Just completed my 454th consecutive weekly Bismarck Tribune newspaper column, on a gray-black day in central dakota. Im sitting in one of my favorite coffee houses, while conversations buzz around me. Its dark enough that youd have to have the lights on in your kitchen, at mid-day, as we move to the longest days of the whole year. I woke up as melancholy as a lugged bear, as Shakespeare puts it, I know not why. This is the kind of day to sit in a big easy chair reading Dickens and sipping hot tea. This is the kind of day when you drive a couple of hundred miles to some place across the state and you just keep the speedometer at 62 miles per hour, because it is a day to gaze about and just drink in the landscape, with no sense of urgency. I love these June days when the temperature is perfect, at times even a bit cool, and the breeze is not quite a wind and it reminds you of spring and possibility. The tomatoes want more BTUs, hot growing weather, but we all know that will come. Today the words flowed and they did not trip at the end of the neurons that were formulating them, did not trip at the barrier of my teeth, did not trip as my fingers intuited their way around the keyboard. That is rare. There are days when I know what I want to say but dont know how to say it. There are days when I am not quite sure what I want to say, but I know the general drift, and the sentences and paragraphs do not move smoothly onto the page. There are days when I know exactly what I want to say but Im tongue or finger-tied. There are days when I have no idea what I want to say. There are days when I would like to say X, but I know that X will lead to controversies I would rather not shoulder, and so I spend my time trying to find the least unpalatable way to be true to my ideas and principles without unnecessarily offending anyone. There are days when I would rather not write at all. There are days when I wish I could write for 40 straight hours. Its a mystery--writing. Meanwhile, the folks around me are talking about their marriages, their friendships, their jobs, their parents and in-laws, the war in Iraq, the sale at Pennys, the last weekend and the next. Yesterday, on a bluff west of Dickinson, in perfect early summer weather, I thought, like a mantra, I love North Dakota, I love North Dakota, I so lover North Dakota. And today, our principal oil industry state regulator, ecstatically cheers the fact that we have now reached an extraction rate of one million barrels per day. it wont be Dickens, alas, but I turn to reading now. csj
Posted on: Wed, 18 Jun 2014 15:37:33 +0000