I am like reading

I don’t like that. I feel like I’ve lost something – my creative edge – my brains. I feel like I used to be smarter.

I started reading a book called Off the Grid, which I agreed to review for Globalshift.org, so it was more of an obligation read than a fun read. Three pages in and I’m hooked. It’s a fascinating look at what it takes to live outside of a community with water and power and 9-5 jobs. The author references Thoreau’s Walden and I remembered reading that book in college and studying the whole Walden Pond movement, which was somewhat akin to the hippie commune concept of the sixties.

I was born a reader. I read fiction books and biographies, history books and books about movies and how to books, poetry and scripts.

If I collected every word I read in day and put it on a piece of paper, I’d probably find that I read the equivalent of a novel, every day. But they’re scattered words.

It reminded me of Los Alamos phase a few years ago where I read everything written on Oppenheimer and the bomb. I miss being that invested in a subject.

Thoreau said, ‘How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.’

I think this is why I haven’t written any good fiction lately. Because I’ve stopped learning and stopped living. Though I did learn how to move a database, but I don’t know that that really counts.