Rainey Blogs on Some Days

Somewhere in the past year I lost the will to write, the discipline to sit alone and let words roll down onto a lined, white steno pad page. This is not entirely true and I have had a few exceptions to this trend, but in general this thing—writing—that has brought me such joy and therapeutic pleasure has diminished. Maybe my “dark night of the soul” that lead me to write so profusely has concluded and I no longer need it. Maybe the aging process is creeping over into writing, and just as so many things diminish as the sun starts to set on our lives, maybe my writing is diminishing as well. During the past year I got an electronic tablet and the truth is that I now fritter so much more time away checking Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, and the Internet that used to be devoted to other things like writing. So yes, I'd say Nicholas Carr was right: Google is making me stupid , another creative analog native neutered by the digital age. Despite the self-hatred and loathin...

I feel so retro sitting in the Newark Airport waiting to board a flight to Louisville to meet Marcia and the girls. People playing with electronic gadgets and listening to music or podcasts all around me. I almost brought my CD player, but that also would have seemed old fashioned, so 1990s, carrying around a Sony Walkman in these iPod days. But I could have listened to NPR this morning if I had it. Something else to mention--I'm writing on a steno pad! Who writes on a steno pad in this day and age? I should have a laptop computer, but I'm using a steno pad with a ball point pen, just like George Washington probably did when he wrote. This is so embarrassing. People sometimes look at me funny when I do this. "What's he doing?" they probably say to themselves. "I'll bet he's writing a letter to his mother." Or they think, "Why is that guy taking notes on paper in an airline terminal? I wonder if he's a terrorist, taking notes on how...