First

 

The problem, for me, with social media, is that it has so few characters available. I was recently reading a first person, The Marriage Dividend by
Laurie Stone in the Paris Review where Ms. Stone leads from one topic to the next and back again.

From a spontaneous orgy at age 19 to being 78 and meeting a friend on the streets of New York. I fell in love all over again.

I read my very first first person in the New Yorker while on a camping trip with my highly dysfunctional wife and her new age conservative friends. They disapproved of my choice of magazine and everything else about me as it turned out. I was 40 and going to art school to gain some formal credentials in academia in order to teach and get a career away from the very conservative transportation industry where I had taken refuge away from being a poorly paid contract addictions therapist. My transitional needs job. I like to drive and dispatch.

It was hard to get jobs as I was too everything: smart and creative, experienced and a threat to the current management. My straightforward honesty and sense of ethics was also an issue in the shady business world.

So I sat there in the woods reading my first first person and feel in love. I didn’t know it but I had found a writing that matched my painting and my music. Unedited, the first thought is the best thought, unrehearsed, painting from start to finish in 45 minutes. Self accepting that no amount of fussing and going over it was going to make me a better writer, painter, musician in the ensuing 10 minutes. Acceptance of human imperfection as perfection. The sound of the calloused fingers on the strings.

In art history class the prof said Emily Carr’s mark making symbolized a higher power or some such nonsense. When I pointed out she was cleaning the extra paint off the ferrule of her brush all kinds of academic hell broke loose. I encouraged the prof to make some art and then talk about it. So she did.

One publishers rejection said this isn’t a book it’s a blog. So I self publish, thank you Amazon and Google.