Robert Devereaux

Writers examine things.  They observe.  Infinitely curious creatures, these writers.

So now that the website’s two weeks old, the blog too, allow me to muse about this process, what it means to me, and perhaps to you.

At the moment, the typical venue is my futon couch upstairs.  It’s on a landing lit my a natural spectrum lamp, lots of open space, the front door to this two-story, 1984-vintage house down below to my right, the master bedroom on my left, and a bathroom with a now-darkened skylight just ahead of me.  I’m typing on a Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop computer, soon to be upgraded from 512 Mb to an addition gigabyte of RAM.  It rests on a cherrywood lap desk from Levenger’s.

I usually wake a half-hour prior to the 4:45 a.m. striking of our Tibetan bowl alarm clock from Zen & Now, thinking idle thoughts, among which is what I might blog about that morning.  I get up, grind coffee beans and set the grounds to filtering, take a slower, savor the coffee on my futon couch (Vicki has meanwhile had her shower and retires to the finished basement for her early morning activities), then get to the Internet.

I have my favorite set of sites to drop in on (don’t we all?) and then the blogging begins.

What prompts one or another topic?  In a way, you do.

But you’re a phantom to me, as really I am to you.  Because people talk to one another in real time in real space, we like to trick ourselves into thinking we can know someone, at least a little, from words confided on the printed page or on a blog site.  It’s a comforting illusion.

In the process of meeting Vicki, my second and wondrous final wife, I placed personals ads in newspapers but also used the net to meet women, to strike up a conversation, and see where it led.  This was circa 1993.  Sometimes it led me to interesting places, a few times traveling to Lincoln, Nebraska, to Hawaii, and elsewhere.  What was odd was that I had had extensive online communication with those I met, got to "know" their minds as they mine.

Because of that groundwork, I knew–and this was so–that there would be a connection from the start, when we shared physical space.  It remained to be seen if we would explore physical intimacies as well.  Sometimes yes, sometimes no.  For the intangibles became quickly tangible, and the totalities of our being might well not mesh.

So I like that this is a journal of sorts, that these words go out into the blogosphere, and that a connection of sorts is established between some kind of me and some kind of you.  You may read these words on the day of their posting, or months or years later.  But sooner or later, assuming this blog does not eventually die on the vine, a small community of readers will coalesce about it, comments will increase, those who resonate with these mind-wavelets will stick around for more.

I like to think the Internet is inspiring a new literacy.   But maybe not.

In any case, for me, this is an experiment.  Out of this will, I have no doubt, emerge a new voice.  Voice dictates what is spoken and how it’s expressed.  I continue reading the Kerouac book (his journals from his mid-twenties), struck by voice there, his living the life that will yield fame, struggling now for publication of his first novel, nearly 400,000 words long, not knowing the future as we, his godlike readers, do.  Neat kinship.

For what is this desire to be heard, to move people with one’s words?

And what prompts a subject to seize upon the writer for the exceedingly long period of time that gestates a novel?

And where is the motivation to write such a thing?

But these are musings for another day.  It’s time to set out the garbage and prep for my nine-to-fiver!

My wife and I are coming on to three years taking T’ai Chi with Michael and Sara Stenson, who themselves have done T’ai Chi for something like three decades.  Cheng Man-ch’ing brought the simplified form to the United States in the seventies, and Michael and Sara learned from his students.

But this posting is really about motivation and its lack.  Vicki and I take a class every Monday evening.  It’s essential to practice the form between classes.  I did when we first began.  I don’t now.

Yet I enjoy attending class.  A great bunch of people there, most of them in their forties and up.  I suppose my form has improved over the years, but it’s a physical meditation, a series of movements that appears simple but requires intense concentration on matters of balance, relaxation, precise placement of the knees, fluidity of the hips, and so much more.

I resist.

I also resist going to the health club we belong to.  I don’t go.  I’ve stopped going.

I know it’s the right thing to do.  I love walking in the mornings, feeding the dogs along the way, Oscar, Molly, Bad Dog, and Also Ran (our names for them).  But treadmills and weight machines, no matter how unlike high school gym they try to make the surroundings, turn me right the hell off.

Motivation too fuels the best writing.

I’m currently highly motivated to blog.  Perhaps that too will flag, perhaps not.  Lately, writing hasn’t gone as smoothly as earlier in my career.  In part, that’s because of the sea change this country has undergone in the last six years (we’ll get into all of that in upcoming posts).  Suddenly, I want my writing to matter more.  Shifts in the political climate affect what one writes about, the subjects you choose or that choose you.

Blogs I see as a way of priming the pump, finding a new strength of voice, exploring what really matters to me, both in small things and large.

The choices before a writer are truly infinite, what tales to tell, within what conflicts to embroil one’s characters.  But those choices must deeply engage the passions of the writer, else why bother?

Ah, the workday beckons…

That’s a wrap!