A Day

Writing is a little bit like playing the piano...it requires constant practice and finger-limbering. Here's an example, for those who might be curious.

I sit cross-legged on the floor in the vortex of a category-four hurricane, watching the minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years swirl by, and I catch the quickest of glimpses of flying debris: a cardboard fort I got for Christmas one year when I was about seven, a copy of Great Poems of the English Language from college, a ticket stub from a movie theater in Nice, France (The Golden Stag), a playbill for Me and Juliet, the first Broadway show I ever saw, the wooden cabinet my dad made (which I still have), a pair of flight goggles and a book on navigation from my Navcad days, pieces of the sofa Norm and I built when we first got together in Chicago, a couple of the stuffed animals Ray loved to collect, a jar of raspberry jam I made from raspberries I picked myself in the woods near Pence, Wisconsin, my grandfather’s pocket watch, the mesh mask form fitted to hold my head in place during my radiation treatments at Mayo…so many other things whipping past so fast I cannot identify them before they are gone.

Which brings us, more or less to today. Nothing particularly special about today, which is exactly what makes it rather special. Up at 5:30 to finish a blog I’d not had a chance to finish the day before since I was trying to get out the last of 300-plus personalized e-mails to people on my mailing list announcing a special pre-publication sale on His Name is John, the book I’ve been waiting to have released since last December. Watched the NBC morning news from 7 - 7:25, my morning ritual of V-8 juice, coffee, and chocolate covered donut broken by having run out of V-8 juice (and you thought your life was exciting), to the computer for various e-mail sendings and receivings.

Around nine, received the galley proofs for John which, my having waited for for six months to receive it, I am expected to go over and return to the publisher as soon as possible. Having to work both tomorrow and Sunday (well, you won’t be reading this until Monday), and not being able to carry my computer to work with me, I won’t be able to do anything at all on the galley until Monday…which I understand is a holiday of some sort. (Christmas? No, no snow. Easter? Groundhog Day? I have to search my mind to figure it out. But since every day is in fact a holiday for me, it doesn’t really matter. It’s just another day, as are all holidays).

Got about 20 pages into the galley (having to increase the size of the type by 150 percent to be able to read it…my eyes are getting worse and worse, undoubtedly due to staring at the computer monitor 10 hours a day). I’d probably have gotten further except that I am incapable of not checking my email every 30 seconds or so. Lots and lots of emails as a result of a minor tempest at one of the net lists I belong to.

Oh, yes, neglected to mention going out for coffee earlier, and stopping to pick up some V8 juice and a slice of pecan pie from my local Kentucky Fried Colonel. Not bad pie, but I buy it because one small piece has 460 calories, and I need all the calories I can possibly get, since I am eating less and less solid food. One can of Boost (which I really don’t care for, but again, I drink for the 350 calories) and a piece of the pecan pie provides more then 1/3 of my total daily calorie requirements. I understand Drunken Donuts offers a Large Frosted Something-or-Other that contains 3,127 calories (including the equivalent of 16 teaspoons of sugar).

And then I remember I need a blog for Monday, and I sit down and without backspacing once, I went from “I sit” to here without stopping. But you could never tell, could you?

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