Why? It’s the question they always ask. Why do you write, paint, compose music, knit, garden, do woodworking, sew? Why let some thing occupy a significant portion of your life, or take it over entirely? But that’s the wrong question. The right question is, “Why not?” If you can’t come up with a good answer for that question, then a good answer to “Why?” is “Because I want to.” The best answer, though, is “Because I can’t not.” That is the egg from which masterpieces hatch.
Three slices of cheese and 18 crackers. (Too bad that phrase doesn’t scan any better than that else it would make a great first line for the chorus of a country song.) Two slices of Sargento muenster cheese and a slice of Sargento sharp cheddar cheese and 18 Keebler Town House sea salt flavor Flatbread Crisp crackers. The cheese is cut into equal thirds lengthwise and the thirds cut into equal haves. A predictable taste – one sixth of a slice of cheese laid atop one cracker. A known taste. No surprises. My wallpaper program shows a photograph of white water rapids down a narrow canyon with steep, perpendicular walls. That is how my life is right now. Focus narrowed onto doing what is next, putting one foot in front of the other, getting through the tricky bit that lies just ahead. Sufficient unto the day . . .
I watch the DVD of a film made before TVs, DVDs, or me. The mediocre script is loosely based on a mediocre novel by a man who blew his brains out 50 years ago. The performance of two actors transfixes me: The leading man, born 2 centuries ago and 54 years dead, and his leading lady who is 86 years old now. I cannot help but wonder, ‘What would Bogey think to see me lying on the sofa in the flickering darkness of my living room watching him and Baby fall in love?’I put on my glasses and discover a fingerprint on the world.
Wol's River of Stones 