I started writing when I was about 10 years old, a poem for my little sister, about how she was like a spider. I don’t remember writing anything else for a while. I went thru phases. Years went by when I didn’t write anything. I don’t know what I was doing.

I remember sitting in the attic of the Charles Street house in Grand Rapids, Michigan when I was 19 years old, a recent dropout from the Baptist Bible College and Seminary, listening to music late into the night and writing. None of it has survived but I think it was a form of poetry or deep self-reflection of some sort.

Many more years passed and only an occasional journal entry or recorded note appeared. There was no volition.

Then it started up again. Writing. Street lights and car lights reflected on the pavement thru the potted plant in the window out the corner of my eye change into the crowded roomanddance amonge the shadowed 1/2people pressed together for a moment inlove with the soundless music. from ‘LEARNING TO SCRIBBLE’ 1999.

Volumes of poetry poured forth: ‘THE NATURE POOL’ 2002, stones tones and audible levers 2009, WHAT I WANT TO SAY TO YOU 2018, poem picture 2019, zines, essays, film scripts or atleast the treatments of film scripts, a book - 295 pages of ‘The Ancient Book of Magic Secrets’ 2023, Substack posts every week or atleast they used to be every week until I ran out of ideas. Now I write them whenever I feel like it. I’ve slowed down.

I find myself writing mostly Facebook posts and text messages, maybe some Flash Fiction once in awhile. I’m slowing down for sure. Little volition and a complete lack of ambition. Soon it’ll just be live rave-ons with the baristas, spontaneous and totally innocent of any premediated aspiration.

So before I go and lose my writing altogether like Hemingway, yeah he blew his brains out because he couldn’t write anymore. That’s what I heard. Of course he was depressed and mentally ill but who isn’t in some way or another?

“It’s been a strange life.” said the man sitting on the sidewalk.

He was slumped over having just received a .38 slug thru his back, emerging just below his stomach. The bullet had hit a main artery and he was bleeding.

His daughter, who was 12, stood next to him and kept saying, “What happened Daddy? What happened Daddy?”

A few people gathered on the street. “Is he shot?” was a murmur that could be heard from the background.

He had been shopping at Macy’s, with his 12 year old daughter, for Christmas gifts. Actually he had just exited the store and was on the public sidewalk. Nobody seemed to know where the shot had come from. Neither did the man have any idea why he had been shot as his daughter blubbered and he leaned over and laid in the street.

Flash fiction. Great stuff. You can get the entire literature experience in just a few sentences. The dramatic effect, the heightened awareness, the characters, the scene. It only happens once.

Everything changes. It evolves. It flows. That’s our story written in super script at the top of the page. That’s the epitaph and the preface and the everything in between. The story of life. Dramatic and compelling. Tragic and tremendous both. Tremendous things happen in life. One was being born, one will be leaving this mortal coil, one is being alive on a planet in a body. That’s rare. The universe took 14 billion years to make you. Tremendous.

Write on oh humans, oh Rohn, oh my, oh boy. This story was not written by the gods, unless they are we, us, whoever. It is being written and has been written and will be written by you. As in all y’all. Including me.

If I can write one more page it’ll be courage and great love and amazing adventures and near misses and total crashes and triumphant realizations and fearless intrepidation approaching my death date. But not yet, like Roy says in ‘Blade Runner’ and sticks a nail thru his hand.

It’s not like I’m unhealthy or unhappy or obsessed with death, I’m not, just that I have a healthy regard for it. It does kind of close the curtain, final note, end of the story, resolution.

Mortality should be our friend not our estranged enemy. Make friends now so when you become intimate it will be a well regarded arrangement. How can you live if you’re not well regarded towards death? It has gifts to offer - appreciation, wisdom and the finality of all things. That might not seem like a gift but it is. All things are finite including the sun, the moon and the stars. I think that’s what I think.

What survives all this? Only the feeling of love and a well regarded friend. That’s all we started off with so it’s a closing circle isn’t it? A circle ends where it starts and it begins where it ends. Something profound about that but I’m not sure what it is right now.

podcast music: Senegal - Dakar Breeze1:30:53-1:38:00 / 1:13:12 -1:16:50

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