THIS BLOG IS MY THOREAU JOURNAL

When you start to blog, they tell you the only way it will succeed is if you make it about one single thing. If you’re a writer who begins to design umbrellas, you have to make a separate blog for that. Which means your life is diced up into little compartments like those plastic serial pill boxes they sell in pharmacies. Henry didn’t do that. His life was altogether in the text.

Thoreau just set down what was happening in his life day by day. His NOW. So I named this, SLICES OF NOW to emulate what he did in real time.

Also to answer the question older women get asked all the time: ‘What on earth do you find to DO all day?” – in that phoney, patronizing, talk-down voice used exclusively for the elderly as though, rather than upright and dressed, anyone over 65 should be propped up in a nursing home bed somewhere drinking through a straw. They invented that ghastly word, ‘fiesty’ for those of us who aren’t.

Thoreau and I turn out to have much the same topics, go figure. Both of us write seasonally about nature and our gardens, what we’re reading, the passersby or the neighbours (and there’s LOTS about them I haven’t said) or philosophers that get it, or what we’re writing or trying to understand well enough to write about with a smattering of politics that we can have a say in. He wasn’t consciously trying to influence the world’s leaders – but he did.

Louisa May Alcott said he had a ‘neck beard’ that served as a good barrier to keep the women away. I illustrate what that looked like by the one on the man in my life which most emphastically does not keep me away.

He wrote – I write about the current slice of our NOW. In this century I’ve added in the influences with which technology gifts us, often wondering what he would’ve made of them: Mine are often comic strips reflecting on popular culture, a large part of which is facebook and designer coffees that cost more than he spent in a week on groceries. I don’t wish to travel any more than he did, neither of us out of fear but indifference.

Often I feel him looking over my shoulder and nodding. Both of us wander into politics now and then but only the stuff we think we might be able to do something about. We both write poetry and I think he probably wrote songs too but there isn’t any evidence. Anyone tends to sing when they’re by themselves. Both of us continually strive for simplicity. Hence my free table, loaded with books.

I’m going to try and link to some of his on-line journals.