A few million published words into our career, we don’t believe too much in the romance of around writing. But sometimes you do have to appreciate a young Hunter S. Thompson at work in his Nash Rambler in the Northern California woods with a cigarette in his mouth and a Schlitz tallboy on the front seat. You have to figure out whatever he wrote there was just a little better for this setting.
I’m sitting at my comfortable standing desk with a rubber mat beneath my feet if I want to actually get up, and a fancy-ass chair. I’m struggling to finish an essay. I’m at the “I want it done” stage. How I long to get into whatever zone HST is in here — where the disappears, forward head posture and kyphosis a concern for a later date if you make it to old age.
It’s always like this at 75 percent mark of an essay. I know I need to go back and edit what I’ve written, but that always feels like I’m going backward, when all I want is to make that leap to last quarter, the ending. I’m on nobody’s deadline but my own, I remind myself, as I dance around the office and stretch, posting on Substack, checking email, giving Laser Prilosec, doing whatever the opposite of my fellow Kentuckianian is above.
Oops! I made the “body” disappear in that sentence above.