Come sit with me now on this beach 2 thousand miles from Sin City & twelve hundred miles from the Verrazano. Join me in the rebellion. Choose your gear wisely, bring your Chaise lounge circa 1979, and your lime green bikini. Sit near the water. Sit so close you can hear the muddled masses crying out from across the water. They whisper sweet, in timeless incognito voices, that rebound off the sunken pillars of great stones of the lost Atlantis…
Be still — it’s nearly high tide and dinner is in the slow cooker. The red wine is cold and waiting. Come sit with me now before the ages take us too.
Is this our refuge? Or is this our fate? She asks me this as we lie upon the white unbroken sands of Miami Beach. Only hours before – we drank white wine and toasted the snowbirds down from the Cape and New Jersey and Grosse Point.
There’s no bad weather for us she says, I can put it all behind me.
Not me said I. I have no time to be idle. I’ll spend my days writing poetry and volunteering for beach cleanup.
Then I’ll read Nietzsche, she says: It’s all happened before, and will happen again.
Then I go: Let’s order a bottle of absinthe and we can drink easily in the long shadows of late evening. We can press Old Man Time’s patience to the limit.
She says: Tic toc, let the old fool unwind like the Seth Thomas clock on your Grandma Pearl’s mantle.
Bring your easel, I say, you can paint evening better than anyone.
In August one year, we were drinking wine, in a State Park in Kansas watching the afternoon walk away toward the Missouri River and Saint Joe. We were listening to Johnny Cash on my cellular phone. You – in your Miami Beach T-shirt, and me – in my ‘Virginia is for Lovers’ sweatshirt. We tied one on — in the neatly trimmed grass of a picnic area — named for a long departed native American, a guy who had roamed the plains and hunted there and produced offspring there and had no idea that there would be a recreation area and a campground named after him one day.
And later we lay on our backs, with the sound of a flat-lands waterfall gurgling somewhere in the distance and the sound of a honey bee
hovering
pulling nectar from a flower that you could not identify. You said that you could consult your Kansas State University botany book for a read on the plant, but I remind you that you left that book at the Rodeway Inn in Salina three days ago.
We drink more of Kansas and talk about bees. I tell her about the natives who came over from Asia and how they walked across the ice bridge. And how they trekked across the continent with travois sleds pulled by dogs.
Twilight – we find ourselves on our backs watching a jet streak by overhead.
It’s late in the day and we know it is bound for Philly, or New York,
or Boston.
Eastbound at night I tell her. Westbound in the morning she says.
I am listening to my inner poem today, The one that is deep in the core of my aging body where I keep the cleansers and the cleaners and the emotional vacuum cleaner that I use to suck the cobwebs off the ceiling and to blow the ants from their nests near the potato bin.
Sometime before noon I find myself calling out to the inner poem for some inspiration. Sing to me you Old Inner Poem. Whisper a sonnet in my ear. Come close and explain the nuances of your latest villanelle. Don’t become caught up with the details and the meanderings of the old poets – you are on your own now – you need none of them. Inspiration comes from the clouds and the damned moon – REALLY can anyone bear another poem about the moon?? Can we beat another one out of the Clouds? Give me a Picasso or a Rembrandt today – with a hint of Jackson Pollack. That’s the kind of poem I need from you.
Don’t make me come down there and look for you Old Fool Inner Poem: If I must do that, you’ll be sorry for the experience. But there is silence down there and soon I know Inner Poem will need to be prodded and maybe coaxed with a good glass of port wine.
I have been an aficionado of country music for many years, going back to when I was just a young boy growing up in the Midwest. Country music was a staple of my playlist before anyone even had a playlist. And at the top of my playlist has long been Willie Nelson. I was a huge fan of Willie back in the late 60s and early 70s when he wasn’t as recognized as he is today.
One of my favorite Willie Nelson songs, is titled “Bloody Mary Morning” and it is near the top in my “writer’s playlist”, or those songs that I play when I am writing, to help inspire me to greatness. Bloody Mary Morning (BMM) is, in my opinion, one of the most quintessential songs of the country genre, in that it contains several basic elements from which other songs are spawned.
In BMM, a young man from the ‘sticks’ is dumped by his big city sweetheart (in this case a girl from L.A.), and he is headed home (to Houston) to recover from the sudden breakup. On the plane ride home, he succumbs to drink (Bloody Mary cocktails) to ease the pain.
This is a country story that could be rewritten a multitude of times by switching genders, mode of transportation, and type of booze. We could swap a young lady from Alabama heading home from Nashville on a bus drinking wine. Or a guy on a train bound for New Orleans, staring out a window, sipping bourbon from a paper bag. You get the picture. BMM is perfect in its simplicity.
Some sources (and we always trust some sources don’t we), say that Willie wrote this song on an especially rough flight, on an airplane airsickness bag. I can’t confirm that, even though it is a good story. What I do know about the song is that when it was first released in 1970, it was titled “Bloody Merry Morning” and according to Willie, he wrote the song to inspire him to be a better parent. I am not sure how that worked, or how the song was supposed to accomplish that, but the song was reworked and released again in 1972 under the new cocktail driven title. The song became a minor hit for Willie, and it peaked at number 17 on the Billboard chart for 1974, or around the year I picked up on it.
Over the years, I have heard Willie play BMM numerous times, but none quite as movingly as last Friday evening in West Palm Beach, Florida, when 90-year-old Willie took to the stage once again.
Three songs in, Willie broke into BMM and performed the song well. Maybe not as well as he did on Austin City Limits in 1974, but hey, that was 49 years ago!
Willie is always calm and laid back, even when performing an intense song like BMM. And he makes recovering from heartbreak seem easy, and nearly painless, and in the space of an LA to Houston flight, he infers that things can turn around for a guy (with the help of a cocktail or two).
And how do we find serenity in calamity? I found this quote from Willie that might explain it:
I take it not only one day at a time, but a moment at a time, and keep it at that pace. If you can be happy right now, then you’ll always be happy because it’s always in the now.
So, it is all about living in the now! Is that the secret? Is this the fabled ‘here and now’ in which we are supposed to live. A friend of mine told me that his AA sponsor once told him to forget one day at a time and take it one hour at a time, and then one minute at a time if need be. That’s screwing it all the way down to the here and now.
It makes sense. If we can learn to be happy in the present moment, then maybe it is all just a matter of stringing the moments together.
Willie Nelson – iThink Amplitheater, West Palm Beach, Florida, October 8, 2023
I enjoy reading what successful authors have to say about the writing process. I like to know what time of day they like to write – what they drink while writing – what music they listen to, or don’t listen to. Do they write longhand or on a keyboard? I have long been interested in writing as a craft. Sometimes I care more for reading about famous writers than I enjoy reading their work.
And I also enjoy collecting writers ‘rules. Writers’ rules are bits of advice that successful writers hand down to the rest of us ‘wanna be’ writers to help us develop and grow as writers.
Today, I am reading a set of rules compiled by novelist, Jonathan Franzen. I think they are so good that I keep them bookmarked so I can read them periodically.
I find Rule 8 on Franzen’s list especially interesting:
“It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.”
This is a bombshell rule. Since I am thinking that most fiction today is written at workplaces (computers), it makes me wonder if Franzen is correct. Do successful authors have to work offline? Is Stephen King sitting in his writing shed tapping away at an IBM Selectric typewriter (full disclaimer, I just checked the internet to make certain that I spelled Selectric correctly). So there, the internet is already distracting me from my writing.
After spending some time working on a novel, I have concluded that the internet is a fact checking rabbit hole, down which it’s easy to disappear and difficult to re-emerge. What begins as a Google search into the earliest month daffodils bloom in Minnesota is likely to end in a descent into social media hell. In short, fifteen minutes of productive writing often ends in three minutes of research, followed by thirty minutes of non-productive web surfing.
So, do I need a fountain pen and yellow legal pad to write my novel? Do I need to get my 70’s era Olivetti manual typewriter out of storage? Or is there any in between?
Which brings me to Tom Hanks.
I read an interview with Tom Hanks earlier this year. As if being an Oscar winning movie star wasn’t enough, Hanks decided to become a best-selling novelist as well, and recently completed a 448-page novel titled “The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece”. Early in the project, Hanks discovered that he needed help focusing on the task. To this end, Hanks used the much-touted ‘Pomodoro Technique’ to help him write his novel.
The Pomodoro Technique was developed by Francesco Cirillo, owner of a Berlin, Germany based consulting firm. Cirillo is credited with inventing the Pomodoro Technique, while he was a university student. Cirillo used a tomato shaped kitchen timer to time designated work intervals. The Italian word for tomato being Pomodoro, hence the name of the technique came into being.
So, in practice it goes like this. Work periods are broken into 25-minute intervals, called pomodoros, after which you can take a 5-minute break. After four Pomodoros (about two hours), you are allowed a 20 – 30-minute break. Here we go:
With your work open in front of you and ready to go, set a timer for 25 minutes. You can use a kitchen timer like Cirillo used, use one of a multitude of free online pomodoros timers, or just use your cell phone.
NOW focus, focus, focus on the task.
When the timer goes off at the end of the pomodoros, take a 5-minute break. Stretch, take a short walk, pour a cup of coffee etc. Just leave the work area.
Repeat steps 1 through 3, three more times.
Now take the big break. Go for a quick run, take a power nap, or pour a cocktail. You’ve done it.
According to the extremely focused folks at Harvard Business Review, the Pomodoro Technique not only helps users to turn off external time sucks like social media, but the real distractions that occur within our own heads.
I don’t know about you, but I’m up for trying the Pomodoros Technique.
I shall close with a quote from Tom Hanks regarding writing: “I write because I’ve got too many f—ing stories in my head. And it’s fun.”
There is no ‘flannel season’ where I live. Around these parts it stays in the 85-degree range until – Christmas, or thereabouts, so it is sometimes difficult for me to remember just where we are in the seasonal cycle.
October 2023 – can’t be. As you get older, the months seem to travel quickly, but this one really crept up on me. So, I intend to enjoy every day of October 2023, because the next time we see an October pop up, it will be in 2024 and we (in the US) know what that means. By next year, at this time, we will be in the death throes of US Presidential election, number 60. And what an all-consuming contest it is bound to be, divisive, ugly, and devoid of civility. But that is to come, and this is the here and now.
So, I intend to enjoy every day of these sweet October days below the frost line. We haven’t leaves to turn color, but we have rockets lighting our skies every few days as we reach out for the moon, Mars and beyond. Rocket launches have become so commonplace here on the Space Coast that we often forget they are scheduled until we see the plume of smoke in the sky and feel the sonic boom rocking the house. Just another day here.
So, what poetic offering do I have to celebrate October of 2023? I didn’t think I had one, but I do, so here it is. It was written several years ago as I sat on a Florida beach:
OH OCTOBER
Oh October, you have tracked me down like a contract process server, with envelope in hand, rushing toward me as I sit helpless, on Ft. Lauderdale beach, toes in granite sand, Ray Bans angled into fading afternoon sun. You hand me the price that I’ll pay: No shady drive leaf peeping bright New England autumn cider sipping pumpkin picking pre-ski crisp air from Ontario blowing across the Lakes orange and yellow tinged afternoons. With brandy and conversation before the first fire. Just remanent heat here beach-side last hurricane of the season, six hundred miles offshore.
Ed's end of the planet books 