SILENT BOOMER CAUGHT RACING ALONG

Yesterday I shot through the rewrite of Chapter Fifteen in a couple of hours. That pace, I'll be done with Angie's Choice next week—a goal achieved! Today my attention wanders among the words in my head, waiting for them to make a combination that will explain to me who I am today and what I'm supposed to be doing as a 75 year old man at ten-thirty am on a Thursday in July morning, living in America in the early 21st Century of the Year of Our Atheism, CE. 

Me, in the time of writing this....

In brief... should I go walk beside the Columbia River and dream away my remaining hours or should I sit my ass down before a computer screen and peck away at the keyboard until my little fingers burn with arthritic pain?  

Jung said the first half of a man's life should be filled with DOING—establishing a career, making a living, supporting self and a family, all those time-consuming, attention-diverting tasks. (Women can make their own lists.) The second half is to be used for THINKING—philosophy and wisdom. I got it backward. I was a flop in the roles of husband, father, bread winner, son, responsible male animal. Writing never became a bread-winning career. I was diverted by poetry, art, movies, novels, alcohol and my lovely pain. I did all my philosophical suffering early. I frittered away my youth, eating cake and drinking life—both it's frothy top and its seedy dregs. A life of feeling, of dreaming, of thinking.

To this day, almost daily, I write whichever words in my thoughts yell the loudest to be let out (like now), but I do know that some of the most awakened moments in my life arrive when insistent words jar me from a dream and drive me to set them down fast as possible before they escape back into unconsciousness, or when words come alive with their own intelligence as I wrestle with them over the shape of human reality and my fingers are forced to fly over the keyboard to fill the emptiness of a blank screen to get reality down before it disappears back into the silence that is NOW. Hum....

Guess this old ape will keep pecking away, see what's next. These days, love fills up a lot of time. How long it took for that sweet flower to blossom in my stony philosopher's heart. How much failure it took to learn how to nourish it!