There are other views more beautiful and the natural assumption is that the writing by such windows would also be more beautiful. I tend to agree, but I’ve hopefully written some eloquent pieces with this limited view, driven by internal inspiration not drawn from any particular sight or sound that surrounds me. Handheld devices have allowed me to update this site while roaming and writing bits of sentences at the park, at the playground, in hotel rooms overlooking the Capitol Dome and on the Vegas Strip, in the living room while sipping coffee and on the front porch swing in mid-summer when the hanging baskets are bursting red and the slotted wood floorboards and the white-painted porch fence feels about as American as it can be.

But I have written in some beautiful places. I have been inspired by views. On my honeymoon, I lay on the beach in Kuaiu and wrote in a fresh journal about the signifance of reading Exodus and its story about the people of the world being begot and begot and begot as the continual waves deposited new shells on the beach and pulled sand away from the shore. The little green bedside bible never made its way to the beach with me, though, and on the opening page, I lament that decision, then go on to describe the scene. I still have the notebook on an upper shelf in my closet. Here’s an excerpt of how I saw the world at 24:

The sun sneaks behind a cloud and I see a little boy – maybe not that little, 11 – throwing a handful of sand. The sand is much finer here that anywhere in the contiguous states. Milleniums of water have shaped and softened each grain. It feels like powder. From the tops of the beach chair, you need only move your hand a few inches and you can feel the knakhi colored powder freckled with white grains. I can see the cabana boys at the end of the beach starting a fire at the butt of a long golf cart. I can’t see what they are burning. The smoke is rising up through the palm trees and drifitng toward a row of multi-leveled houses built into a hillside that looks over 50 feet of trees right beneath their patios, then water. The water on Kalipaki Beach in Kuai is brown and carries a lot of sand. On the flight in, we saw pockets of bright blue water. Those same pockets formed jagged edges where the dark water around it tried to intrude. The smoke is beginning to take on the sweet smell of fish or pork.Two men now sit at a table, legs crossed, ballcaps on, the golf cart moved back into the shade of the palms. A helicopter probably on a tour chops overhead in the 10-minutes-till-9-a.m. sky and draws our attention upward. A cloud-shaped heart catches Betsy’s eye. Maybe the atmosphere is picking up the vibe from the honeymooners and the couples wanting to regain their love hoping the exotic location will help.

Before we were married, my wife and I lived in a small Cape Cod-style house off the historic town square in Liberty, Mo. That first summer I met her she kept the windows propped open with rulers that were a tip off to her employment as a second grade teacher. On the second floor on the north side of the house there was a bedroom overlooking a strange neighborhood garden. Missouri Street was full of well-groomed houses and some older ones that had been poorly maintained.

Amid the houses, though, there was a large open field about 50 yards by 50 yards that had been terraced and planeted with flowers. In the soft grown you could find everything from yucas and snap dragons, to tulips and Chrysanthemums. They were so healthy they had to be continually maintained though I never saw such a person. The gardener was probably a neighbor – a retiree – who came and worked over the ground with a trellis during the day while we were away.

I wrote by the window overlooking all this on occasion in some long forgotten spiral notebook and sometimes on the font porch that had been eaten through by termites. I proposed to my wife in that house on a Sunday night in a bedroom that had been made over into a dining room. Before I moved in, she’d taken down the bedroom doors off the hinges in that room so that it became an open space you could walk into directly from the foyer or the adjoining kitchen. Pushed up against the wall, there was a stereo that I’d listen to in the shower before heading to my job at a small newpaper in town. I drew about as much inspiration from the warm shower and Jackson Browne’s The Pretender as I did the view, but it was a different sort of inspiration. I guess you could call it energy.

That house had no basement to write in, but the first floor was essentially built into a hillside. The view from the bathroom window and the living room on the northside was a chainlink fence holding back a dirt wall. There was a desk and chair upstairs, which made it the perfect place to write.

My job at the time involved driving to the neighboring county to cover commission meetings and downtown to cover city hall. I was paid little for the work that involved writing 5-10 stories a week, editing article from freelancers, taking photos and laying out the entire newspaper. I essentially was operating my own independent newspaper with the exception of ad sales. I came to see that little house as my refuge. On Thursday afternoons, when the commission meetings got out early, I’d pull my car up behind the house near its ancient garage, and spend the afternoon reading or writing. I didn’t do as much writing as I wanted, though, given that my job was pretty tiresome and I’d spent most of the day writing.

But I felt removed from it all there, sort of like a writer’s cabin deep in the woods. We celebrated New Year’s and the new millenium with a small dinner _ just the two of us – and the doors locked tight. We didn’t know what to expect, if the Y2K threat was real and suddenly our bank accounts would be blanked (not a big issue because we were flat broke) or the missle silos would suddenly let the missiles in their bellies free. We were just off the hostoric square, not far from a small restaraunt, a greasy spoon, a bookstore and our bank. We had almost everything we needed in walking distance and it was a poster on a jewelry store window that convinced me to start looking for diamonds.

Once I sat on the front porch and read a short story by Orwell that I found in one of Betsy’s old English canons from college. She’d walked up the street with a friend that afternoon to the city’s annual autumn festival. Later that year we hung Christmas lights on the low-lying eaves. We could look out on the crisp December snow from windows that had settled into the walls at odd angles.

The next two houses that we lived in and actually owned were not conducive to writing at all. The first was a 1950s ranch house with a tiled basement that appeared as though it hadn’t been updated since the house was built. The tiles were white and what I would call bowling-alley green/blue with black flecks throughout and they layered the room where the computer terminal was set up. There were no windows to write by at all down there – just a musty old shower stall and a half-bar set up. In that house, I actually wrote very little. I chose to write on my lunch hour at work, either secretly writing and saving Word docs on my desktop or writing on a notebook or a handful of paper I grabbed before heading out the door at noon.

The second was a California split level that was actually in a pretty neighborhood, but I was working two jobs at the time and wrote predominantly away from the house. I wrote part of one of my favorite pieces, though, while sitting at the kitchen table. It was about my daughter talking herself to sleep just before Christmas with the Nutcracker Suite playing in the background. I wrote about the visions she must have of being a ballet dancer or whatever she wanted to be for that matter and the changes our family had gone through in that house. We’d welcomed my son into the family a few months before I wrote those words and described how we moved about the halls and was less reliant on supproting himself on various objects.

And, now it’s almost Christmas again and the season’s first snow is layering the ground. Maybe I’ll write about it tomorrow. If I could see it from here, I bet it would be a beautifully written piece.

I write by a window well in the basement, probably the least artistically encouraging spot in the house. Boxes and old clothes and toys are spread on the floor in disarry and the disorganization, if I let it can play mental games with me. It’s exactly the type of disorder I hope to keep out of my writing.

Downstairs, the light is always the same – muted, neither cloudy nor sunny – and so it feels a bit disconnected from the world. All I need, though, is a little space cleared so that I can put some thought into my work and find the words. Today, my work involves a historical piece. Tomorrow, an urban trend I’ve come to learn a great deal about. And, still more work on Wednesday.

I”m dressed the part and in this Seattle-like frame of mind, fueled by caffeine and a little creativity, I’m going to push through a day perfect for sleeping, for lying in bed and reading, which is how I ended up here in the first place.

I announce these shortcomings with a bit of satisfaction because I know them only to be partly true and because, on some days, to be referred to as a writer even if it’s one that is enigmatic is a strong enough connection for me. The great ones are generally thought to be a bit off kilter (Kerouac, Sexton, Joyce, etc.) like train cars sitting in the pulverized railroad ground, just off the tracks.

I do not have my future mapped out as most people do and a list of hopes and dreams to come true (not written out, anyway.) I am hopeful of everything, it seems, including that my friends and neighbors are able to light as many gas grills and mow as many lawns as their suburban hearts desire. I, on the other hand, live in the moment … and other times couldn’t be further from it. When people are speaking to me, I am sometimes lost envisioning stories, creating backgrounds for the people I pass on the street and imagining what their hopes and dreams might be if I could step into their bodies.

Eccentricity has its advantages and I’ve cultivated mine to include family, dependability, comraderie, love, passion, level-headedness, compassion, warmth, realism, godliness, and pets. I write to make sense of the world and to capture it in bits and pieces before my life disappears. There is more importance in the little moments than any other and it’s important to pay attention to them even if finding the words to write about them consumes you shortly after the moment passes.

In person, I am not the analyzer I tend to be in my journal and my blog posts. That happens subliminally as my mind sorts of what matters for itself. Before the end to my own story comes, I hope to live life to its fullest, and to do it with pen in hand. One day, I’ll learn to edit out the internal editor that can cause be to so erratic and then, with even more focus, all these goals I feel so passionately about and yet am not familiar can finally be crossed off from my invisible to-do list.

When you’re writing on deadline, as I was, you have no choice but to perform no matter what the circumstances. The fever kept me strangely focused. I could feel it behind my eyes, locked on the screen and working the buttons while I layed on my back – flat in bed on a thick comforter, under the whips of the ceiling fan, across from a bay of windows that let’s in soft light and opens up onto an intersection where the neighborhood boys gather in the summertime and cuss as loduly as they see fit until an adult comes out to check the mail or walk the driveway and they hush their voices.

I wrote this magazine piece from memory. Rather than taking copious notes, I conducted the interview with a tape recorder running and merely jotted down the most important comments that I knew I’d use later. Usually, if I use a tape recorder, it’s for back up and so I can veg out on writing down every word of what my subject was saying in my nasty handwriting. But what’s even worse than going back through pages and pages of handwriting you can’t read is trying to roll through a tape-recorded interview that is 90 minutes long. All that fast-forwarding and rewinding, double-tracking, listening to the same snippets over and over trying to decipher through the background noise what a person is actually saying.

This time, I let the most important remarks stick in my mind so I could recall them with only a little prompting of my notes. The coughing, though, often took me out of rhythm when I turned to the word processor to finish the piece. By the time I sat down to the computer termninal to arrange my original BlackBerry thoughts, I was deep into this sickness I believe has been partially brought on by stress. I can’t seem to shake even the simplest cough, the same cough my wife was over in a couple days has lingered with me for the better part of two weeks. So, in the middle of these thoughts that I’d try to put to paper, these almost hysterical, deep, whooping coughs would take my hands instantly to my mouth and like that, the flash was gone.

By some measure of fortune, I actually did some “pre-writing” on this piece, elementary school-style, and had a body of material from which to work. I blew through the first draft and made very few changes on the second, which is not my typical system. As usual, I was careful to set the scene, because without the proper concept of time and space, all that writing becomes is information, no humanity. I suppose you never feel closer to humankind or the human condition than when you are sick, when you’re brain is fevered and it’s easy to sympathize with bored boys in the street or the legions of other writers through time who have had no choice but to find the words.

This has been a down week, locked in a sort of holding pattern while waiting for magazine assignments to come through. Tomorrow, the drought ends with the comic artist interview I promised in a previous post. Assignments for Urban Times were also issued on Friday. I’m interested to see how freelance reporting impacts my blog output. I suppose what’s important is to continue writing, continue reading, and continue to improve no what medium the words appear in, if at all.

I’ve switched through prevalent writers day by day, almost as often as I’ve clicked publish on this blog. I’ve gone from Tom Wolfe heavily back into the beats. I picked up a book of essays by Gary Snyder about living congruent with nature and read some passages in the book store while my daughters pulled talking princess books from shelves, played chase around the sexy romance novel stacks and read their own favorite stories in this great recreated wagon by the picture books designed for pre-schoolers to sit in and shuffle through pages.

So our time together has revolved around the written word and storytelling. But a certain amount of life has to be lived in order to write about it. Caroline sits alone right now in the driveway making her own creative contribution to the world with chalk drawings. And, I’m going to join her right away. No matter what I find in language, there’s more to be found in our experiences which, if intense enough, makes the search for words not only worthwhile, but critical to existence.