action and adventure, science, and imagination.

Every trip to one of my local bookstores was something I looked forward to like a vacation.

Is a writer still a writer if he isn't writing?

For the last year or so (if I'm honest, nearly two years now) writing has been far more difficult than it should be. By writing, I mean anything that requires putting words in a cunning order. Be that blog posts, letters, novels, or really anything. I managed to complete NaNoWriMo 2017, but it was torture and well, quite poorly written. For NaNoWriMo 2018 I never got past 14k words. 

I have always considered myself a writer, not because I had published anything or because I was always writing something, but because I loved writing. Whenever the opportunity presented itself I would write happily away into the night. whether it was instructions on some process or system for work, a letter to someone, a short story, a blog post, or anything the words just poured out (not always good, but easily). This is no longer the case.