Don't you wish everybody did?

One of my best friends wrote me an email last night, and I just called him and asked if I could quote him. He said I could.

"I am totally envious of what you're accomplishing--both with the weight loss and the blog," Larry wrote. "I don't know how you have time to write it. I am getting more and more afraid to write stuff down, and I can't actually figure out why. I can't write anything, and I mean anything. I wrote 2 pages for Randy's daughters after he died, but that was the first time in a long while. I used to do it fairly often, but just can seem to now."

I think there were about 20 years when I was afraid to write things down myself. I could write memoranda, speeches, press releases, and organizing plans, but nothing personal. And that was for a guy, me, who self-identified as a writer. I had written hundreds of pages of fiction in college, been the fiction editor of the college literary magazine, and studied with Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Lowell, and the best writing teacher at Harvard, a guy named Monroe Engel.

But I swore it off for 20 years. I thought it was because I was committed to doing organizing work instead, but there were other weird things going on. Part of it was that I was afraid if I started writing I wouldn't stop, and I was afraid I would never get anything else done. Part of it was that I had unconsciously tried to conform myself into a certain person to make my first marriage work, and either writing did not fit with that or maybe I feared that if I wrote down too much it would expose me as a fraud to myself. Part of it was that I probably resented the idea that anyone else, ever, might judge what I wrote. I am reasonably arrogant, after all.

It was all pretty weird, but it's not like I understood any of that then.

The bottom line is that I paid a heavy price for not writing, and for not writing things down, and without ever intending it this way I extracted a heavy price from others. I'm not really prepared to go into detail about all that just now, but the point is that when we are meant to do something, we damned well better do it, or eventually there will be hell to pay.

So, understanding myself a little bit more now than I did then, I can observe this: that I am afraid not to write things down.

In the past 8 years I've published four books and written several others that are in various states of readiness for publication. Some are better than others. I've written hundreds of pages of "web content" to keep soup in the cupboard.

But it has been very good for me, these past 80 days, to have this blog. It never takes me more than an hour a day between writing my posts and posting my music and tweaking this or that. It provides me with a fairly informal way of writing regularly somewhere near the "spine" of my life, of my personal story, although quite frequently it is only after I have written it that I can relate it much to my life. It keeps me relatively honest and, of course, it keeps me accountable to a very specific goal, which is to whip my ass into a little better shape than I have been in lo these many years. It is just one thing, but this one thing is working.

It helps, a lot, that writing per se does not intimidate me the way it intimidates a lot of people. Larry is a mensch, and an extremely interesting and creative guy, so it is hard for me to see that writing things down should be intimidating to him, or to understand why he might feel, as he says, "afraid to write things down." But given how weird and mystifying my own agraphia was, I shouldn't necessarily expect to understand anyone else's, should I?

Blogging makes my life much more livable. It helps me make myself who I want to be, not that I always succeed. It has helped me drop a little over 35 pounds, although I am a little displeased that I cannot yet run a 6-minute mile the way I could in 1996, let alone a 4:38 mile the way I could in 1968. It will lead me to do a fair amount of other writing, and some of that may add chowder to the soup in the cupboard.

I recommend it. It is easier than people think. I honestly believe that if more people wrote things down about their lives, the world would be a more civilized place.

It makes me think of those old commercials for Dial soap:

"Aren't you glad you blog? Don't you wish everybody did?"

I know what you are thinking. Who would read it all, right?

That's where the music would come in:

Weekend soundtrack

Two favorites of mine



Tom Waits - Looking for the Heart of Saturday Night



Alison Krauss & John Waite - Missing You

Monday morning soundtrack

How about a real get to work song for a Monday morning?


Because you don't want to end up like Bonnie and Clyde, right?

Desmond Dekker - The Israelites

Tuesday's Soundtrack

My father was born in Rome, Georgia in 1927. He quit school in the 8th grade and joined the Navy with a fake birth certificate when he was 15. He always kept quiet about being a Cherokee Indian because it was something to hide growing up in Georgia in the 30s. He met my mother at a USO dance when he was 18 and she was 21 and she quit college to marry him. It didn't pan out. He lived in a campsite near the beach on the Big Island north of Kona the last 15 years of his life, until cigarettes killed him in 1986. Here are a few of his favorite songs.

Wednesday's soundtrack

My daughter Moriah's first Thanksgiving was on Douglass St. in the Lower Ninth Ward in 1978. Meg and I had moved there from Dallas a few months earlier, and I had just come back to ACORN after a few months away. I was driving the I-10 across the bayous several days a week to do an organizing drive in Lake Charles, while trying to help one of my staff organizers, Lia Lent, get a campaign started targeting the Corps of Engineers concerning the safety of the levees. Randy Newman's Good Old Boys LP was pretty fresh at the time and I played it so much that it's a little surprising that Moriah's first words weren't about "a little fat man with a notepad in his hand." Her first solid food came on Thanksgiving afternoon when I slipped her a little piece of turkey. She's always been a meat and potatoes girl.

Thanksgiving Day Soundtrack

Happy Thanksgiving, friends, loved ones, and countrymen.