(A great help for 
Good to hear from you
Thank you, Jerry Waxler, for your comment. I have posted it in the comments section for this entry, not for our previous entry, ‘Riddled by spam,’ which was where you sent it.
I have brought it forward because after reading hundreds of spam comments since our last post Dec. 7 — actually, about 7,500 spam comments, most of them unintelligible — I was delighted to receive yours and wanted to bring attention to it since it raises several issues worth discussing.
Thank you for your recommendation about a spam trapper, but I must confess that as I get better at scanning these conglomerations of self-promoting links and nutty messages, I’m getting somewhat fond of reading spam.
As a reporter, I always enjoyed the weirder side of society, and believe me, there’s nothing stranger than some of this electronic stuff.
Anyway, you have no doubt noticed that I did not file an entry for Dec. 14, 21, 28 or Jan. 4, despite our intention stated in the lefthand column here that we would try to post a new blog entry each Sunday.
The reason I haven’t filed since Dec. 7 is that, like some writers I know, I’m in one of those periods where I haven’t had anything to communicate. This wasn’t a problem in the years I wrote for newspapers as a reporter and editor because I was always responding as a reporter to some news or feature story or as an editor to some reporter’s story. But I did go into those periods of noncommunication when I wrote a book — Adrift in America, which is reprinted in our nonfiction section.
I started writing the book in late 1985 after I met a guy named Steve Lutes in Colorado during a cross-country trip, one of many I’d make in the next five years. During those years, I was living in a truck — actually, a micro-motor home with the barest of necessities — that allowed me to follow a minimalist lifestyle in which I could spend hours, days, sometimes weeks by myself in some remote part of this country, sometimes just thinking, sometimes just looking at the sky. At other times, I would write, sometimes furiously. And then I’d go back to thinking and skywatching. I finished the book in late 1992.
As I’ve mentioned before in this blog, I don’t mind being by myself, cut off from the world, doing nothing, saying nothing. And I guess I’m still more or less in the dawdling mode.
But you, Jerry — I’m glad you’re not the same.
– Sid Leavitt
NOTES:
The image above is the cover art for Incommunicado, a book by Margot Heller and Tom McCarthy, published by Hayward Publishing, available through the Cornerhouse website.
Jerry Waxler is author of the weblog Memory Writers Network, a site that discusses memoirs and how to write them.
Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments »