This post is largely about the time stamp on it. As (basically) a freelance writer for (approximately) 52 years and five months, I occasionally slip into a lifestyle of being awake when everyone else I know can be presumed to be asleep — like now, for instance. Some people, I'm sure, are awake — I see a number of them apparently online on Facebook at the moment — but my phone isn't ringing, there's very little traffic noise on my street and it feels like I'm the only one conscious on the planet. This can be very good for a writer and it's often when I get my best — or maybe just my most writing done.
But you have to make sure you treat it as temporary; that at some points, you get your life in sync with the rest of the world. There are calls I must make and calls I must take…and especially during The Pandemic, orders I must make and deliveries I must receive. Some of those calls are ZOOM conferences so I have to make at least a token attempt to have about the top quarter of myself look presentable.
Leaving ZOOM out of it, this is roughly how I have lived for much of those 52+ years. There have been extended periods when I've had the kind of writing jobs that require one to report to an office almost every day. There have been periods when I had two or more such jobs. But basically, I think of myself as a guy who works at home. When people ask me, "When do you write?" I usually say, "All the time" or sometimes "When I have to in order to get the work in to them when they need it." Another good and true answer sometimes is "Between other obligations."
I feel like during The Pandemic, more and more people are living this way. Certainly, more of them are working from home and/or waiting for Grubhub to deliver. And this is going to sound odd but I occasionally think that if there had to be a Global Pandemic — and there didn't — it could certainly have come at a worse time for me. Like when I had to spend so much time at hospitals because my mother was in them (as she often was) or my lovely and loved friend Carolyn was in an Assisted Living Home battling the big "C."
Carolyn was in one for eleven months and I occasionally look online to see reports on how COVID has infested that particular home. It seems stable now but for much of the first Year of the Coronavirus, they were losing patients and medical personnel at a ghastly rate. She would likely have added that to the long list of things wrong with her…and I would have been in danger every time I went in to see her, which I did almost every day.
I'm also fortunate to have a very good doctor who has given me — and his other patients, one presumes — very sound advice based on a pragmatic assessment of What We Know and What We Don't Know. I've usually had good doctors but there were periods when I didn't…when I'd lost one good doctor and was searching for another. You know the old saying about how a man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client? I've come to feel that way about laypersons who think they know all about medicine.
If all this sounds self-obsessed…well, it's easy to slip into that mode when you feel like the only conscious human being in the world. I'll finish an article I'm writing after I finish this, then I'll go to sleep, then tomorrow — whenever it feels like "tomorrow" begins — I'll start working my way back to "normal" hours.
And I do understand that others are awake. Checking back on Facebook, I see several other friends apparently online and I wonder what day it is for them where they are. Are they up late on Saturday night or up early on Sunday morning? Or do they, like me, not know the difference…or care? There's one there I need to talk to about something but it can wait for a time when it's today for both of us.
