About the Writer
Let me start with my immediate surroundings. I work at a plain antique library desk with a dark mahogany finish. I paid $15 for it, a good price even then. The desktop is strewn with books, papers, and a tangle of wires. Why are there still so many wires? I have two laptops side by side, my beloved Powerbook and a Dell something or other with Windows and Linux. On the floor behind the desk is an old PC—a castoff from REI corporate offices—which makes a fine Linux server for mp3s, backup, and web development. The Linux and web stuff is a hobby of the same order as, say, crossword puzzles. It keeps the mind active but has no long-range utility. For that reason I have begun studying Spanish. It also keeps the mind active, and it won’t be obsolete in ten years.
My office contains two bookshelves I made. The blue one, behind me, has a lighted work surface at chest height, usually too cluttered to be useful. Across the top shelf stand the neologisms and initialisms of our times: Unix, Linux, php, html, css, Javascript, mysql. It’s depressing to even contemplate, like a sick addiction. Just below the work surface are my writing books: dictionaries, style guides, grammars, usage manuals. These I love unconditionally. Looking at them now my eye falls naturally on The System of English Grammar, by Long and Long. Five hundred pages on building English sentences. I found it years ago in a used book store near the University of Chicago, and it literally taught me how to write. A few books down is another old favorite, A Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage, by Evans and Evans, from Book City on Hollywood Blvd. This book taught me to distrust the rules and simply listen. The Evanses’ first question is, “Does it make sense?” Sometimes that’s all they need to know. They have Shakespeare on their side.
The green bookshelf, to my right, contains two rows of poetry and a growing collection of Spanish, some of which is itself poetry. I keep the poetry close; it’s the collective R & D of writing. The Spanish shelf also contains nearly a dozen graphic novels that recently arrived from Spain. Titles like Buscavidas, Alack Sinner, Mort Cinder—I love to read them in bed, by flashlight. It’s like learning to read all over again. A guitar leans against the bookshelf, an Epiphone archtop, circa 1935, that looks like it’s been through hell. I plunk on it once in a while, without much effect.
At this moment, one of our poodles, Andy, lies in front of the bookshelf dreaming, making little puffy barking sounds—proof, if any is needed, that animals have memories, which means they have complex inner lives, which means we should think twice about how we treat them.
Scattered about the floor are three, four, five pairs of running shoes, two of which are my current runners and the rest everyday walkers. All I have anymore are running shoes, they’ve crowded out the loafers. Soon I will lace up the trail shoes and go out with Andy and our other poodle, GoGo. I’ve been running with GoGo for ten years. A lot of miles we’ve covered together. Today I think we will head up to Cougar Mountain.
I will not take you outside this room, into our home, though I will say that my wife Wendy’s office is right next door. It is much neater than my office, everything in its place. She’s an illustrator and in her work much freer and looser than I could ever hope to be. And yet everything is in its place, ship shape. Well, I suppose there’s a lesson in creativity right there.