Around The Time I Turned 30, I

I Have A Friend Who Lives In The South Side Of Chicago. I Helped Out At A Church Charity There Where They Try To Give A Bit Of Cohesion To A Desperate Area. Everyone Was Very Welcoming

I Was Reading Raymond Chandler Very Much With The Feminist Eye. In Six Of His Seven Novels, It's The Woman Who Presents Herself In A Sexual Way, Who Is The Main Bad Person. And Then You Start Reading More Fiction, Whether Crime Fiction Or Straight Fiction, It's Just Bad Girls Trying To Make Good Boys Do Bad Things, Going All The Way Back To Adam And Eve. The Woman That Thou Gavest Me Made Me Do It, Adam Says To God.

I Had A Fantasy As A Child That I Might Be A Writer Someday. I Always Thought That Meant You Went To New York Or Paris. But After That Intense Summer, I Never Thought That I Wanted To Live Any Place But Chicago. It Also Made Me See What The Stakes Were In The Civil Rights Movement. And It Made Me See What Real Hatred Was Like And The Forms That It Took. But It Also Made Me Understand How Powerless Ordinary People Feel In Their Lives.

I Look At The Great Poets Of The Soviet Union, Like Anna Akhmatova, Who Endured Far Worse Then Anything We've Seen Or Hopefully That We Will Ever See. If They Could Keep Writing And Keep A Voice Alive, Keep People Hopeful Through Their Poetry, Then I Would Be Ashamed To Stop And To Give In. It Would Be Really Self-indulgent, Unacceptable, And Inexcusable To Walk Away From It.

People Have Less Privacy And Are Crammed Together In Cities, But In The Wide Open Spaces They Secretly Keep Tabs On Each Other A Lot More