The Virtue of Forgetting?

Sometimes I'll be sitting somewhere and I'll get the feeling that I should be remembering something. Often this will be accompanied by a feeling that I should also be worrying about something. Lately I've been tempted to just ignore these feelings. I figure that if I am feeling OK, then maybe I should just "let it ride", so to speak.

I experienced this phenomenon today. I had been worried about losing my phone charger but was hoping that it would be waiting for me at work. Alas, when I got to work there was no charger to be found. So I started working, got distracted, and suddenly I was feeling good; and then I got the nagging feeling that I described above. Wouldn't it be great if we could just let go of responsibility and live in the moment more often? I once had a friend who embraced this notion of living in the now. He ended up living in an abandoned bus in the wilderness and talking to insects. Seriously. But he was also the happiest guy that I knew at the time. Go figure.

I think there must be a balance to be struck between the anxiety of constantly worrying about things and the care-free feeling of just letting go. One glorious tool of the modern world is calendaring--especially when it's integrated with your mobile phone. I'm hoping that by the time I reach senility that there will be a fully programmed neural computer waiting to guide my every thought and step. Maybe the twilight of my life will be like one of those "Dark Rides" where you sit in a car that's mounted on a rail and ride through an amusement just taking in the sights. I might be OK with that once I hit 90 or so. It would sure beat sitting in a room somewhere rotting away like a zombie!

Imagineering is still underway on the next Hemlock novel. It is mainly centered around the second act of the novel and specifically concerns a character that I had intended to be moving offstage pretty quickly but that is now seeming to merit some additional "screen time". In the meantime, I need to get back to writing the first act, which is completely "imagineered" at this point. I feel bad that this process is taking so long. I saw a recent Goodreads.com poll that said that 1-2 years is the acceptable window for the next novel in a series. I hope I can hit that. Being a part time writer makes it a big challenge. And I guess I'd rather be sure that it's good than have it be just OK but completed faster.