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http://redclaydiary.com/
or read Jim’s column below…
The Day Nothing At All Happened
Here at the center of the universe, in the heart of beautiful historic Downtown Birmingham, Alabama, I, The Bookie, ply my trade.
I call myself a Bookie because virtually everything real to me resides upon pages. I write true stories and books, help edit a quarterly literary/arts journal, produce a weekly blog/blast (we used to call them “columns”), place online a weekly podcast (in the formerly non-virtual world we called them “spoken-word stories” or “audio tales” or “columns you can close your eyes and listen to”), and serve as judge to several literary contests.
I also go forth from Downtown and deliver messages of goodwill to writers’ groups, civic clubs, schools, and anybody else who will invite me to share my six decades of experience as a whatever it is I am.
Oh, and I also own and run one of the last “real” bookstores in the country, a shop that carries books and paper ephemera that extend back some 500 years. In fact, this is where I spend the majority of my time—mostly because most of my income depends upon this five-day-a-week endeavor.
So, today’s question, addressed to the Dispassionate Universe at Large, is this: If I have all these activities going on in my life—in addition to being a husband, father, grandfather, brother, etc.—why do I feel like I’m wasting my time? Why do I lie awake at 3 a.m. wondering how to find meaning in my existence? Why do I feel as if I never do enough to feed my Muse?
The answer to this and many other angst-filled inquiries is written in the stars and won’t be decipherable for a few millennia. But I keep asking anyhow, hoping for magical revelations but knowing that there is no magic at all in the cosmos, just the Feeling that there may be magic.
I actually am aware that this is what keeps me going, this constant thirst for answers to unanswerable questions. If you walked up to me and gave me The Answer, my life would go into shock—because it is the adrenaline-filled neurotic search for things that are just out of reach, just over that next horizon…it is this search that keeps me placing one foot in front of the other, one step forward, two steps back, three steps forward, one step back, never knowing whether I’m getting anywhere.
In case anybody is curious as to what my epitaph will be, I’ve already recorded it. Here it is:
“This is not exactly what I had in mind.”
Should some passerby see this granite-inscribed sentence on my tombstone a hundred years hence, my hope is that an uncontrollable chuckle will issue forth into the quiet mist.
If that happens, my mission will have been accomplished—only I won’t be around to notice.
But it is nice to imagine that I may get the last laugh
© Jim Reed 2015 A.D.