Beauty conquers fear

Each life is a gift from a higher power; may we accept this gift with gratitude and recognize the same miracle in others. May our gifts to others add only good and beautiful and love to their lives —

or a smile: May we greet hate and foolishness with humor and grace, because the ugly things in life wither in the face of a smile or a laugh.

I have been greeting alarmist headlines on the TV with an exaggerated “OH MY GAWD,” laughing at the fear mongers. Red may eventually be driven crazy by this, but it’s my effort to remind myself that life and hope and a good sense of humor still exist, still endure, sure as light follows dark and peace comes in the morning.

Resolve to add joy, beauty, humor, peace, good … Encourage the best of us, not the fearful cowering.

Meet the fear with hope, meet it with a stubborn intention to smooth the path for the next traveler along the road, a stubborn refusal to be ruffled by the potholes and cracks in the pavement.

Enough of what ails us! See what beauty surrounds us, see how much there is to love in this life that is over too soon, like a roller coaster ride returns to the starting point and we have to get out of the car and head back to the line.

Oh my gawd, what a wonderful world when we turn from fear and embrace the miracles.

Etymology and hitting the fan

My dad did not use “those” words, as a rule, and so it was with some embarrassment that he told the joke.

I had purchased a 45 rpm record at a 10% cut-out sale called “When It Hit the Fan” (because I liked the label, I think – I was a kid) and I didn’t understand the context. So he told me the joke.

A man takes a room on the second floor of a rowdy saloon, and during the night he had an urge for going but didn’t want to walk downstairs through the crowded bar to the outhouse. He saw a hole in the floor and thought, “Ah! I’ll use this handy portal.”

Not long afterward he noticed it had become very quiet downstairs. Curious, he went down and the place had cleared out. “What happened?” he said, and the bartender poked his head up from behind the bar with a harried look on his face.

“Where were you,” he asked, “when the $#!+ hit the fan?”

I realized this morning my dad had passed along a valuable piece of history, the origin of a common vulgar phrase, and so I pass it forward to you to preserve this important knowledge.

All heaven and earth in a book

Today I release the first three paperback editions of the Roger Mifflin Collection: The Haunted Bookshop by Christopher Morley, Men in War by Andreas Latzko, and Trivia by Logan Pearsall Smith, three forgotten classics that deserve to be remembered.

The Haunted Bookshop is, for lack of a better genre, a mostly-cozy mystery about a book that keeps disappearing and reappearing, a young man who meets a young woman, and the most amazing bookshop owner in modern-ish literature, Roger Mifflin.

Mifflin is an endless source of great books. In a previous novel, Mifflin had hitched a wagon full of books to a trusty horse and roamed the countryside introducing the people he met to their perfect book. In this sequel, he has set up a storefront in Brooklyn, where he continues the life mission he set out in his first book:

“When you sell a man a book, you don’t sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue – you sell him a whole new life. Love and friendship and humor and ships at sea by night – there’s all heaven and earth in a book, a real book I mean. Jiminy! If I were the baker or the butcher or the broom hustler, people would run to the gate when I came by – just waiting for my stuff. And here I go with everlasting salvation – yes, ma’am, salvation for their little, stunted minds – and it’s hard to make ’em see it. That’s what makes it worth while – I’m doing something that nobody else from Nazareth, Maine, to Walla Walla, Washington, has ever thought of. It’s a new field, but by the bones of Whitman it’s worth while. That’s what this country needs – more books!”

When our young man first enters the shop, he finds a note tacked to a bulletin board:

If your mind needs phosphorus, try “Trivia,” by Logan Pearsall Smith.
If your mind needs a whiff of strong air, blue and cleansing, from hilltops and primrose valleys, try “The Story of My Heart,” by Richard Jefferies.
If your mind needs a tonic of iron and wine, and a thorough rough-and-tumbling, try Samuel Butler’s “Notebooks” or “The Man Who Was Thursday,” by Chesterton.
If you need “all manner of Irish,” and a relapse into irresponsible freakishness, try “The Demi-Gods,” by James Stephens. It is a better book than one deserves or expects.
It’s a good thing to turn your mind upside down now and then, like an hour-glass, to let the particles run the other way.
One who loves the English tongue can have a lot of fun with a Latin dictionary.
ROGER MIFFLIN.

Men in War cover

That note became the catalyst for The Roger Mifflin Collection, new editions of the books that the little red-haired man recommends during the course of the adventure:

  1. The Haunted Bookshop, of course, because it’s the origin story.
  2. Men in War, a book about the horrors of combat “so damned true that the government suppressed it.”
  3. Trivia, a delightful little book of aphorisms that, truth be told, inspired four of the last five books under my name.

The next round, coming within a month or so:

  1. The Man Who Was Thursday (see above)
  2. The Demi-Gods (see above)
  3. War Poems by Siegfried Sassoon, which Mifflin pairs with Latzko in his epic rant against the Great War:

“Sometimes I thought Truth had vanished from the earth,” he cried bitterly. “Like everything else, it was rationed by the governments. I taught myself to disbelieve half of what I read in the papers. I saw the world clawing itself to shreds in blind rage. I saw hardly any one brave enough to face the brutalizing absurdity as it really was, and describe it … Perhaps half a dozen of them have told the truth. Have you read Sassoon? Or Latzko’s Men in War, which was so damned true that the government suppressed it? Humph! Putting Truth on rations!”

I released the first three books in hardcover and was met with a great ho-hum. I’m hoping by releasing them to a wider market will find some of these great (yes, great) books a new audience, not just because Roger says they’re worth your while, but because I’ve taken his advice and seen for myself, and I say so, too.

Waking more than usual

TEN HOURS of sleep in the last 24, including 8.5 hours straight before waking at 5 a.m. Who is this stiff and aching guy plopped in the blue chair waiting for coffee? Wait, I need caffeine? Really?

So: Poisons are cleared from my brain, and what am I thinking? What should I do with a clear brain? “Clear away the clutter in this room!” Come on, that’s what I think normally. So, not much different, just clearer?

… (I write some thoughts to myself about books and audiobooks, and I write a poem. You saw the poem yesterday if you were here.) …

It takes a few minutes for the coffee to brew, and then, in a last flurry of gurgling, the pot is full of hot, dark brown water. Just a minute, I’ll be right back.

(…)

There. I haven’t even had a sip yet, but the world seems better already.

(sips)

I am. I think that’s the biggest difference after a full night of sleep: I have a greater consciousness of being here. The fog has lifted more than usual, and certainly more than it had yesterday afternoon, when I drove home feeling drowsy and surrendered to the bed shortly after I came home, let the dog out and in, and took off my shoes. That accounts for the other 90 minutes of the above-mentioned 10 hours.

Resolved: Maybe I need to go to bed by 9 every night.

Wait.

“Resolved: Maybe”? Do you hear yourself?

You are resolved or you are not. There is no maybe.

Speak

Speak!
You know what you want to say.
You know what needs to be said.
You know what has been building
in your heart and must come out
So speak.

Speak!
You don’t know what you want to say,
You don’t know what needs to be said,
You just know it’s been building
in your heart and must come out
So speak.

Speak!
It needs to be said,
It wants to be said,
And the world will change
when you say it,
And only then.

Page 70

I’m scribbling on Page 55 of the current journal, and I just took a minute to number the upcoming pages through 70, even though under normal circumstances it may take a week or so before I need Page 70.

I wonder what I’ll be thinking when I get to Page 70? I wonder what I’ll write? Of course, the future person who finds this journal can just turn there now and see, and in a couple of weeks I’ll be able to page back and see what it was that I wrote when I got there — but for today, it’s the future.

The main reason I number the pages in advance is I’ve found I forget to do so, and I’ll be writing along and see that I don’t know what page I’m on — so lost in the scribbling that I didn’t notice I was writing on an unnumbered page.

The numbers don’t matter until I need to go back and find something and make a note so it’s easy to find again: “Oh, that little piece about page numbers is on Page 55.”

Notice I said “is” on Page 55. I almost wrote “was,” but then I realized that it “is” on Page 55 and always will be, because that’s where I put it.

Now I’m really starting to wonder what I’ll be writing when I hit 70.

Connecting without an intermediary

The old ways were about waiting to be found, waiting to be discovered, all of us diamonds in the rough looking for our big break.

The new ways are about climbing on a platform and eliminating the “middle man,” going directly into the act, whether someone tells us we’re ready or not, and maybe we’re rougher and less polished than if some intermediary had discovered and polished us up, or maybe we’re more real for the lack of polish: Maybe we’re more appealing warts and all, just as long as there aren’t so many warts that it’s distracting.

If I say, “Do you know what I mean?” and you don’t, then there’s still work to do — maybe. Maybe you don’t get it but the people I want to reach will. The only sure way to find out is to keep working and keep trying to make a connection until the connection is made — you and me across the void, discovering we’re not alone after all.