Like Riding a Bike

I decided one night to accept an offer to purchase Vanity Fair magazine again for only pennies a month.  What a deal.  Now they pile up like accusations, stacked neatly, unread.  So last night, after A.A. cocktails (cranberry, club soda, lime) and dinner (from the Whole Foods deli) and an episode of Mad Men, I allowed myself a nightcap of scotch and took the magazines to the bedroom.  If I maintain the habit of A.A. cocktails and a late nightcap, I'll probably become literary again.  Hell. . . who knows what might happen.

So I took the plastic wrappers off two of them and decided to flip through to see if anything caught my attention.  In the back of the latest edition is an article about the discovery of previously unknown Hemingway letters in Cuba at the Finca Vigia.

Earlier in the evening, I had gotten an email from Q who sent this quotation:

"If you're going to try, go all the way.  Otherwise, don't even start.  This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind.  It could mean not eating for three or four days.  It could mean freezing on a park bench.  It could mean jail.  It could mean derision.  It could mean mocker--isolation.  Isolation is the gift.  Al the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it.  And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds.  And it will be better than anything else you can imagine.  If you're going to try, go all the way.  There is no other feeling like that.  You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire.  You will ride life straight to perfect laughter.  It's the only good fight there is." _Bukowski, "Factotum"

To which I replied:

Remember what is engraved on his headstone?  

I forwarded the quote to C.C. who responded:

I know one thing about people with what Juvenal called: "the incurable disease of writing;" it does not necessarily lead to contentment.

"Many suffer from the incurable disease of writing, and it becomes chronic in their sick minds." 

I have been rereading the collected early letters of Hunter S. Thompson lately.  He had it.  The disease, that is.  And truly, it is pleasing.

I have been disappointed recently again (it is a lifelong disappointment) with attempts at corresponding with others.  It all begins fine, but too soon, they peter out and I end up writing to myself.  Maybe I always am.  And, of course, these are not even letters but simple emails.  The Prodigal Girl who told me she "does not give verbal" writes from time to time three or four lines of email.  This dwindles eventually to one line then a fragment.  I expect one day to receive a simple letter.  I mean one of the twenty-six in the alphabet.

"g"

The girl (woman. . . I know) with whom I had lunch on Sunday used to write me fairly regularly and substantially.  She, too, now writes infrequently.

Last night I received a promising email, but it comes from someone who begins well from time to time then falls off the planet not to be heard from for months or more, and then writes as if that were normal.  Which seems to be the culture.  I recently struck up a correspondence with someone exciting, but the wire went dead.  And a friend with whom I used to correspond and who wrote the longest missives of all has recently moved back to my own home town.  And now I hear nothing.

What is it?  Too many drugs?  Television?  Twitter?  Global exhaustion?

Of course, it could be me.  I imagine I go too far, say something unpalatable or worse, make writing more difficult if not distasteful.  Perhaps they've found other geniuses with whom to correspond, writing Proustian volumes rich and plentiful.

I have no wrap up to all of this other than to say that writing is good for you and like other things that are good for you are either to be avoided or done rabidly like Tantric sex or veganism.  But most people do neither.  Once in awhile they will get an urge to eat healthy foods, run, lose weight, go back to school, read more, etc.  But like a bad cold, this runs its course.

And really, it is probably the best thing.  I should think of writing like bicycle riding.  I like to ride once in awhile leisurely, but there are those closed societies of men and women who spend thousands of dollars getting lighter frames and precision gears and tight, gaudy spandex clothing, who talk about biking and buy the magazines.  And when I see them, I want to go elsewhere.  What is wrong with them, I wonder to myself.  They need to get a life.  They need to find some balance.

And with that. . . .