A Bunch Of Something.

The deep blue stall out; life and what to make of it; books are always the best; "music is my savior," wine, TV, films.

The savvy reader will notice I put “TV, films” at the end of that subhead. And yes, it’s been that kind of week, which felt like a month. (The even savvier readers might say, “I’m a little worried wine came so late in that listing.”)

Sometimes you can’t blame the “I got nothing” vibe on the weather, which is inconvenient now because it was so easy recently with the atmospheric rivers and all (although as I write this on Friday morning it’s raining, actually and metaphorically, after days of very acceptable spring weather that lovingly featured nary a drop).

So there’s a malaise going on here. Couldn’t call it unexpected, as Elvis Costello once wrote. I’ve been dealing with a family situation; it happens, everyone runs into something hard but fixable. But it takes a toll. My partner KB suggested — via phone from dealing with her own family stuff across the country — that if I had a normal job I would just take a few days off. True, but having been a columnist/critic for so many years and writing three or more times a week, there’s an ingrained rhythm that’s hard to get out of.

This is all part of the process of writing, of course, and it’s magnified for me because there’s been almost nothing going on creatively with the “other” writing. At least nothing good. I went searching the other night for my copy of Mason Currey’s “Daily Rituals: How Artists Work” (which has the cleverly hard to find subtitle: “Writers, composers, painters, choreographers, playwrights, sculptors, filmmakers, poets, philosophers and scientists on how they create.” I’ve written about this book before because it’s a different kind of “process” book in that examines the daily rituals of incredibly talented people that I can boil down to this: they take lots of walks, lots of naps, drink lots of coffee and lots of alcohol. What’s most engaging (and reassuring somehow) is how little work actually gets done each day and how the vast majority of featured creators seems to put an extraordinary effort into ways in which to avoid work.

Turns out I left it in Portland.

But that’s fine, I have a lot of books I’ve been leaning on, which I’ll share in short order.

Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash