1. It is looking increasingly likely that the Mariners starting rotation down the stretch (and into the playoffs, if applicable), will be headlined by these three starters:

I mean, I know about counting chickens and all that, but still. Assuming Bedard gets signed and is healthy (two enormous assumptions, I’ll grant), this may be the best starting trio the Majors have seen in decades. You can keep your Sabathia/Pettitte/Burnett. I’ll take Hernandez/Lee/Bedard any day.

2. It is startling how much more productive one can be when one is neither sick nor has to deal with insurance companies. I didn’t even notice how much spare energy I was expending trying to get healthy and/or deal with the fallout of 2009’s various accidents until I spent a full afternoon without either task. Very liberating and bodes well for all future projects.

3. The Dow has seen five digits for the last time in a good long while. Prepare accordingly.

When I was enrolled at Clatsop Community College in the fall of 1990, I took English 101 as one of my three classes. And in it we had one of these dismal textbooks that was about writing and the writing process. It was the sort of remedial stuff that I would later come to loathe as people continually suggested I take writing classes to learn how to write. After things like CCC and the Seaside Signal and the seventy short stories of high-school, I didn’t need the how. I needed the time, the motivation, and maybe a little more practice.

But something from the how, from that early primer on writing technique, stuck with me. It was this essay called “Soup Can Labels Can Be Interesting” – at least I would swear that’s what it was called and has always stuck out in my memory as being that. This phrase has become something of a totem for me, for my writing life. Not that I always feel an accordance with its sentiment, but often enough to make it work.

But just now, feeling this memory full-force, reinforcing Em’s Psychology in Public Policy assessment of why I don’t feel I’ve changed much over the years (more on this in a bit, perhaps, like in a future post), I Googled the phrase of Professor John Rupp’s beleaguered fame. And I found exactly one hit (”Googlewhacks” I guess they call them these days, though I thought there was some other term). And it was … from my own webpage. How anticlimactic.

But of course, because I’m in SCLCBI mode, I pursued the link to my own storied past, to May of 2001 and the fateful weeks they were. To a Mariners season I accurately projected to be well beyond 100 wins. To the epic balance of non-communication that spared a long-documented Quadfecta-precipitated disaster for all involved (see, I can still talk cryptically about the same things I did 9 years ago – where’s the change in that?). To a visit to Sandy San D, to reuniting with old friends, to speculating on the writing life, aspiring to be a columnist, aspiring to write a story in 2001 that remains half-written on my desktop here in a year with all the same digits in a slightly different order. I only read 20 days and it felt like a lifetime, a time machine, a portal to life on the precipice of some of the better things I ever did while I waited and recuperated on the periphery of something I couldn’t yet detect.

And I’m there again. Because Soup Can Labels Can Be Interesting.

The essay, of course, and now I’m really wigging out because I could have sworn I wrote something about this essay before on this blog in this format and this kind of thing always seems to end with me figuring out a better way to Google it and discovering that it was a different February 4th when I was constructing the exact same post, but anyway the soup cans. The essay is about procrastination, about the little tricks and distractions we find to keep ourselves focused on anything else when it’s time to get started on writing. The essay was very general and written for people who sort of fear writing as a process in the same crippling way that most of the freshmen who walk in the door of Hardenbergh A2 have spent their lives fearing public speaking before they resolved to get up and do something about it. You know, the way people who attend Clatsop Community College sometime after their 11th birthday feel.

And while I never related to that exactly, or to the bulk of the essay, the imagery of Soup Can Labels Can Be Interesting stuck and stuck hard. Emily and I later identified a whole syndrome at work where one can clear an entire to-do list that’s been sitting on the back burner for a week or a month if there’s one dreaded task that creeps into the periphery. Suddenly, rote data entry and catching up on reply e-mails to people who accidentally wrote you become essential to job performance. Rarely for either of us was the task in question writing something – more often for me it was making particularly inquisitive phone calls to strangers (though that got better over time) or dealing with a couple of prickly personalities. But I think everyone can relate to this phenomenon, to being suddenly really motivated by the idea of putting off something that seems like even more of a struggle.

I could chronicle everything I’ve been doing since a little after midnight, the proverbial soup can labels I’ve been reading. Some of them have been about my past, while others have been really obscure Facebook data I’ve absorbed. There’s been a check of every blog I regularly read, every report about the Mariners, research into the nearest Minor League teams and when their seasons start, comparative mileage analysis and schedule checking for when I could embark. Granted, I could have spent this time, I don’t know, looking for an agent or doing something fun and non-productive, but instead this sort of half-assing around seems like a better compromise.

Editing out the soup cans is essential to deliberate living, to making this sort of life work. It’s part of the reason I’m coaching debate, playing intramural basketball, scheduling a good chunk of my time. Because life works best when time is valued, has a premium on it, is chosen for favored activities. Not doled out to absurd levels of self-delusional procrastination.

I’m being a little too hard on myself. Nights like this are rare. They were especially rare last year when I wrote American Dream On and they show no signs of entrenching themselves as I approach more projects. But they make it all important to nip in the bud when they arise. For all that I’ve enjoyed explaining this, this 1,000-word treatise on soup can labels is, itself, another soup can in a way. Though at least it leaves something for posterity. If nothing else, a second Google hit for the phrase.

Postscript – apparently my memory is thorough but its diction is imperfect. The actual title of the essay is “Soup Can Labels Can Be Fascinating“, which is more cutely hyperbolic. It appears in Jean Wyrick’s Steps to Writing Well, which I think was the remedial primer of record discussed above. The book is apparently still in print and newly released in a new edition, so bully for Jean Wyrick. The whole metaphor is aptly laid out in the first paragraph or so of that link, by the way, so check it out. If, y’know, you’re not just putting off something else you should be doing. Or maybe if that’s exactly what you’re doing.

Just updated the Book List for the first time since September 2008, including a raft of new submitters and their submissions. The total stats are up to 1,159 books by 795 authors as submitted by 89 individuals with their 25 favorite books each.

For the unfamiliar, this is an aggregate effort to rank the best books of all-time as viewed by my friends and other visitors to the Blue Pyramid. This remains one of the most popular elements of the BP and generating this much interest about books surely is unlikely to hurt an aspiring author.

This update, I decided to tack on a little extra, so I ran some numbers about the Top Authors on the Book List as well, done up with some snazzy but small pics. No matter how you slice and dice the stats, it’s hard to underestimate the overwhelming impact Harper Lee had with one 300-page volume. With 494 total points, not only is she the sole and dominant place-holder of the top book of all-time, but her single tome puts her 5th in aggregate points for all authors. Only Tolkien, Shakespeare, Orwell, and Garcia Marquez could beat her, needing an average of 6.25 books each to do so.

The late great J.D. Salinger is well represented as well, checking in as 10th author of all-time on the whole and 4th in quality-per-book for those with more than one volume on the List. Surely this is helped by the fact that not one of the 89 submitters includes Raise High the Roofbeam, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction among their 25 best.

A late list I considered adding but didn’t, mostly for fear of making this project too onerous to update (I do it less than once a year as-is), is a list of top books that none of the 89 submitters consider their all-time favorite. What’s remarkable is how many of the very highest regarded books still escape the #1 slot for anyone. Most impressive among these is 1984, which is 2nd place all-time despite receiving zero first place votes. I wonder what it says that these books are so widely regarded, but no one would take them as their only choice to a desert island…

1. 1984, George Orwell, 2nd overall
2. Catch-22, Joseph Heller, 9th overall
3. The Return of the King, J.R.R. Tolkien, 10th overall
4. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, 14th overall
5. Night, Elie Wiesel, 17th overall
6. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte, 20th overall
7. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut, 21st overall
8. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 22nd overall
9. The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien, 23rd (tied) overall
10. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen, 25th (tied) overall

Of course, on the flip side, no fewer than 21 of the 89 first-place-vote-getters (a full 24%) are unique books, appearing on none of the other 88 lists. So there’s probably something about the process of picking a favorite that’s more likely to make it unique than the average book.

I have been having a tough time the past 60 hours. Not really bad, just weird. It’s mostly the result of trying to figure out how to approach the next writing project, Good God. As my first non-fiction effort longer than a college paper, it’s a daunting task. And with five novel ideas queued up behind it, in widely varied states of readiness, there’s a big part of me that wants to just stick with the fiction. Fiction, after all, is fun. And I feel that American Dream On was a profound success, the book that will ultimately, some way or another, probably put me on some sort of map. So why shift gears?

Well for one, it’s due up next. I was trying to explain the other day that the book ideas have been coming at about the pace one might expect them to over the last several years of not writing, despite the fact that I haven’t written the old ideas. American Dream On was the real gorilla on my back, having been a pretty well formed idea since early 2002. But the next few books are old-timers as well, all dating back to at least 2005. Chronologically, Good God is the oldest unwritten book. So it should be up next.

But that’s probably not good enough reason all by itself. There’s also the issue of my trip to India and the religious experience I had there in a boat on the Ganges in Varanasi. Wherein I felt called, more than anything else, to write this book which I have just re-embarked on tonight. And though the book is not the product of literal divine revelation, my life would seem pretty empty without its many religious experiences. I feel impelled – deeply impelled – to write this book.

There’s also probably the matter of hope. I find American Dream On to be an ultimately hopeful book, but I doubt many will agree with me. For the most part, people have found it somewhere between bleak and Kafkaesque… and it is those things, too. Good God, on the other hand, is a legitimately and unequivocally hopeful book, perhaps the only one I will ever write. And it may be the only non-fiction, unless I decide to tackle my theory of dinosaur extinction or the book earns enough refutations to warrant a defense publication. It’s a unique book, even for all the differences I see among the many novel plots I am contemplating. So maybe I want to write it next to prove I can, to show the breadth of my versatility. Em and I were joking a few hours ago about how anyone excited about publishing ADO would be utterly baffled by my description of Good God as the follow-up work.

But as I embark on it, writing 7-8 pages tonight to accompany the paltry 14-page headstart I brought to New Jersey, more questions than answers loom. What sort of tone can one maintain for a largely second-person conversational non-fiction work on God? Is this just going to be too experimental? How do I balance philosophical exploration with straightforward personal appeals? And how do I get the target audience to want to read whatever this looks like?

Tonight, though, I remembered that these questions are pretty thin and unimportant when the process of writing is afoot. I have come up with six book ideas yet unwritten and I have developed them because I believe in them. There will be questions of form and plenty of time to second-guess and to doubt. That time is not amidst the two years I’ve set aside to churn out the ideas full-time, to make good the promise of my inspiration. It’s time to churn, to chunk out the pages and let them do the talking. It might not work.

But it doesn’t matter. I must work and the rest will follow.