Write More!

Yeah, logging in at number four on my resurrected resolutions is

Write! Not just this journal. All the short stories I've outlined. All the essays. Start on the novels and non-fiction books.

Every day I do other things instead of writing. Except the blog and my private journals and scribbling. I fret over my dad and his medicine, entertainment, shopping. I exercise while reading The Science Times in The New York Times like I did yesterday. (It comes out on Tuesday, but I'm usually a day behind.) There is an article about how medical tests are making us sick. I ride the bike and read this and think about incorporating hospital and doctor stuff into a novel. What I don't do is write the novel.

No, I do things like try to make the TxTag system yield up a solution to the fact that I got a tag for a car, never installed it and then sold the car. I do things like balancing a monthly statement for this account or that. Like figuring out how to get a logon for our business from the Feds so I can maybe figure out how to use their (free!) service to create a W-2. I do accounting for bank deposits and discover once again that whatever FFP writes on the bottom line of the deposit, whether the checks add up to that or not, is what gets credited. How they make this OK in the banking system is anyone's guess, isn't it? Does this mean I am trying to balance things to the penny (because OK, it's only fifty cents), but the bank just stuffs it in a slush entry?

No, I don't write my treatise on traveling light (in actual travel and through this life). Instead, I ponder what to do with the junk in front of my computer monitor: a business card for a California film maker specializing in surf films, a business card for a gal running a gift shop on Congress, a scrap of paper with info about getting my dad's phone bill lowered, a scrap of paper with my friend's temporary address while getting cancer treatment, a scrap of paper with a phone number I already have programmed into my phone in two different entries, a notepad with notes about a documentary film I thought of making before I decided I wasn't going to be a film maker.

Sure, I know how I spend my time. And I know that I do write. Or type. But only, it seems, in the form of a journal. Well, it worked for Anais Nin. But that was, you know, different. I read thein The New York Times Magazine the other day about Rupert Pole dying last year . He was married to Anais. Only she was married to someone else at the same time. Which was two marriages more than I knew she had. (Neither to Henry Miller.) Anyway, suffice to say, Anais could make a writing gig of her own life. I'm going to need something more. My little family, shown in today's picture, has a good deal less drama.