Sometimes, it's just an exhausting, ultimately depressing, and a desperate challenge to write.
When you are approaching 72. When a once exciting journalism career, and a couple years of book- writing, copy editing, and freelance writing wither in a market eroded by A.I., a flood of soulless content writing, and media pursuits increasingly driven by mindless ideologies.
It's tempting to just throw up your hands and declare, why try? Who cares? Who wants to read this? Or who will pay for it?
Ah, then you realize. Before the jobs, the paychecks, the mortgages, car payments, and pursuit of things . . . there had been that urge for art.
Or, at least, there was that thrill, that yearning for the occasional taste of the words, the molecules of truth revealed, of beauty described -- if they only amounted to a single leaf on a flower, one of thousands in a meadow, sprouting beneath a forest of redwoods, sentinels nourished by the mists and waves from endless oceans stretching beyond the horizons.
Ernest Hemingway's tortured life ended in suicidal despair, but not before it celebrated flashes of literary brilliance immortalized by his quest for that "one true or perfect sentence."
He did that well.
I'll settle for just one true perfect word. Then another.
Let's see how this goes.
