Thursday, January 6, 2005

Harrumph The problem is, I blog all the time in my head. If only some scientist could perfect a neural link for me to my iMac, I'd be writing up a storm. It's the fingers that seem to get in the way, or maybe the need to plant my prodigious butt in my desk chair, or maybe the decisions that must be made in order to transform thought words into words on paper (or, in this case, on screen.) I don't know. Thought has always been the enemy of action for me and blogging, at least in the last few months, has fallen prey to this bogeyman of mine. So what are some of those posts I've written in my head and never posted? One has to do with the recent death of someone whom I was privileged and proud to know and daunted to call my friend. Jack Newfield was a journalist's journalist, a great and proud and fighting liberal, a civil rights activist, a boxing maven...and one of the most fascinating, kindest men I've ever known. I wish I could write about him and what he meant to me here. But I can't. I am still trying to write a letter to his wife expressing my sadness at his death and those words have been hard to find. Out of respect to them both, I don't want to put my feelings about him and his going online until I've done the right thing and sent them to his family. Suffice it to say that Jack's untimely and unexpected death has made me incredibly introspective, since I learned of it three days before Christmas, and I am still trying to figure out what do with the lessons it seems to hold. If I believe in such things, which I don't, necessarily, though I want to. Another thing I have been unable to write about except in my head is, of course, the tsunami, all those photographs of dead children, parents with faces distorted by the most extreme grief...There are no words. And my life and its myriad stupid privileged-person problems (because, frankly, that's what they are, in general, and, specifically, compared to 99% of the world) just doesn't seem all that worth memorializing when placed into that context. And my DSL has been on the fritz on and off for two weeks now thanks to the deluge of rain that has hit Los Angeles. (See? This is not worth complaining about when you think about eleven-year-old orphans clinging to tree branches so they don't get swept out to sea.) 7:29:49 PM     comment [] trackback []