A running start . . .

Saturday. Sofa. Coffee.

I have skipped posting a few Saturdays lately. I still have the drafts. They start out "Saturday. Sofa. Coffee." As a writer it is usually helpful to have that first sentence already written, something to get one started, like a sprinter's starting blocks. But the only blocks I have experienced on recent Saturdays would be of the writer's variety.

Oh I have written a few lines, sometimes a few paragraphs. But as I rest on the sofa sipping my coffee in the quiet stillness of Saturday mornings the words and thoughts just don't seem to work.

What you have just read is me attempting to build a ramp, a steep slope, to get me started today, sort of like finding a steep place to start a sledding run, something I did in a literal way a few times this week. But that's another story.

Take last Saturday for instance. (Back to writing, not sledding or sprinting) I started a pleasant enough post in the morning, but had to quit to do a few necessary Saturday kind of maintenance activities. Before I had returned to the key board (laptop not musical instrument) I had spent a few hours riveted to the news channels learning of the now infamous shooting in Arizona.

Suddenly the pleasant musings of my earlier efforts seemed stupid. They were quickly deleted, from the laptop and from my psyche, as a weird feeling of what can best be described as shame came over me. How could I have been writing such inane palp as this tragedy was unfolding?

That is the struggle. We live multiple lives as we move along the timeline. There is our own life, that life that is lived completely within each of us, that life that is guided by our conversations with our own self. Think I am crazy? Well of course I am ("we're all bozos on this bus", one of my favorite comforting phrases courtesy of Firesign Theater, 1971), but that doesn't mean I can't occasionally have a lucid thought. The trick is picking out the wheat from the chaff.

Saturday mornings I enjoy this part of life the most. Do I want to get up now? What kind of coffee will I make? Which of my favorite mugs will I use? What do I want to do today? Sometimes the conversation with myself is actually verbal, even audible, though no one else is around, I hope.

After the stresses of the week, I generally try to avoid stressful thoughts on Saturday mornings. So when I open the laptop on the sofa on Saturdays, the words tend to reflect that easy-going conversation.

But there's another life that each of us live. An "It's a Wonderful Life" kind of life; a life within a small community of family, friends, and others that we share daily existence with face to face, or at least email, text, facebook or tweet to email, text, facebook or tweet. (I am sure there are more social networks by the time I finish this post, but you get the idea).

And there's another life that this generation is realizing more than any previously. We each live in a larger world, a much larger world, the whole world, which sometimes seems to have been placed in our hands before we are ready. A world that we know more and more about as horrific events occur in Birmingham, or Arizona, or Tunisia, or Australia (about as far away as one can get from me on this globe). And we know about them immediately. Sometimes quicker than we learn of events in the life of a friend or family member across town.

It's not really three different lives. I know that. But it sure gets complicated. It's all part of the same life. Like politics, religion, culture, war and peace, and fried foods, its all part of one life.

Sorry about this post.

But maybe it'll be enough to get me going next time.

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