The joy of 2 a.m., the hour of discovery

On the way to bed tonight I realized something and turned back down the hall, to write an email to my favorite professor from college. I went to night school at Warner Pacific College, and graduated in 1996 at age 40. Here is the email. You, reader, are the second person I have told. And sadly at this point I may be speaking only to an audience of one:

It's 2 am, my favorite hour. Bless you for taking a interest in me, now and when I was a student. I made a discovery just now that is deeply exciting to me: I didn't know this when I started but I am writing a book. The title just came to me on the way to bed. It will be "The Music I Heard and the Roads I Traveled: Coming to Rest In a Small Town." I have a lot of work to do. But the blog gets me writing every day, and God's grace comes to me in waves.

Best wishes,

Dale

--I hope it is all right I wrote to you again. You are the first person I told, just minutes after I realized it myself.

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My niece Alyssa, salutorian and three-time state champion equestrian, she of wondrous unaffected beauty and old-soul wisdom, says the best one in the county is at the Farmstead Inn at Arrowhead Golf Course off Highway 213.
I just googled them but it doesn't give any hours. In the words of the immortal Casey Stengal, you could look it up. She has lent me her copy of The Audacity of Hope, and I would steal the title in some way if it weren't so prominent and obvious. My aim is to be the Robin Hood of Ideas; I'll steal from the rich in intellect to give to the poor in spirit, and try to keep a little cash for myself along the way. I don't want much in the beginning, just four walls of my own and a five-foot folding table to work from, a Bose radio to play the good jazz and four hours a day to write. I write in the evening after everyone has gone to bed--I've always loved the quietest time late in the evening, and if I were rich or at least independent of debt I would work till three am and sleep till ten. I love this time where thoughts melt in your heart like candle wax and your spirit soars to its best place.

My nephew Mitchie's game was rained out in fourth inning and I came home and took a nap and slept till just now. Three hours is about the right amount of time for a nap, provided that the last half hour is spent in that delicious space between sleeping and waking where your dreams are playing saxophone riffs on your soul. A couple of you know what I'm talking about, and that's why I write, to get to that place where you bob your head in time to my music; it's the best place a soul can ever go. Life is a journey my friend, and we had better take along a good tour guide, a reliable pilot, a comfortable pillow and something good to read. I see you now and your head is bobbing and that takes me out of my small fearful place where for a moment I felt ridiculous playing on an empty stage in an empty bar with nobody laying a dollar into the brandy glass, next to the one I crumpled there myself.

"All art constantly aspires to the condition of of music." The internet attributes this quote to Walter Pater or Ezra Pound; I thought it was Rilke. Right now it does not matter. From the laptop on the table next to me the saxophone player is taking the phrase and turning it and letting it soar, then it drops and falls to an inexpressibly sad place, then rises again and soars higher to an exquisite, tender place until it falls away to a single perfect note. Amazing the beauty that can come from a laptop: what God has wrought, what Hewlett Packard has invented. I aspired to that quality today and did not reach it. My entire being is lifted by the effort, and tomorrow is another day to write.

When I got up my brother-in-law Mark was up, watching the history channel in the living room from the couch, his legs crossed and stretched out cowboy style across the couch. Mark is a genuine cowboy directly from the pages of the old west, a former champion bullrider, a skilled horseman and farrier, lifetime member of the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association and President of the Mollala Buckeroo, a 4th of July Rodeo held here since 1913, known to those who love it as "The Cowboy Christmas." Mark has a quiet way and an easy smile and his lap is his youngest daughter Dahlia's favorite place. He's laconic and likeable and remarkable to know.

You've got to love a cowboy who watches a tv documentary about Galileo, the astronomer who spent the last years of his life imprisoned in his villa in the north of Italy for challenging the conventional view. Even in confinement Galileo got busy living, and changed our view of the universe and ourselves forever, escaping to become a giant of history. What if Galileo had had a blog, people, or an internet or a MySpace or 80 channels in high definition and surround sound? What if Mozart had one, or Shakespeare, or Thomas Paine? We are living in an age when every one of us has a recording studio on our desk, a sound stage and a printing press and a telegraph to the world, and we use it to hook up and watch porn. The brightest generation in the history of the world uses it to play Metal Gear Solid 4 till four in the morning and blow their brains to bits. My God it's time to wake up, and my brother Frank thinks I'm the one who's a little nuts.