Running for Your Life: Ant Heel

On a run in June 2016 in Italy, I had a thought. Here’s what I wrote in my journal:

We newspaper editors are the worker ants of journalism.

No matter what, we gotta do it. Whatever is required.

Backwards, frontwards with diligence and skill, working without rest, and, yes, we constantly attempt more, take on tasks beyond expectations, big, bigger, biggest, with experience that should tell us that it will not be noticed by the queen when the task is finished.

Alas, the human doesn’t set aside hope of being noticed. If only we could learn from the example of the worker ant, that there is dignity in the simple task itself.  Work to be done. That is enough.

Next level: That we newspaper editors in our worker ant selves serve the queen and her court but we fail to notice that the queen is not as she was before.

She is corrupt and perhaps mad.

What was once a benevolent system is now one that serves no such purpose.

We are building a Frankenstein monster but we, the worker ants, cannot stop in our task.

Think deadlines. Worker ants work as if a deadline is always in place. Do it right and hurry. If it doesn’t work that way, try another. Whatever you do, don’t stop.

Otherwise, you’ll be noticed. And for worker ants that can never end well.

Next: Running for Your Life: Cool, It’s October

Running for Your Life: Paper Mate

In June 1983, I began the practice of writing in a journal.

That’s more than 35 years ago.

Granted we’re not talking about daily journal-writing for 35 years, or 23,000 days, give or take.

But I don’t let any of it go. Once written in a journal (ringed-paper variety these days for ease of flat-surface writing) the treasure is kept on a shelf in my home studio.

In that workspace I’m literally surrounded by pages and pages of cursive writing.

As I mine material for a new memoir I find myself re-reading journals.

Dipping into the past I see the younger me, desire for connection, observations from the surprising to the mundane.

Themes emerge, passions, some lost, some still budding.

I’m in a subway car as I write this. (I transcribe – and edit corrections – of my journal-writing in this space). I use a carefully chosen black ink craftsman pen.

Each letter is owned, idiosyncratically mine.

At times a face in the crowd attracts my attention and I pause with a few strokes on paper, capture something about that person, a mood, with the simple goal of showing one defining  feature.

The sketch, with accompanying script, makes a distinguishing mark on that brief occasion, both about the subject and me.

Max Ferber, a fictional character in Sebald’s “The Emigrants,” says, “Time is nothing but the disquiet of the soul.”

Maybe that is what I’ve done in this half-lifetime of journal-writing. Put in words, in this most modest way, an account of the disquiet of the soul.

Next: Running for Your Life: Ant Heel

Running for Your Life: Sebald -- Content and Structure

There is so much to love about W.G. Sebald’s “The Emigrants.”

The roots: It celebrates two places, the home and the new home. If you predominantly identify yourself as an emigrant then you’ve not let go of your homeland.

The term emigrant implies that you close your eyes and feel the spirit of your native place.

The trunk: Immigrant, on the other hand, empowers the new home. While some practices are obviously primarily class-related, the phenomenon of an immigrant as more of a stranger in the land they entered and are in (“im”) than the one they exited (“em”), and more likely to be standing in line at a Western Union, sending money home to a family in need, seems true to me.

Emigration is a deep well that we’re sinking our rope-line bucket into, replete with treasures of memory. It traffics in emotions.

Immigration, an economic particle, what is subject to legislative policy.

What is the difference between science and art.

The crown: As an emigrant myself, I’m thinking of sitting down with my father, who has never left home.

What are the stories he would tell me, the reporter-writer returning home, what would culminate in being there with him, composing a Sebald-like Ambros Adelwarth-like story?

What he sees and feels about his life as he’s lived it, let the story unfold slowly and without judgment.

Next: Running for Your Life: Paper Mate

Running for Your Life: News, Not Snooze

How often do you encounter news that surprises you with its bona fide quality of serving non-elites – something about a newsmaker, say, who has a genuine radical vision not beholden to a plantation-style master?

Try this. A piece by rogue reporter (ie, old school muckraker, undeterred by establishment interests) Matt Taibbi fits the bill. About none other than Bernie Sanders.

https://rol.st/2QPFvG7

Wanna know what’s truly in the public interest?

Read the link above. And think about why it is this populist idea doesn’t get more exposure.

Think the Washington Post, owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, will do a deep-dive probe about this underreported story?

That I would like to see.

Next: Running for Your Life: Paper Mate

Running for Your Life: Pursuing Happiness

A journal is a good place to start. “Journaling,” by name.

Recently, I received a note from a special friend. She wrote to acknowledge a kindness, and then told me that by following my example of daily “journaling” she has been “sustained in many ways.”

“Making you an important role model for me,” she wrote in closing.

I had a moment of clarity with my journal the other day. Largely because of the sense of my life as a thinker and a writer.

What I’ve learned in thirty-five years of journal writing, some bits leading to essays and blog posts and short stories and plays and novels and memoir junks and prose-poems, is, ahem, humility.

I write, choose words in an honest attempt to connect within a world that I’m knowingly a minuscule part; hold fast to what I know, have learned, expect nothing.

You are born alone, and you die alone.

We have love, lost love, love reborn. Family, bloodlines are only the most consistently reliable source of love.

Why, when the well is dry or poisoned or worse, we, as people, suffer.

What is the cost of a broken heart? Neglect that leads to disease and injury, costly care, early death.

Pursue happiness, and never stop. Only through love. There is nothing else.

Next: Running for Your Life: DIY Training