mad in pursuit

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I’m looking at old online journal entries — transferring them from html files to plain text. I haven’t decided yet whether this is useful or obsessive-compulsive. In either case, I’m apparently one of those people who find themselves endlessly fascinating.

I’m working on 2002 at the moment, a year when no one was reading my postings except for my parents and members of a few writing circles I belonged to. I’m surprised at how good they are — long chatty “letters home,” sometimes in response to a writing prompt (“courage,” “what I know for sure”). I had gotten far enough into the public journalling game to know that I had to be entertaining. But it was long before “blogging,” where the format is short and snappy, preferably with a picture. So I generated a treasure trove of opinions, observations and learning histories (2002 was when I was learning how to edit video).

But it’s weird to see what I don’t write about. For example, 2002 was the year Jim finally drank his way to end-stage liver disease and came close to dying, then made a courageous and miraculous recovery. I didn’t write a word about it. Maybe I was honoring his privacy. Maybe it didn’t feel like my story. I was somewhere on the stage of Jim’s grand opera, but he was singing solo. I was doing, like, the comic relief — you know, how in the middle of a Shakespearean tragedy, the fool walks on stage with a few smart-ass lines for the king.

I guess everyone is different in how they deal with the crap going on in their lives. Some people wear their hearts on their sleeve. Others prefer their game face.

Here’s a metaphor. When I think the dam is breaking, I know it’s too late to do anything about the dam. So, I rush downstream and start sandbagging to protect all my cultivated fields. I should expound upon this, but I think I’ll stop while I’m ahead.

Pat and I are both listening to Writing Down The Bones by Natalie Goldberg. In it, she quotes one of Jack Kerouac’s rules for writing: “Accept loss forever.” Pat balked at this, so I had to stop and think.

Seems like there are two ways of “accepting loss.” (1) Say goodbye, close the book, move on. Forget about it, no regrets. But that feels like a hole. By a certain age, your soul may be a Swiss cheese — too many people, too many experiences carved away forever.

But (2), if you accept loss like you would accept a gift, it becomes a part of you. Instead of being a pain, an obsession, a hole in your soul, it becomes part of your eco-system, part of the earth you stand on. The rich compost for your garden.

I made a short list of losses: my dad, smooth young skin, long hair, scuba diving, friendships that have faded, a night under the stars with Jim in the Himalayas, etc. Under definition (1), this could make me very sad — material for a good sobbing cry. But I prefer (2). All the things I’ll never do again, all the people I’ll never see — they aren’t lost. They are part of who I am.

(The trick, of course, is making your garden grow — taking those gifts and using them creatively, for the good of yourself and other.)

Hangover. Two glasses of wine with Sue W last night, followed by a tequila-drenched yakathon at Sheila’s house with Maria, Carol, and Deb. An unusual Monday night.

Unusual for me to get out on my own any night these days, which is why (I’m sayin’) I threw sobriety to the wind. And it was dark already at 5 P.M. What is it about the city lights in my old neighborhood that brings back floods of memories? Maybe that contributed… some reverberation of youth.

Sue and I are getting reacquainted after working together in the early 80s for Pat Drum Aerobics. She proofread my current book project so we talked a little about that, but then meandered into my recent favorite topic of religion and the various traditions that come to bear on our lives. What matters, what doesn’t.

The mood changed from urban bistro to suburban house-beautiful when I got to Sheila’s. The five of us there have been friends for a decade or two and feel free to express whatever is on our mind as loudly and as emotionally as we want. A different kind of therapy. Remember that time you were mad at me back in 2002????  No talk of God.

In either mode, it was fun to get out with the girls. Whether the conversation is silly or deep, emotional or intellectual, the mutual appreciation is real. The laughter is real.

Worth the morning headache.

While I’ve been caught in the endless loop of revising Tribe of the Breakaway Beads, I’ve gotten out of the habit of churning out a chunk of writing every day. I think my “golden age” was back when my dad was alive (2004) and I knew I had to get something posted every morning before 10, so that my mom could print it out for him to read. I wrote a lot of rants about politics (now archived in a separate “Greed and Arrogance” blog) — what difference did that make, except to exercise my rage? The rest of it was not necessarily well-written, but formed the backbone for lots of future writing. I’m always digging back into my own archives of memories and observations for source material.

Now that the Breakaway Beads project is done except for the final technical stuff, I’m realizing how out of practice I am at writing fast, short entertainments.

So, I’m… procrastinating. No, no, I mean, getting organized. On the one hand, I don’t have an idea in my head!!! But on the other hand, I have an (obsolete) stack of 3×5 “idea cards” and paper notebooks stuffed with my daily morning “meditations” (mind maps, reading notes, and other outpourings of raw words).

Here’s where I start obsessing about personal workflow, which you have to be a complete nerd to care about. Or do you? If you have an employer, how to get the work done is largely dictated by the company’s business systems. But as more people are freelancers or independent contractors these days, you’re on your own in figuring out how to get things done. People who do creative work are especially on their own — and how many of us get lost in the jungle of our own processes?

Anyway, just as I was thinking of myself as the nerdiest loner ever, I (re)discovered Merlin Mann at 43 Folders, which led me to the Mac Power Users podcasts — a platoon of creative people obsessing over their personal workflows and how to make technology work for them. My people! Here’s what Merlin says:

I now know a lot about workflows. Nerdy, nerdy workflows.

I can tell you a few things that almost always work, I can tell you a handful of things that almost never work, and—best or worst of all—I can tell you thousands of things that might work. Sometimes. Maybe. Kinda. For some people. For now.

And, at the risk of gay-marrying my arrogance to my hypocrisy, I can tell you that I also know enough about the unholy diarrhea of potential options for Theoretical Productivity to share two big patterns:

1. Getting your workflow right matters.
2. Getting your workflow right to the exclusion of the actual work is a fool’s game.

But. Managing to get the most useful and most elegant and least fiddly mix of 1 and 2 right is super-hard. Especially for nerds. Especially for me.

So, I’m investigating apps, wikis and other aids to get the jumble of ideas from the womb into the incubator, on to the nursery, then… off to college.

And, look, I actually wrote something public this morning.