I’ve been thinking about this writing business. Like anyone would give a shit, I announced I wasn’t going to write my stories any more. Most people have hobbies, things they do when they have nothing else to do. At this very moment, I have nothing to do. I am talking right now.

I ride my motorcycle if the weather is nice and I feel the urge. I know I don’t do it nearly enough and boy is it easy.  I am sure there are plenty of riders, who welcome the opportunity to ride, whenever they’ve got some time. Don’t get me wrong, I love to ride, but have my own relationship with it.

Within the past year, I have introduced fishing into my regimen of what the fuck? Now, I am pretty good at riding the bike, but a couple of hours is plenty. So far, fishing and I have had a very strained relationship. I have snapped my lines more times than I can count. 

Let me tell you a little about me and fishing, which I happen to think is incredibly funny. I am my own comedy fishing movie. It is fully funded by me. I am the star and the audience and we have been having a good time. I could easily be pissed off with my complete incompetence. I always get my gear together, checking I have everything. I get to where I am going, big smile on my face, each time I have arrived at my destination.

There are two kinds of shore fishing, dunking and whipping and they are exactly how they sound. For dunking, you have a good sized rod, with a weight on the end, plus one or several hooks on a different line, below the weight. The objective is to throw the line as far as you can, allowing the weight to settle on the bottom and the hook(s) dangle above, with delicious bait for the fish. It could be shrimp or squid or a small fish you have just caught. Now, that is all you do. Invariably, I have gotten stuck, unable to reel the line back in and goodbye weight and hooks.

Let’s move on to whipping, which is also pretty much the way it sounds. You use a smaller rod and reel. At the end of the line, you have bobbing bubble, holding the line at the surface. Below that is a line with lures or other small gizmos to get the unsuspecting fish to swallow whatever it is, with a hook to ensnare this finny victim. I can’t whip to save my ass. I throw it and reel it in and throw it out and reel it in and on and on and nothing.

I know that eventually, I will actually fish, as opposed to posing like I know what the fuck I am doing. I swear I don’t mind any of it and I am on the verge of having both my dunker and my whipper set up by my friend, Foster, who has somehow become the consummate fisherman, while I have been drowning in my ineptitude.

You know, if I had an editor, everything you have just read would have been deleted. The stone cold truth is nothing I do brings me more joy than doing this right now. Listen, I am no talent when it comes to writing and I never wanted to be. As stupid as it sounds, I am doing this for us. I am writing about our lives and not doing any better than you could, but for most of you, you do other stuff to fill out your life dance card. I write.

When I sincerely said I was done doing this thing, I swear I meant it and I want you to know why, not that you asked or give a shit. Like I just wrote, who the fuck else is going to tell you this stuff? For the past couple of weeks, I have been looking at my early writing and I think I was trying to be a writer. It is liberating not to give a shit about stuff like that any more.

You want to read my writing, that’s great. If you think it sucks, that fine, too. To me, honest sharing beats the shit out of acceptance.

It’s funny that the reasons why I stopped writing are the reasons why I want to keep at it. They are Love and the World. I thought falling in love would really preclude me from writing honestly, because some stuff is just my business and not yours. In looking at the state of the world we live in, I find it so incredibly depressing that I didn’t want to find myself in some bleak, negative diatribe about how fucked up virtually everything is.

I am going to get to the state of things in a second, but it is the love thing I want to talk with you about. As many of you know, I am an old guy. I began thinking about my first love and now what I know will be my last. I don’t care who you are and how smart and talented you think you are, it is simply impossible to define that word and feel you nailed it. Pure and simple, it is magic, a kind of magic that defies language and imagery. Far more talented people than myself have spent their lives, banging the creative anvil for answers. I’m gonna come back to it in a minute.

The road map for the future of the world is our history. Today, it seems as if most everything has gone off the rails, as if things have gotten worse than ever. I don’t think it is true. We have gotten better at what we have always been good at. 

I think Darwin kind of fucked things up with the notion of evolution. He was right on the money with every life form, from amoeba to ape. While humans have been physically evolving, now on the cover of Vogue, our minds, for lack of a better word, have hit a wall. It has to do with our feelings, the world of Freud and Jung, trying to understand what it is to be human. Why we do the things we do and why have we always done them?

Slavery has always been cool. Hitler and Trump were not the first megalomaniacs to prey on people’s anger and then turn against them by further empowering the powerful. Differences in skin color, religion, tribe, geography and even body size have been excuses to punish. Ego driven orgasms focused on intellectual prowess have created monsters and AI is at the top of today’s list. We have taken Darwin’s ladder and turned it into a hammer, leaving us alone on fractured stilts that can’t possibly support us. This miracle of a planet became a slave to our whims a long time ago. Power and excess drugged our innocence, making us non-addicts its tools.

Maybe, in a few million years we will have evolved beyond the state of our species. Until then, here we are. Here I am. This is where Love comes back into this story. It enables us to fly with the angels. It is not a weapon against the horrors we have always brought on ourselves. It is what makes us special. Funny, what felt like a conflict to me, Love and the World, is a secret passageway, finding light in the darkness. When our heart shines, we can see heaven.

I love writing, not because I am any good at it, because I love it. 

Thank you for taking the time to share my love.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1292459/episodes/14364548