Sudsy setback

After my triumphant beginning Tuesday morning, a minor bump on the superhighway to literary fulfillment. The alarm went off at the same time this morning, I stumbled out of bed after an interesting dream the same way, staggered down to my play station (I shall refuse to call writing my Great Freedom Novel "work") and accomplished nothing in an hour or so.

Wha happened?

Reconstructing the previous 12 hours, I was struck by the fact that I spent three hours in front of the television set and consumed a greater amount of my favorite adult beverage than usual Tuesday night.

Moral of the story: If I spend that much time and effort shutting my brain down for the night, I should not be surprised if jumpstarting my brain is a major task in the morning.

Onward and upward.

The dream of the bugs, and the first step

Now that was quite a dream.

After an extended adventure, the details of which are a little fuzzy - was it a childhood frolic with a little pal or a traveling trip of a more adult nature? - I was sitting inside with a little pal. He was reading comics, and I still had a bit of the wandering bug, so I went for a walk outside. After a few steps, it was clear something odd was happening in the field near the house.

I couldn't see them as much as sense them, and I could hear a low buzzing. Bugs and beetles, lots and lots and lots of them, from one kid-horizon to the other, not so many that the ground was black with them - I could see all of the vegetation of a typical meadow - but enough that my concern was elevated. I wasn't frightened so much as extremely curious and knowing I should stay out of their way if they decided to swarm, and they seemed to be preparing to leave.

I walked quickly back into the house and told my little pal, "You should see all the bugs out there, there must be millions of 'em," and just then the buzzing rose in intensity and hundreds of bugs were clinging to the window screen. Not that they wanted to come in and hurt us, the screen just got in their way. Not black bugs, kind of a light brown and semi-transparent against the sun - at least the ones on the screen; I knew there were bugs of all shapes and sizes in that way that you know things in dreams. After a few seconds they moved on. I was glad to be in the house, because while they didn't appear to be hungry bugs, the sensation of millions of flying creatures banging into me and brushing past on the way to wherever would probably have been a little ticklish in a creepy way. Then, darn it, the alarm clock beeped.

The combination of my recent reading, and the reaction to my musings about The Fountainhead especially, motivated me to write down short descriptions of four main characters in my Great American Freedom Novel the other day. Not a lot of detail, barely half a page of an old-fashioned composition book I bought a year ago for 12 cents at the most amazing school-supply clearance sale I've seen in a long time. (When the cashier at Target rang my nine items up for $1.12 including sales tax, we both did a double take.) The main point is I know the basic motivations of four folks. I'm not sure how they will interact, their genders or what they will do, but I have a feel for who they are, and I know which one is the hero - or at least which one will prevail. And don't worry, I didn't copy Roark, Toohey, Keating and Wynand, except in the sense that they possess certain qualities in different measures, and four seemed like the right number. (Now I will have to resist the temptation to re-create a Dominique Falcon, though.) But that's probably true of all sets of fictional characters, I imagine. And the worst thing I could do is start second-guessing myself at this stage.

After the dream and the alarm clock, I lay in bed thinking how pleasant it would be to rest another hour or so. Then a sentence came to me - not an original sentence by any means whatsoever, but a sentence - "Even as a child, it was clear there was something unusual about him." I climbed out of bed, took my allotment of pills and made coffee while trying to hold onto the bug-dream and expanding on that first sentence in my mind.

As the coffee trickled into the pot upstairs (I can smell it - wait just a few more minutes, B.W.), I banged out four paragraphs. When the novel is done, we'll see whether "Even as a child, etc." is the beginning of the novel or somewhere else toward the beginning, middle or end. Maybe it'll even end up on the cutting room floor. But I have four characters, and four paragraphs. It's a start. (Do you think the groups of four represent a pattern or a coincidence?)

A friend who's going through one of those serious life's challenges that only are supposed to happen to other people sent me a note after I told him about the four characters. He wants an autographed copy of the book and time to read it, and the doctors' prognosis is a little less than optimistic about making it five years. Well, this is a guy with the spirit and ability to beat the odds, but just in case, I have a deadline. (Um, maybe I shouldn't phrase it with that word?) Anyone who works with deadlines knows how powerful they are. I'm moved that he would care enough to give me one.

And I'm started. Take that, you pesky little quotidian.

On the Road

Milady and I are prepping for a 1,000-mile trip that begins Saturday morning. Of course, I don't consent to unreasonable searches of my innocent person and property, so we'll be driving - that, and we have friends to see between here and there, not to mention the friends on the other side of the 1,000 miles. I/we expect it to be a valuable time; it's probably 5-6 years since we took an extended road trip that didn't include my parents' house at some juncture - numerous 3-4 day weekends and overnight trips in the meantime, of course.

We'll be packing her laptop and, thanks to Wally's timely heads-up, a printout of Murray Rothbard's "Betrayal of the American Right," and the Mead composition notebook that contains the beginnings of my master plan for escaping wage slavery. I hope to make many notes during Milady's shifts behind the wheel. Thanks to the joy of laptops and Wi-Fi, I hope to post while out yonder, but I make no promises just in case.

I can already feel the weight of the day job starting to lift off my shoulders, but I have to be careful about shirking the yoke too soon - much to be done before they free me for a week. Oh my, nine days in all not on the clock ... a guy could get used to this ...

Robber asks for change, only needs $4

Sometimes it's just Weird News, but I'd love to know the back story.

GREENBURGH, New York (AP) - A knife-wielding robber in this small suburban town north of New York City needed only $4, so he refused to take a $10 bill from his victim and waited while the man made change at a pizza parlor, police said.

The story goes on to say that at first the robber - 48-year-old James Mitchell - demanded that the 18-year-old victim hand over an artificial rose he'd just bought. When he refused, Mitchell demanded money. The kid only had a $10 bill, but the robber only wanted $4, so he waited while the young man got change at a nearby pizza place.

The police spokesman said he had no idea why Mitchell wanted only $4. It seems clear to me: He wanted to buy a rose of his own.

An 18-year-old man who has a purpose for a rose so important he won't give it to a man with a knife. A man who wants a rose so desperately that he'll rob someone at knifepoint to get it - but only a rose, so his alternative is to steal $4. For whom did the young man buy the rose? What was the robber's intention once he had his own rose?

This isn't Weird News; this is the scenario for a wonderful short story. Someone should write it. Maybe I should, if you don't beat me to it. Or maybe even if you do.

Desperately seeking quiet

"The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things."

Figures. I found an online text of Thoreau's Walden because I wanted to find the context in which this famous quotation lies. It turns out all I needed to do was read as far as five pages into the book. It's the ninth paragraph. I suppose it's a famous quote in part because anyone who gives the book the old college try is going to find it within about five minutes. Did I mention I never have read Walden despite having a degree in American literature and owning copies of the book for, oh, 30 years?

Every now and then I think of that quote and think it might be me. But every now and then I think of that quote and think I'm enjoying life too much to be quietly desperate about it. Every now and then I get a little bit tired of listening to the sound of my tears. Every now and then I get a little bit nervous that the best of all the years have gone by.

But then, of course, I say to myself, "Turn around, bright eyes!"

This Thoreau guy had a lot to say, but even though I have a link to some handy HDT wisdom right there on the right column somewhere, I have only dabbled here and there in his writings. I have spent more time exploring the work of Nathan Fillion than Henry David Thoreau. That puts me back in the company of the mass of men, no doubt.

But, ya know, I don't believe in masses of men. It's when you, mentally or physically, organize men and women into masses that you begin to lose sight of the individual. It's easier to deny freedom to someone who is part of a mass - masses are all the same so it doesn't matter if individual liberty is squashed. It's easy to say women shouldn't be allowed to do this or that; it's very hard to look a specific woman in the eye and say, "You can't do that." At least the first time. At least until you start thinking of her as part of a mass of women and not an individual with a name and a soul. Even huge, faceless bureaucracies are comprised of many individuals - many of them, most of them, no doubt living lives of quiet desperation.

In the peace of morning, away from the overstimulation, it's not so hard to separate the individual from the masses. I imagine that's why Thoreau decided to walk away from the overstimulation. I know that's why I feel the urge most every day to walk away. And if I couldn't find the peace of morning to stay somewhat centered for another day, I just might walk away. The best days are when I wake up and am overwhelmed by the complex infinity of souls I encounter, rather than collect those souls into finite boxes. Interestingly enough, in the quiet, the quiet desperation floats gently away.

She's pointing at me

Every so often I emerge from the haze and say, "This isn't the way I planned to live my life," down on my knees while the robbers circle around us. I reach back, trying not to be noticed, so that I can take action, but then one of them cocks a gun in my face and says, "You know what the definition of a hero is? It's someone who gets other people killed. You can look it up later." So I back down.

Then I hear Johnny Cash singing Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down," and so I run after the robbers screaming, "Take me with you!" But it's too late. And on top of that, they shoot me.

Then I wake up, thankfully, and I get up and go to work. But there, I realize, I work on my knees while the robbers circle us ...

Glutton for punishment

I don't know why I'm going back to this. I was bummed out at the wage-slave job all day Tuesday after reading Claire Wolfe's quote from a Kate Wilhelm novel ... because I recognized myself.

"... Sanity was accumulating debt and paying it off and accumulating more ... Sanity was pretending things would get better tomorrow, next week, next year. Sanity was pretending there was no beast inside roaring and searing, tormented and tormenting ...

"It was accepting rush-hour traffic and too many horns and poisoned food and too many wars and deaths and killings and armed people shooting other armed people and unarmed people alike and terrorists and more terrorists to fight the terrorists and politicians lying and lying and the war machine rolling forever onward and hunger in the shadow of wealth and too many children and too many people and too many fat religious leaders telling everyone else what their duty was and making everyone hate feeling too fat or too thin or too blond or too dark or too tall or too short or too old or too young and ... pretending it meant the good life and good health and mental well-being and teaching guilt and shame to those who faltered ..."

Great reading, but discouraging because so true. So why come back to it? Because after reading it, I sat down and scrawled 10 things I could do to start clawing my way out of this "Sanity," nine of them short-term and one longer term. It took me about two minutes to write down the list, because all of these ideas had been pressing against my brain busting to come out. The thing that bummed me out was then I had to report for duty as a wage-slave, postponing any active work on anything on the list.

I'm on my way out the door to do the same now, but I'm not as discouraged as I was yesterday. Now I have The List.