You shake your head, and said it's a shame . . .

Looking back over my posts I am struck by the fact that they are sporadic at best. Not that the teeming world of blog readers is waiting breathlessly for my next installment, but when I started this thing I had hoped to post something at least several times a week. The problem is that as soon as I sit down in the desk chair and face the computer my mind goes completely blank. If you were to hook me up to an EEG you would probably decide it was time to donate the organs.



I had the same problem in the Seventies when I was working in Ann Arbor and living in Tecumseh. It was a forty-five mile drive along two lane country roads and, especially at night, incredible poems or stories would unfold in my head like I was reading from a page. I would repeat them over and over to myself to try to fix them in my memory so I could write them down later. As I slowly drove down the last couple blocks to my house I would go over the poem or story one last time, and smile with the joy that I had it. It was good.

Then after greeting the dogs, going to the bathroom, and giving my wife a kiss I would go sit down at the typewriter, put in a clean sheet of paper, and stare at it. My fingers would rest lightly on the keyboard while my mind slowly groped around among words that could only recreate my masterpiece by defining exactly what it wasn't. Eventually I would hesitantly type out "Something about bricks . . . and stuff." Which would take approximately half an hour.

During the Eighties and Nineties my writing was pretty much confined to corporate blather, which is actually much easier to do if you don't think about it, and my ongoing therapy book The Man Who Hated Chocolate Chip Cookies. (I have only posted six installments here, but some of the others will be along when they have had some of their more psychotic sections tidied up a bit; and the targets of a couple of the more libelous sections have found a suitable disguise.) Occasionally something would occur to me, and I would think it would make a good story; but the corporate life never seemed to leave enough energy or will power or desire to follow up on them.

Then I quit my job. At first I had no clear plan, but I knew that whatever I ended up doing it would involve writing. I had not struggled for years working my way up through The New Yorker's several layers of form rejection slips just to give up when I had finally started getting handwritten rejection slips from actual people—sometimes with guarded praise. Well, actually I did. It had been over twenty years since I had submitted a story, but now I had the time and I was no longer trying to figure out if management ever actually listened to itself. I would start again.

A lot had changed since the late Seventies and early Eighties when I was sending stories off to The New Yorker or Paris Review. Now there was these blog things. Instead of waiting three, four or five weeks to find out that a story didn't fit current editorial needs, I could put my rambling thoughts out in cyberspace and find out immediately that no one was interested.

And then it started again. These amazing ideas would float across my mind, or an image or line would grow like a crystal, but never when I could record them. They would come to me during my shower, or when I was cooking a kind-of complicated dinner for friends, or drving in traffic that's been made just a shade more interesting by having rival gangs weaving in and out and obviously flashing signs and complicated finger codes to each other that I am pretty sure did not translate to, "Yo. Do you have any Grey Poupon?"

Needless to say some of these lost works are beyond great. They would have ended war. They would put an end to the heartbreak of psoriasis. One or two might have even been bought by an editor. Others were too beautiful to look at straight on. Men would weep. Women would offer themselves to me just to experience a small shadow of the power. There would be reports of a teenager in Nebraska reading one of my posts and then having the courage to chat up the entire field hockey team of St Mary's Church of Redemption in the Fen. He would be quoted as saying that, "Yeah, for the most part they were really nice, and it hardly bothered them that I was a boy. But there were a couple who like really seemed to like me, and wanted me to come help them practice tackles."

Those are the kinds of things that come to me when there is no possibility of being able to write it down. I have tried to train my mind to retain these fleeting pictures, but as soon as I sit down in this chair and turn to face the keyboard they vanish in a cloud of misleading phrases from pieces I did write and have come to regret.

I have to get a new chair.

小鳥この頃音もさせずに來て居りぬ
Recently/Small birds/Come noiselessly.