The choice and the good luck

Almost twenty years ago I made a choice that has contributed to this good feeling "of a kind of ending" I have these days. I also got lucky.

The choice was to stop drinking. Two folks get credit for this: the doctor who got my attention about health matters; the VA counselor who convinced me to spend six months in a VA domiciliary before I returned to the world.

The good fortune was meeting and connecting with Harriet. The hardest part of quitting drinking is not quitting drinking but changing your social life. Harriet brought along her own social life, a built in substitute for the one I had to leave. It made the entire period of transition one hell of a lot easier than it would have been otherwise. Maybe I wouldn't even have made it without this alternative. Harriet provided a new world and invited me in.

The trilogy of books I mentioned earlier could not have happened without the choice and the good luck. No wonder I feel blessed. I've been given twenty years I wouldn't have had otherwise. And I'm still going strong, if ready to reinvent myself soon once again.

One thing I look forward to is having more time to be a consumer of art. Writing takes  a lot of time and demands a lot of focus. Consequently I've always been a half-ass consumer of art: never time to read enough, see enough films, hear enough music, go to enough lectures, and so on. My work always, always took precedence over the work of other people. And even when I went somewhere as a consumer, often my mind was preoccupied with whatever I was working on. My characters have never let me rest. In fact, in the past half century, I doubt if in a social situation I've ever been "all there." A part of me has always been obsessing about my story, my characters, my themes. I am hoping this will come to an end now, as I trade inside-out writing for outside-in writing.

(In the past, my outside-in writing, which I've done my share of, was to pay the rent. A part of me was always doing the other. I was as distracted at work as in social situations.)

I do have a small fear that I can't make the transition. Writing at this level may be a disease, not something I can exchange for something else. Maybe this is what happened to the old farts I see mumbling to themselves on the bus mall. They're really poets who couldn't make the transition except to stop writing it down. But they still have to babble the poetry, or the dialogue of the characters, or the brooding about a plot point. This would be a hell of a fix.

Right now I'm feeling I can do this. But I've been wrong before, so we'll see what happens. Tick tock.