Joe Nation

• Answered Questions: 40
• Posts: 18,048
• Location: The City.
• Occupation: Professional 20 Questions Player

We aim, in Michael Oakeshott's words, to live amid the conversation "an endless unrehearsed intellectual adventure in which, in imagination, we enter a variety of modes of understanding the world and ourselves and are not disconcerted by the differences or dismayed by the inconclusiveness of it all."

I am now living my two thousandth life.
Actually, 2,784th.
First, I was a hippie. I danced whether there was music or not.
Whether alone, or surrounded by thousands.
I took college classes and
hung out on the Boston Common with my guitar.
We marched for the end of the War.
Then I joined the War.
I was in uniform,
(Okay. Hippies had uniforms too, but this was a real uniform.)
I marched.
(Okay. Not the same kind of marching that hippies do.
Real marching.
With a marching band and flags and very serious people on all sides.
I did not fit in well.
I opened a little off-base off the base coffeehouse
where we sang hippie-ish songs and
waited for the end of our hitch
while some of our friends
serious and otherwise
died.
Really.
I started writing.
School books.
Little stories for fifth grade or third grade
that taught that the world was open
and how to spell the word raisin.
Then I went into television.
(Okay, not into the television, into television news.
Which was news then and not infotainment,
but saying that makes me sound like an old hippie.
Which apparently I have become.
And on the way
I married.
Several women.
but not all at once.
even I am that smart.
My grown up children are musicians and kinda hippie like.
I have days when I am glad about that
and I have days when regrets, I have a few.
(Apologies to Paul Anka)
I practiced yoga.
I ran 30 miles a week.
I refereed soccer games
and rode my bicycle thousands and thousands and thousands of miles.
Threw a paper route
painted apartments,
sold furniture,
bought wire and gears and god knows what
for a factory job.

and I stopped writing.

You know, writing is hard to do. It's painful.
Not as painful as not writing, but still.....

I tried to be boring for a few years.
The other boring people said I didn't fit in well.

Well.

So.
I wrote teeny tiny things for a tiny teeny neighborhood paper.
About how to fix things.
(That's how Eva knows me.
She was my editor. Poor thing.)

And we,
L and I,
got bored with living under gigantic Oklahoma skies.
(and I had ridden
every inch of chip and seal highway
for three states around)

So we moved to New York City.

That was seventeen years ago or two hundred,
I can't really tell.
So L worked in fashion
and I managed a hardware store
and I got fat from too many MaryAnn's Mexican meals.

So I started running again. I went from puffing to the bus stop
to finishing the 2007 NYC Marathon.

And on January 1st, 2008. I said out loud.
"I think my life cannot get any better."
And by mid-August, it lay in ashes.
L left.
Left twenty years of marriage.
She was unhappy.
That was four years ago or four hundred, I can't tell.

um. I missed the 2008 Marathon (meh) but I finished '09,'10,'11.
[and
I've fallen in love with someone who know how to be in love with someone.
Yes.
(think about that)]
Delete the above bracketed lines. it's over.
That was two years ago or two thousand or yesterday.
Possibly all three.

I've been writing.
I take a picture of every morning's sunrise and wait for whatever it says to me.
I forget how many now, 1000 in a row?
(Ask me where to see them)

I was writing this fabulous story now
about this guy who had 2,784 lives.
And my editor kept saying
"Pick one for christ'ssakes!!"
but I couldn't because
they are all my favorite lives.
So far.
But, maybe,
just maybe,
this one
right now
is taking the number one spot with a bullet.