This section will be filled with exciting information and sparkling memorabilia as time passes. To begin, I had a flash in the recliner early the other morning….and, well, I’m coming up on age 72 and couch surfing has been lots of my previous life. I continue to have many glittering ideas about recording the ongoing journey and other things, this may in fact be a lazy man’s memoir. I mean, any day I get to wake up – just that – just waking up again and crawling out of bed – it becomes a day for big rejoicing.
Over time this Blog – ‘Couch Surfing at 70’ – has morphed from a typical topical kind of post – how I feel about what’s going on right now – to a way more ethereal, stream-of-conscious storytelling – and not always by me. There’s a channeling thing going on. Trust me, read the last forty of fifty posts and see for yourself.
As a matter of fact there is today (9/2020) a new book in the works, filled with these varied stories, which mostly I’m editing and composing a lengthy ‘Forward” for the author, my friend Milky Dent. Hopefully you will keep an eye out for its publication, which a wild guess from me will happen late this year or early 2021.
Some of my personal info includes being married to Susan, the most wonderful woman (see Blog post #1), two sons, one here in Portland, OR and one recently arrived in Columbia, Missouri setting out on a brand new filmmaker’s journey. I have a step-daughter here in Portland too. I gave up boozing long ago (hello Ronald Reagan first term), and later on in life got the big-time writing and periodic oil and acrylic painting things going. You can learn/see about the artistic activities on this page:
Let’s see – I walk a lot, often with the wife, and sometimes day-dreamily alone. My favorite musical group is The Beach Boys and I am more into them now (9/20) than ever before in this life of mine. Milky too.
Oh, I have published these books: Fiction – ‘Ring Around the Rosy’, ‘Astoria Strange’; Non-Fiction – ‘Get in the Car’; Poetry – ‘Minor Revelations’, Dictation From the Backyard’, ‘There Were Elms’, ‘The Automatic Poems; Zine – ‘I Remember My Life.
I’ll be helping Milky publish ‘The Files of Milky Dent’ soon, and further down the road look for my collection of wild sci-fi/supernatural stories (‘Collected Strays’) and an honest-to-goodness detective book (‘The DeLoreal Beach Mysteries’). That will be a dream-come-true.
So – Big thanks for checking ‘Couch Surfing’ out.
Oh – there’s this too.
I Need an Office
(Verbatim transcription from 11/22/18 Morning Pages, unless in parentheses)
I need an office. Maybe this is it, the old Cushman (kitchen) table and my stuffed up computer and papers all over the ping pong table. It’s not romantic, but it probably has to do. Anyway, I need an office in which to keep and add research and pin-up inspirational and grounding quotes and sayings and mantras and directives, where they whistle out for me to take a look every time I show up for work again.
Which is a key point, my office is about creativity and so most, way most of the time and effort expended in it which is to say every time I come down here, is a sharp focus on what’s important, what’s necessary, what will matter most. I probably need a pin-up on the wall that asks – “Have you fallen into a rabbit hole?” Yeah, I need that. Because those hours of succumbing to the enticement of distraction and evasion and the easier softer way generally waylay – if not sink – the intention to do what is most important.
So I need an office in which I will come with intention, devotion, and duty to keep my own promises, to see with a clear eye, to will myself – and it’s not too difficult – into some temporary state of amazement and stimulation which – for those minutes even hours – takes me either completely outside myself or maybe all the way into myself, and I (fall into) the vivid and continuous dream, as John Gardner says makes for all fictional writing that truly works, engages and holds with the act of storytelling, and I’m thinking the story can be entirely made up – fiction – or entirely squeezed out of my life, currently blogging.
And for this, it is plain to see, I need not only an office – cause likely I already have one since I could easily find myself living where I had no such call it bountiful space like the basement here, yes, I need an office and I need a commitment, call it a burning desire a need an entirely unavoidable personal imperative to do the work. Because the work, I know, will be honest and true and it will matter, what Thoreau said about the ability to change the day – make it better – and that feels like duty – my duty – these days when some darkness never feels very far away (over the planet).
Like Harry Nilsson’s “Me and My Arrow” I need an office. Me and my office.