Legacy

Ah, writing.  And random notes...

• Tried a new pen a couple of weeks back, called InkJoy.  Not really the joy I was hoping for, but, like a lemming, I bought the super-sized pack because I can't walk to ready supply.  Now I am stuck with temperamental pens that cross-dress between ballpoint and gel.  They don't do either well...
• Read this week that Steve Martin released a book of his tweets.  I used to follow him, but there were one too many tweets that fit the category of my mother's adage of "It must be good--I don't get it."  Still, I thought to myself, in fifty years, would it make for fascinatin' study of our times?  Which lead me to...
• I am continuing to meander through William Least Heat-Moon's "Roads to Quoz:  an American Mosey."  I began the damn thing over two years ago and don't mind if I do linger in it.  This past section is focusing on a wandering through New England via the Midwest (beginning in Columbia, Missouri and ending at the tip of Maine).  Least Heat-Moon is addressing the world through the memory of Jack Kerouac and his famous text that is shortened to "OTR" for the sheer worship of it and its famous form:  a scroll.  Jean-Louis gets about four chapters until I'm in love again too (still have the copy that I bought in Missouri and drove to California with), and then Bill takes a small segue into his love of US 40, a thoroughfare that, one way or another travels from the Atlantic to the Embarcadero in San Francisco.  One man that Bill meets along the way is a US 40 historian and photographer, and working on a book that may or may not see the light of a publisher.  Frank and Bill discuss the financial and emotional costs of being writers, and Bill states, "I told him about years ago when I was struggling along writing my first book, a road narrative of sorts [most likely "Blue Highways"], and how I often imagined the manuscript never finding a publisher and ending up in an attic where somebody would come across it a century later.  A readership of one, but one seemed better than none..."  Frank agrees that he is shooting for the same star, that "readership of [at least] one," and then I am struck as though by a brick...
• Yes, this is a dream world that I operate in.  But the real world does not want me.  The job that I took in January is incurring no income and multiplying expense, which is nice for taxes next year, but worthless to me in terms in paying this year's bills.  Is it really impossible to believe that my "dream world" of writing is the most lucrative thing I can find in this Occupying Age?  What if that Disney ending is the grittiest and the most Wall Street of the collection?  It's like a scene from a movie or tv show I can't remember, where the character states, "Have you noticed that it's always the last place you look?"  Damn it, no; I was too "practical" for forty years to finally do the F-IN THING I WAS MEANT TO DO.  The world's longest realm of denial because that path wasn't supposed to make me...it breaks people.

And that's where I am, practically delusional, hoping the damn writing, the last option, works at some point.  I just have to stop flinching and listening to every other damn expert and take a real chance on it.

Write on.