Scratchpad Blues

I just saw something odd out of the corner of my eye. I'm home alone, relaxing on the couch after a long day. Skimming through some blogs, texting my mom about nothing, listening to Bob Dylan again. Something just floated across my peripheral vision. GAHHH-- Well, okay, that's a spider. Floating in mid-air. A tan little spindly thing about the size of a twenty-cent coin. She must have cast her line down from the radiator pipes criss-crossing the ceiling and has come down, assuming any reasonable human will be fast asleep at this hour, to have a look around and catch a midnight snack. Now she's just hovering there suspended against gravity, her silk completely invisible, stretching her front legs languidly, searching through the void. She holds still, then stretches and somersaults, then freezes motionless again. I'm not afraid of her. She has no designs on hurting me, her goal is the fruit flies that I can't seem to rid the kitchen of. She's probab

There are two kinds of pubs in the theater district. One is the kind with the ten-foot-tall illuminated shamrock hanging from the eaves and a fake Irish name blinking three stories high in carnival lights. These tend to be deserted after about 9 pm because their clientele needs to get up early to see the Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, Central Park, Chinatown and the 9/11 memorial before lunch. Then there’s the smaller, darker, grumpier kind, where waiters and bartenders and busboys shuffle wearily in at the end of their shifts to share the space with the writers and actors and stagehands who still work in the neighborhood. I’m usually there around 11:30, alone at the bar with a book and a beer, trying to remember who I am. I’m reading a book on my Kindle and the screen’s artificial glow feels intrusive and embarrassing, out of place in the grungy noir. And then Peter Dinklage slides up to the bar with his laptop. It isn’t really Peter Dinklage – too tall – b

So I'm fascinated with typewriters at the moment. A classic case of medium overshadowing message, but I'm convinced that a typewriter would make me a better writer. Just me and the page and the ink smudges, no Spotify or Twitter to distract me, a forced slowing down of time. A return to the era when writing meant something. I would instantly become Truman Capote, Ernest Hemingway, Zelda Fitzgerald. My editor would come around in a pinstripe suit and newsboy cap, gnawing on a cigar, and the authenticity would be transcendent. Unfortunately, typewriters are both expensive and impractical, so I did what any good twentysomething would do and found a typewriter simulation app for my computer. It's called Winston. It shows you a graphic of a typewriter with animated paper (you can set "pristine", "sepia" or "crumpled") and makes old-fashioned clickety-clack sounds as you type. The carriage return dings its little bell. Hitting back-space pr

You always have to be careful around writers, my friend laughs during a presentation of his latest novel. They steal everything you say, especially from other writers. The moment you start telling a story – “Oh man, guys, you’ll never believe what happened to me the other day-“ they turn to you with this little gleam in their eye, l’occhio del ladro, the eyes of a thief. “Oh?” they say. “And just what did happen to you the other day?” “Uh – nothing, I swear!” Bad writers borrow, great writers steal. I’m pretty sure I’ve both appropriated and misquoted that line from Stravinsky. Who took it from T.S. Eliot, who I would call the original source if he hadn’t probably lifted it from someone else anyway. I’m not a writer, but I want to be one someday. This blog is my gym and sandbox: the current objective is simply to get ideas on the page and hit “publish”, exposure therapy for the terminally self-critical. I deliberately make my terrible first drafts see the light of day be