Looking for a Rufous

Life

This is my blog – I am a writer living in the USA. This is more of a literary attempt at finding a common thread about living, based on my journalling, from new stories that I’m working on, and from my dusty manuscripts written years ago. Hopefully, this blog will provide food for thought about your life. In my blog posts you will see a fair number of quotations – I love quotations.

“Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention to arrive safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming: ‘Wow, what a ride’.”

In my English classes in college I read a lot, in fact copious amounts of writing, different genres and styles, from Beowulf to Kurt Vonnegut, who at the time (70’s) had practically a cult following – at least my book-bound friends thought he was a very good read.

I remember that certain styles earned certain novels the label “episodic”, the reason being there was no coherent thread to the story line, just vignettes that weren’t always directly related to each other or in sequence. You may ask, how does that apply to this literary effort, which also has vignettes (I like to call them snapshots)? Strictly speaking, it’s not “fiction” because I’ve drawn from life in talking to people and writing about our conversations and about reflections from my own life. I think of it more thematic than episodic – themes such as avocations, occupational stagnation, fear of change, running, photography, and bridges are interlaced throughout. Hopefully you will be able to relate to some of it.

What Was the Question?

I thought early on that I should set the tone for this literary effort by posing questions to put it all in a frame of reference, I guess to make sure it would be a worthwhile reading experience. Questions like:

Do famous and successful people always love their work?

Would you rather be happy or successful if you had the choice?

Why are some “darn lucky” or have the Midas touch, sailing through life, while others struggle their whole lives just to survive?

Why do many or most people hate Mondays and love Fridays?

OK, you get the idea. I guess using this approach would make it a thematic piece with specific threads of thought throughout and this might guarantee that you got “the message”. However, I have to mention that one very famous writer who has written about the art of writing suggests that you NOT include themes in your books. So, I will leave it up to the reader to glean whatever tidbits about life that they can from reading this work. In my opinion and most importantly, people are people, and they are what make this story.

As promised or forewarned (barely started and here is the second quote), try this excellent quote from Nelson Demille’s book Up Country (the bolding in the quote is mine):

“The journey home is never a direct route – it is in fact always circuitous and somewhere along the way we discover that the journey is more significant than the destination and that the people we meet along the way will be the traveling companions of our memories forever.”

City Slickers

I’m a movie buff so you may see little sketches or metaphors drawn from movies. This one is more or less word for word from “City Slickers”. The scene is with Jack Palance (Curly) and Billy Crystal (Mitch) talking – they’re in the middle of a cattle drive and somehow got into a philosophical discussion about life.

Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is?
Mitch: No, what?
Curly: (He holds up one finger.) This
Mitch: Your finger?
Curly: Just one thing.
Mitch: What’s the one thing?
Curly: That’s what you’ve got to figure out.

The Time is Now

I originally titled this as a chapter, “Fourteen Minutes”, with the idea that I would pose the question, what would you do if you suddenly discovered that you only had 14 minutes to live? The number 14 isn’t important, it could have been 23 minutes, or 3 days, or a month. I had read a book by Daniel Wolk titled The Time is Now. In his book, Wolk presents thought provoking ideas about life, time, relationships, and the Cicada complex (more on that later).

Because I live in the Pacific Northwest (or “Northwet”) – it’s raining as I write this, waiting to catch the MAX (light rail) into Portland – I thought of titling this part, “Just Do It”, but then I realized that I might upset the Nike corporate folks because I borrowed their tag line.
In racing to finish this chapter with 6 minutes left, I need to finish on a note of substance and that is, “don’t be like the Cicada living for 4 years underground only to move up through layers of dirt, hatch, and die within 3 or 4 months”.