Dust and Posts

I’d like to say I’ve been hard at work this last week, excusing my absence from this page. But ‘hard at work” and “Buddy Cushman” in the same sentence are pretty much a – what do you call it? – oh yeah, oxymoron. At least these days. Suffice it to say I have been periodically engaged in a particular pursuit some of the time occasionally. That’s more like it.

The irregular pursuit in question is the gathering of material for what I hope and plan to be my seventh book. There are already the fictions, ‘Rosy” and ‘Astoria’, and the poetry – ‘Revelations’, ‘Backyard’, ‘Elms’, and ‘Automatic’. All self-published via CreateSpace and Kindle, all money-losers and therefore connectly rarely read. Also thrilling to be held in my hands. Books I wrote and published. And now the proposed number seven, the title of which will be ‘Between the Rain’. If those three words together sound familiar look no further than the title of the last post here on “Couch Surfing at 70”. I came down to the basement and wrote that post spontaneously after looking at the sky from the dark backyard a couple of weeks ago, and it has lingered with me. Not that I felt that particular post itself was any great shakes, but that it remained in my mind – the writing of it, words born of experience entirely unique to and for and with me. As in, ain’t no one else could of written that post. And that post got a book seven going.

I have considered, on various occasions the last couple of years, pulling together a number of the Blog posts I’ve written in both blogs I’ve owned, the current “Couch” and the previous “Art”, which dates back as far as 2013. Some other writings as well, call it ‘my own stuff’, from an eclectic mix of Morning Pages, timed writing sessions, a lengthy Word doc titled ‘My Diet’, and entries from a journal I kept daily for nearly a year.  And then I wrote the ‘Rain’ piece and posted it and the act of writing and the reality of all those words began speaking to me: “Go ahead and do it, Buddy, grab a whole bunch of writings and put them in a book and spend a couple hundred dollars to publish it, most of which will not be coming back, because you can and probably you should. Like you’re always saying to yourself and anyone else willing to listen, the mantra of ‘make stuff and share it’.”

Which is where I have been this last week, well, there and sharing my time with the wife and walks in the rare Portland fall sunshine and the World Series and multiple episodes of “Riverdale” and starting and finishing a wonderful book titled “So Long, See You Tomorrow”, and Ursula Le Guinn’s take on the Tao, and within all that down here knocking the dust off a lot of words and copying and paste-ing and thinking of what could be a cover and giving credit on the credit page for things not yet begun.

Add all of it up and it leads to not even thinking about writing a new post – what with dancing with so many from the past – and then this morning thinking “Ooops”, and then this afternoon the words “I’d like to say I’ve been hard at work” floated on into the old noggin’, and now here are 572 words explaining why.