The Joy of Writing

I'm going to call it a 'contact high'.

I started writing every day in high school. I was an English major. Honors, even. I know. It’s incredible, because I am completely ignorant about Oxford commas and keeping tenses in sync and even the most minor of grammar issues.

I was an English major because I was good with words, bad with numbers and I didn’t like homework. I also liked journalism. For my high school paper, I penned a whimsical exposé on the rural community north of the suburb I lived in called Renner where I spent an inordinate amount of ink on the drinking fellows from the Elks Lodge who played dominoes all day.

My favorite assignment was covering one of the alternative country singers of the era, Jerry Jeff Walker. For the uninitiated, he is the author of Mr. Bojangles, and Mr. Bojangles always brought a tear to my eye when he sang about his old dog, but I liked him for L.A. Freeway, Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother and the London Homesick Blues. I spoke to him next to the bar while he was leaning on a cigarette machine awaiting his turn on stage and, apparently, I was lucky he was coherent.

He looked exactly like he does on the album cover below.

I wrote in journals feverishly throughout college and then more casually as the decades wore on. I loved writing in longhand because there was something about it that was different than typing on a keyboard. It was similar to my flirtation with the guitar. Somehow the connection between your neural endings or pathways and the action of your appendages differs when you are strumming a guitar, or wielding the object dubbed to be mightier than the sword, than it is flitting about on machinery (typewriter) or technology (computer).

I can’t really describe the difference, I just know it.

Wendell Berry, Kentucky environmentalist, poet, author and farmer, wrote his books in longhand and then his wife transcribed them. If you are not familiar with Wendell Berry, I highly recommend checking him out.

For me, journals were a great place to do a neural dump.

Just as this column has become my daily neural dump but y’all are lucky because I am leaving out all the steamy and mundane parts. (Which is the reason I’ve had to torch all of my journals. No one needs to see or read that.)

The ignition for my writing - more recently - other than being sheltered in place for months while the world erupts in staccato, newsworthy, algorithmic events, was the need and desire to be a voice raging against the machine.

But a strange thing has happened.

Maybe its because many of you are feeling the stressors of a less full life. Less community involvement. Fewer and smaller social gatherings.

What has happened is that I have renewed, or breathed a tiny bit of life, into many old, new and random connections that have been there but have been quiescent for a long time, or just not as active, and it is. . . . I’m not sure there is really a word for it. Another culture probably has a word for it.

It’s elating.

Maybe it’s like a ‘contact high’.

It’s buoying. Refreshing. Sorry, I can’t think of a sesquipedalian word to impress you.

Let me just say, it certainly makes writing about whatever and casting it into the universe worth my while. It’s a double bonus. I get to clear my mind for 24 hours and - periodically, very often actually - I get the contact high from someone reaching out.

So, thank you for renewing my faith in humanity.

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No one will believe this but I signed up for a Substack newsletter that is dedicated to teaching rank novices the beauty to be found in opera. It’s called Opera Daily by Michele Serro. An excerpt below:

While this is one of the most popular arias of all time, this one always makes my lists. Luciano Pavarotti, one of the greatest tenors that ever lived is singing "Che gelida manina", a tenor aria from the first act of Puccini's opera, La bohème. 

The aria is sung by Rodolfo to Mimì when they first meet. In the aria, Rodolfo shares with Mimi who he is and what he does, and how her eyes have stolen his dreams!

I will tell you in two words who I am, what I do, and how I live. May I? 

Who am I? I am a poet. 

What do I do? I write. 

And how do I live? 

I live.

So, rather than reserving my finds for just my friends and family, I created Opera Daily—a free daily newsletter for people who are curious about opera but don’t know where to start.

Also, Zev Shalev’s Narativ on Podbean with Noel Casler, Lincoln’s Bible and Greg Olear called “Secrets of the Apprentice I & II” is not to be missed if you think you might be interested in what really happened backstage on The Apprentice, and just how do all those shady Russian figures like Russian nesting dolls fit together within the insufferable boor’s universe.