A Scribbled Secret Notebook

A Throwback to Another Era

My best writing comes from the morning hours: five am to noon. The afternoons are usually enjoyed, either walking on the beach with my honey, or doing errands. The beach is now my main thing. The mountains once were (before sciatica and arthritis took me out of the kinds of hikes I love). We are blessed to have both here. Blessed... hmmm, sounds pretentious but it is the best word I could come up with. Blessed it is then.

This morning I put Adriane on hold to let my juice go somewhere else... guiding light when I write is the advice on writing found in God Never Blinks by Regina Brett: #4. Take a risk. What would you write if you had six months to live? Say it.


Or in the words of the dumbsaint of the mind, Jack Kerouac: Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for your own joy.


These are the times I pound out nonsensical sense on my Remington Noiseless antique. I do that because I love the noiselessness of its muted thump thump of the keys that demand some energy that the pulse the percussion section makes to the music of my mind. I like to hear the mechanical ticking of a wind-up watch too... these things make me a throwback to another era... a friend gave Bonnie a bunch of old watches and stuff in a box. She likes to take them apart and use the gears and cogs for her assemblages. She saw one she liked and wondered whether it worked... "we can get a battery... eh?"

I popped the stem and wound it... putting it to her ear... she exclaimed... "the battery still works!"

I am only ten years her senior but I can see that I belong to a seemingly simpler era... but an era fraught with contradictions and confusions as great as the present day. Time doesn't change for us but the perceptions of time does. The big picture can be found in subatomic wavicals as well as in the amazing array of galaxies that spin around mindless of our minute and ordinary concerns that demand we are important in the cosmic scheme of things... but ever creating and ignoring us, as I ignore, the community of neurons and synapses that compose this tripe.

Question: Would Melville find the typewriter a clattering  intrusion on his perfect mastery of a Thoreau pencil?

I am writing Adriane to a click click of keys that take very little energy. I am spoiled by grammar and spell check... I can look at the monitor screen and scan over the pages without without crossing out changes and can effortlessly edit and edit and edit forever if I please.

I wonder: Did the scribes of yore...  Whitman and Wordsworth did they pencil before they quilled? Did Dante have to edit his own work or did he send it off to someone else with a perfect hand and eye for detail? It goes on and on way back to the aboriginal cave paintings where a bison is scribed over with an extinct tiger with time and time again with a giant sloth or woman's vagina...

I was just wondering.

Reading now: A Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh.

I read a paragraph or two while I sit on the can... if you know what I mean. He uses dialect, pigeon English and accents as deftly as Mark Twain. I love how the story goes back and forth from inside the minds of each character. I'm only about one third of the way through it. I haven't read anything else by him but I will.