On Hearing Voices

You've had a number of teachers, many of whom resonate for you to this very day.  You needed to listen with care before you were ready for a mentor, and even when you had one, who resonates within you to this very day, you did not think of her as a mentor until she told you she heard voices, then asked you if you heard voices.

By this time, you cared enough about her and the influence she was having on you and the influence you expected she would continue to exert, that you began to worry something might be lacking in you because you did not hear voices.  When you spoke to her of this, she assured you that there were those who saw visions.

Seeing things or hearing them were on a par; neither was better than the other any more than being right- or left-handed was better.  Some situations were reducible to a simple either or an other.

You had a writer friend who confessed that he saw things on a screen within his head, a small, TV-like screen where his characters moved about and spoke.  All he needed to do was describe what they were doing.  You were several years away from recognizing that his writing was, in fact, descriptive as opposed to a more internal focus.

At this time, you began a series of doubt experiences, fearful because you neither heard nor saw.  Once again, your mentor reassured you with questions, wanting to know where the words and feelings began when you composed.  You explained to her that perhaps you were the third possibility, one who felt.  You were neither aware of voice or picture; the material emerged.

Ah, Rachel told you.  That makes you a hearer.  You go home and write.  Listen carefully.  You did, but because you were self-conscious, nothing came out for a number of days, during which you mostly sat, staring at your typewriter, daring a sound or vision to appear.

In time, you were approached by a concept for a story, amused by it, thinking of the actor, Sheldon Leonard, a frequent regular on the Jack Benny show, his voice sounding like an archetypal, Damon Runyon-esque gangster or con man.  Hey, bud, the story said.  Got something I wanna show you.

The next time you saw Rachel, you were able to tell her about the experience, so relieved at having one or the other, a sound or a vision, that you forgot to be embarrassed by your late awareness of process.  That was then, back in time, during the days of radio and television, and typewriters.

This is now. If you listen to a place long enough and with focus, it will begin to speak.  The longer you listen, and the more focus you apply, the more the place will begin to speak to you.The place will start by giving you a sample of itself during various stages of the day and its potential inhabitants or inner forces and mechanisms.  Even now, with vast improvements in your eyesight, which you never considered flawed or faulty,  thanks to cataract surgery, you see without contact lenses better than you were able to see with them.  This refreshed or revised sense of vision adds dimension to your hearing places as they describe themselves to you.

You contemplate further and the place begins to cooperate with you, giving you hints of how a particular character would relate to it.  The beginning is in your awareness that place has a personality.  There may be considerable sophistry in your concept of hearing the place.  There may be equal sophistry in your belief you can hear or read your own characters, who are, of course, your creations, your Golems, made from mud and myth, and need to combat forces of stasis and intimidation.

There may be considerable sophistry in your quasi-anthropomorphising if surroundings, of inanimate things such as rocks, mountains, deserts, oceans.  Not to forget attributing human qualities to animals.  In the true tradition of fiction being enhanced and exacerbated reality, there may be sophistry as well in your reading of humankind and a reductionism in your use of tides, lunar and oceanic, as a metric for the behavior of segments of humanity.

In metaphor, you may have come forth all these years, written these millions of words in search of your craft, only to be at the place you were before your mentor, amazed at her ability to hear voices, her ability to bring characters to life on the page, still unable to define the how and why of the way you intuit and form person, place, and thing for your stories and essays.  In actuality, you may have only made a slight dent in the surface of understanding your passion and the focus on story your passion has given you.

If so, you are much more grateful than frustrated or saddened.  You still have the voices of all the persons, places, and things you experienced, and your awareness of them speaking.  And the time to listen.

A Balancing Act

Thanks to the convenience of the Internet and those ingratiating applications known as "Aps," you no longer need to be too concerned about keeping a running balance on your checking account. You can check in on a regular basis to see the state of your balance.  Thus the term precarious may hover, depending on your prudence or impulsiveness, reminding you in yet other ways how vital a concept of balance is to story.

A comfortable balance works better in banking terms than story terms, in the former reflecting a stasis and comfort,in the latter sending a warning that the story is about to become overdrawn, lacking in assets.

Running balance sounds better in financial terms than dramatic ones.  A running balance is a daily reckoning.  Individuals you know who keep them appear confident to the point where you suspect that unlike you, they never get warning notices from their bank.  You also suspect them of knowing secret ways to get cats to veterinarians.

Balance conveys stability, an ability to cope with gravity, the poise to proceed without the merest hint of a stumble.  Admirable in many circumstances, but not in most fiction, unless, of course, the author's intent is to set the balanced character off kilter.  Many stories begin with what academicians call destabilizing events.  Used with proper finesse, the destabilizing event can cause mirth by supplying a banana peel for a rigid, pompous character to chance upon, then literally fall victim to its slipperiness.

Most of your friends appear to strike a balance between their work posture and their other posture, other relating to anything where individualism and whim have free rein as opposed to more conventional and formal aspects of work.  You're pleased to have found the possibility for keeping formal structures at a limit, the need for a greater balance no longer concerning you so much as, for example, when you reported to a publisher who expected rational decisions of you while at the same time having as a favored expression, "I have a gut feeling--"  His expression had nothing to do with digestive disorder.

In your reading and composition, you are drawn to off-balance circumstances and characters.  You do not need to look too far about you in the real world to find stasis.  You do wince whenever you hear yourself responding to a How's it going type of question with a same-old, same-old kind of response.  You do so because same-old, same-old is a stasis.  Story can emerge from it, but requires a push.

You like to think you can find the sorts of books and stories to read and dramas to watch where the push is already in place.  Hamlet, studying for exams at Wittenburg, had no idea that the push was already in place, but his father's ghost surely did.  " I am thy father's spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night/ And for the day confined to fast in fires, Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt off."  Okay, chalk up a destabilizing event.  And down the food chain we go until much of the dramatis personae are dead.

Balanced persons do not attract you, in life or fiction. as much as those with the occasional totter or stumble.  You in fact begin to suspect yourself should you find your running balance is not teetering close to risk.  At one time in your life, from about your senior year in high school until your junior year at the university, you made some effort to gamble on such things as the relative speed of horses, of the outcome of various card games, and even of the potentials to be had from tossing about two small squares on which were incised anywhere from one to six dots.Won a few, lost some.  Quit because of the accompanying boredom, which led you to take irrational risks merely to keep from being bored.  These were the wrong imbalances.

Better risks were the growing knowledge that examination times were strong incentives for you to discover short stories that wished to be written, resulting in you having at least a manuscript that mattered to you, the risk being you had not read or absorbed enough connective links between the assigned readings.  But often, you had both to show for your efforts, thus farewell to horses, card games, dice, and even high-stakes Scrabble.

On any number of occasions, you've consulted chiropractors, hopeful of having a balance restored.  In recent months, you've taken to visiting an old acquaintance who is a splendid physical therapist, seeking both enlightened exercise proscriptions and manipulations relative to having had replacement surgery on both hips.  This kind of balance is not boring, it is freedom from mechanical imbalances.

On occasions, you are hired to inject imbalances to stories that are, by their very nature, too balanced, too graceful in terms of gravitational and frictional pulls.  Unlike backs and legs, story thrives on imbalance, appears even to congratulate itself as its characters, in search of a dream or goal or some form of discovery, appear to seek out unconventional methods as you once did in the face of an unusual auto-immune system disorder wherein one internist advised you that you appeared to be allergic to yourself.  Several alternative medicine consultations down the road, you found yourself in the office of a practitioner of Chinese herbal remedy where you learned, through her interpreter that she had matriculated from a conventional medical school only to remain impatient with potentials for healing.  There were, you heard from her interpreter, more direct ways of bringing a disrupted body into proper balance, but first, the doctor requests the honor of seeing you protrude your tongue.  The interpreter also told you the estimable doctor was well aware of the possible significance of one extending his tongue in this country, but you would be doing her an honor to extend your tongue as far as you were able.

When  you did so, the doctor shook her hear.  There followed a long trail of the verbal equivalent of Mandarin ideograms to the point where you got the impression the doctor and her translator were arguing.  "What,"  you asked, "was the doctor's diagnosis?"

"Bad,"  the translator said.

"That's all?  Bad?"

"Very bad,"  the translator said.  "Very not balanced.  Very not balance at all."

You were ultimately diagnosed and cured by the least likely of doctors, a dermatologist.  Being back in balance taught your auto-immune system a thing or two.  You like to think that on reflection and a measure of stubbornness, you kept that balance while giving yourself over to the greater sense of living in the shadow world of dramatic imbalance.

You've had your share of stumbles and imbalances, your various running balances of temper, patience, finances, understanding, and education describing ups, downs, and destabilization, adding up to a balancing act of sorts in which you are well motivated to look for, then take the least paved, poorest graded road, and if one such road is not apparent to you, why then, make it.

The Holy Grail Found in a Used Bookstore

Addiction comes in many forms.  When you were quite a bit younger, you harbored fears about being addicted to licorice cigarettes, small cylinders of licorice perhaps half the diameter and length of a real cigarette.  They were packaged in cardboard boxes which you carried about after school,  in your ventures in the large swaths of vacant lots that were even then on their way to becoming a large housing tract.  This undeveloped landscape was your jungle, wherein you imagined explorations, safaris, and adventures taken from whatever you happened to be reading at the time.

This was the time of penny candy, where a trove of varieties of shapes, flavors, and brands were available.  You knew of several venues for these purchases, but far and away your favorite was a combination magazine-book-candy-smoke shop at the southwestern corner of La Brea and Olympic, walking and biking distance from where you lived.

Licorice cigarettes attracted you at first because of the cardboard containers in which they came, bright reds or greens with stark black lettering and scant illustrations.  You were also attracted by the number of quasi-cigarettes per package.  Then, as habit persisted, and you heard adults speaking of their addictions to real cigarettes, your alarm began to appear when you found yourself up to two, sometimes three packs a week.

You had no such alarm when you began smoking actual cigarettes and pipes, nor did you consider yourself anything beyond a coffee drinker until, one hungover morning, you awoke to a considerable headache, no fresh cigarettes in your then apartment, and few scant grains of coffee in the can you'd been saving because you'd thought to use it as a container for pencils.  Going through your kitchen trash to find yesterday's coffee grounds, still damp in the used Chemex filter, you heated water, then re-used the mess to brew an emergency pot.

While the water was dripping and the very things the filter paper had filtered from yesterday's coffee were dripping through, anemic and murky, you scrounged through the living room wastes for cigarette butts that might provide enough puffs to convince you of being sufficiently alert to consider a  breakfast that would take away the hangover's persistent reminders of last night's excesses.

Some hours later, you were at the market on Hollywood and Gower, paying for a pound of cheap coffee, a quart of milk, a cylindrical box of Quaker Oats oatmeal, and a pack of Camels with coins from your change stash, your mind focused on the short story you'd subsequently sold, and would deliver tomorrow, whereupon you would be paid fifty dollars, which you knew would be spent on such luxuries as better coffee, Benson and Hedges cigarettes, and likely such luxuries as lamb shanks and sole or yellowtail.

The worst-case scenario, having to scrounge for butts and used coffee grounds, did its best to remind you of the degradations associated with addiction.  Subsequent to that day and one or two others like it, you've heard enough worst-case addiction stories to convince you you were more late-twenties romanticizing than demonstrating addiction.

However a reach it may be to link a deeper kind of addictive behavior to the hours you've spent in used bookstores, away you reach, thinking again of your financial reserves being limited to a pocketful of coins, desperate to find your version of the holy grail, the book you believed would, even as you read it, cause elements both real and irrational to coalesce, imparting the secret that would unlock the doors to your greater understanding of drama, of story, of character, event, dialogue, circumstance, emotional depth, and yes, empathy.

For years, at times when you could well afford hardcover books purchased new off the shelves at Pickwick in Hollywood and Vroman's in Pasadena, and Martindale's in Beverly Hills, or used in the shops on Santa Monica Boulevard or Vine Street or Las Palmas in Hollywood, you read, absorbed as best you could, then moved on, not yet satisfied.  You were well into your fifties when you began to suspect that not only did no such one transformative book exist, rather that all those you'd devoured were only a piece of the larger mosaic.  You must continue to look, you must continue to read because they all contribute to the end goal you seek.

In a real sense, much of this dances about that most genial and generous of writers, Thomas McGuane.  You've just gone to the bookcase housing your short story collection, whence you pulled forth To Skin a Cat,McGuane's first collection.  The bookmark is still in place where you left it, at the precise place where you stopped reading because your reading had given you an idea and you did not wish to go any farther, lest the idea become more McGuane than you.  And thus you labored for quite some while on Exit, Pursued by a Bear, which you have yet to finish, although you have returned to it numerous times and have a sense of how and where it will end.

A scant week ago, over a leisurely lunch with McGuane, you told him of this as you spoke of short stories, of writers you both knew, of writers you each preferred, and, indeed, of one you'd never heard of before, recommended by him.  Maile Meloy's Half in Love is also a collection, and before you'd got past the opening paragraph of "Ranch Girl," you knew you were in for a ride you'd never take, not even with Annie Proulx's remarkable short story, "The Mud Below," which is about bull riding, while Meloy's "Ranch Girl" is not.  Nevertheless, although you got something stunning and remarkable from the Proulx, you were, yourself, riding the Meloy story, as hopelessly addicted to it as you feared you were to licorice cigarettes.

You are in fact Jonesing on story, hopelessly in love with the form and the effect the powerful ones have on you.

You are a city boy.  You have perhaps ridden horses a few hundred times.  You do not sit a horse well at all, and although you have respect for horses and for farms and ranches and barn cats and have formed a kind of bonding passion for herd dogs and bluetick hounds, you are a city boy.  Your ride is neither the bronc nor the bull or horse, it is the urban short story, as cranky and pestered as you are in the city, as bored by concepts of rural life as only a city boy could be.

Talking to persons who have written short stories, reading the short stories of writers such as McGuane, who make you want to sit a story of your own and let it loose to see if you can ride it down, even though it bucks you and throws you on your ass, willing to get back on again, and screw the humiliation or sore bones, just to get the sense of doing that thing, much like the young protagonist in Annie Proulx's short story.

The vision you sought from one book is not to be had, but the vision from being in the world of story, trying to keep on it even though it wishes with great passion to throw you, this is the discovery of the holy grail in a used bookstore.  This is the knowledge you need, the knowledge that somehow urges you back after you've been thrown.

In 1967, a writer by the name of William Murray wrote a novel called The Sweet Ride, in many ways about surfing.  You've watched more surfers than rodo performances, and although you are not of that world either, it is closer to you and when you stay on a story until it gives you some of the responses you saw in it, you think of what you've been through as a sweet ride, perhaps in a nod to Murray and his novel, perhaps in recognition that there is a sweetness and harmony to the most noir and bleak as well as the most focused of poignancy.

Power

Power is energy, controlled and transformed.  Difficult to think of an act being performed, a thing being made or unmade without power.  The source of power is energy.  Throughout history, energy has been transformed into forces that compete with natural events in the sense of causing eras such as The Bronze Age or The Industrial Revolution.

Power is the cause and effect of such conditions as politics.  You could say--and believe you will--that politics, which are caused by power, has a direct influence on story.  You could say further--and believe you now will--that story releases and directs energy within those who read and witness it.  And while you're at it, why not go all the way, by saying story itself is the control and transformation and manipulation of power?

A major theme in story is opposing forces, which takes us to observations governing inertia.  Objects at rest tend to stay at rest until overcome by a greater force or power.  Thus power lurks about the stage, waiting to propel opposing forces into opposition or waiting to give a nudge to such abstractions as Fate, Karma, and Justice.

Story is about two or more individuals in some kind of competition where some kind of settlement awaits, depending on the individuals themselves and the current attitude of the writer who sets forces into motion and away from stasis.

Years ago, although perhaps not that many, you experiences the bumper cars in carnival fun zones as expressions of enjoyable collision, perhaps made more enjoyable because they were ways of working off the pent-up energy of frustration, anger, resentment, and on the other side of the emotional ledger, enthusiasm, joy, commitment, and the energy released from discovery.  As such things go, you could even say you get energy from discovering things about yourself and those about you that did not speak well to the curriculum vitae you wished to present socially.

Someone in story has power over others.  In some cases, the fact of this power being in place may be due to positive social, moral, and political reasons, but such assessments might mean nothing positive to those on the other side of the power.  Even when used democratically or evenhandedly, the mere presence of power may produce resentment, which, you see, is an energy in itself, prompting actions which may be considered anarchy.

Power does not, then, even have to be used; the mere fact of its presence may cause resentment or such other energy sources as intimidation.  Look at that river.  How we going to get across it?  Forget the question of why the asker, the intimidated ones, would want to cross the river for a moment or two, although suffice it for not to say that plausible motivation, say motivation to cross a river, is of itself a source of energy.

Isn't motivation, after all, a driving force in story?  Who would want to kill Uncle Charlie?  In order to find out, we have to examine the relationships Uncle Charlie had with those about him, validating your theory that motive is nascent power.  Someone who knew Uncle Charlie had sufficient energy/motivation to wish him dead, then to act on that wish.

Story is controlled power.  Those in power have and exercise the energy necessary to demonstrate their position to those of lesser rank or privilege.  You don't get to play in the big kid's sand box.  You don't get to eat with the adults.  You must remember, you're the junior faculty here.

Any number of wonderful story moments arise when the power shifts without the one in power realizing it until a bit too late. If one in power is deposed, the energy turns the story toward humor and cosmic justice.  If the focus is on one without power who gains or regains lost power, the payoff is one of triumph, the mood and implications radiant of positiveness.

Story is all about power, power shifts, and things that transform the power into some kind of inertia, either the inertia of stasis or the inertia of movement.

If you look at story as a motor or engine, converting energy to emotional product, you'll have begun to sense story as it ought to be sensed.

Story as Habeas Corpus: Help, Help, I'm Being Held Prisoner in a Story

Momentum is everything in the early drafts, and yet momentum is the the indecisive cat, not sure if it wants to leave the room or come back in once it has gone out.  Momentum fights a difficult battle with detail and both momentum and detail fight you.  So many verbs, wanting to be the cat and be let outside, only to return for some whim.

Detail begins to want to stop you in your tracks, bore you with detail, where the number of paces a character takes seem of moment only to be overshadowed by a particular shade of hair or a description of a face.

Vocabulary wishes to get in the way, wondering of you why you spent so much time as a youngster, pouring through dictionaries.  Why. indeed?  So that you could feel more comfortable with a full tool chest, confident it was the range of words and the way you threw them off that made the story.  You were well ahead of the game because you knew umbra, penumbra, and antumbra; you did not have to be stuck with mere shadow.

Although you know, going in, that the place where you began the draft will not remain as the place where the final draft begins, you nevertheless need some sense of a boulder, chugging down the face of a hill, that necessary first line that pulls the cork out of the bottle, releases the pent-up genie.

And with whom do you start?  Do you in fact have the right person?  Is there no better person to be the narrative filter?  If the work at hand is not fiction, rather an essay, are you in the proper frame of mind to deliver the voice you feel appropriate for freighting the narrative information?  Are you to be ironic, serious, inflated with gravitas?

Difficult as it is to proceed in such a quandary of thought, you need to make some decisions, you need to do some thinking, some primary arranging to get a forceful narrative start that will urge the genie out of the bottle, ready at least to nod his head to you in thanks for allowing him out of the bottle.

You are in fact supposed not to think, rather to listen to your senses begin to articulate the narrative path.  You try to keep your eyes open for any wanderers, youngsters who might wander off, then become lost.

Over years of practice, you've developed some first draft process, making it rare when you pause to seek a vision of what is to come next.  Pausing, seeking visions, those are the equivalent of shamanism, aren't they?  They're thinking, which should not come until the first draft is largely completed, a mass of lined note pad pages or unspellchecked computer pages, dashed off at great and inaccurate speed.

Of course this is all sophistry; the first draft should be given more than thought; it should be given your living presence so that it can be heard, like a prisoner in a remote jailhouse, writing a crude, pleading writ of hebeas corpus on the back of a paper bag.  Help, help, the writ says, I'm being held against my will.  You have my body in the hoosegow,  Let me fucking go.

When you began to consider stories as writs of habeas corpus, you began to think more of the characters as prisoners, including your tolerance for the cliche that ninety-five percent of inmates argue they've been wrongly detained.  You wouldn't be in here, you want to rail at them, if you hadn't been doing something that appeared illegal.

They may agree that they were doing something suspicious, but whatever it was, "they" had no right to arrest you or subject you to such additional humiliation.

First drafts are in their way anarchists, shouting, yowling for social justice, wanting to be heard now, demanding your attention--or else.  How difficult it is to make adequate sense of them at times.  You often approach yours with a sense of foreboding, wondering what you will discoverer beyond the fact of you having tried to get the writing done as quickly and completely as possible, confident that the discipline of speed with overcome the consequences and awkward style of too much extra detail.

First drafts are a relief to have done.  However much more difficult it is to begin thinking about where the story begins, where it ends, and what its tone is, who's in charge, such considerations seem to make the ultimate, necessary thoughts worthwhile.

Appearances

When a thing or condition is apparent, the trouble begins.  To whom, for instance, is that thing or situation apparent?  Yes, of course, apparent things seem to be where they are thought to be, but there's the question again--to whom do they seem to be in place or even in an emerging condition?  And don't forget this question:  Is that person a reliable witness.

We're used to speaking of appearances, the coming into view or perception of some quality or person or place, for that matter, any noun.  We're not so used to speaking of apparentces.  Your spell checker is not used to seeing apparentces, will have no truck with the word, much less its meaning.  And because apparentces is a neologism, a word coined for this blog post, it may never come into view beyond these few lines, although you do believe it is an easy new word to interpret.

But look, will you, at the mischief caused by appearances.  If a thing is apparent, its presence can be felt if not seen.  How long will this appearance last?  If this presumed thing is apparent, can it become non-apparent after a time, perhaps overcome by some forceful logic or even a lessening of interest?

At some point during your reading of one of your favorite genera, the mystery, you may be delivered the appearance that the proverbial butler did the proverbial it, killed the individual whose corpse was discovered in the main salon, some imaginative prop, say a champagne cork, stuck between his rictus sardonicus death gaze teeth.

Good luck with that.  You are being manipulated by the author, which is one of the reasons you were reading the mystery in the first place, no?  Yes.  You are also being manipulated by those sublime forces contributing to such aspects of you as your curiosity, your level of cynicism, and such abilities as you have to gauge apparent (there's that word again) motivations.

As a reader of mysteries, you're aware of the big three of mystery deconstruction, Means, Motive, and Opportunity.  Who among the ensemble cast of characters had the means of access to the victim, the motive for committing the crime, and the opportunity to do so?

In a successful mystery, everyone at one time or another is an apparent suspect.  Indeed, in at least one Agatha Christie mystery, pretty much all the ensemble cast had the means, motive, and opportunity to do in the corpse discovered in a railroad drawing room coach.

So far as mysteries are concerned, you enjoy being led down what you call the garden path, led to believe by dint of your own prejudices, your own bigotry, your own misanthropy to suspect the apparent worst in everyone.  Of course you get a chance to realize how you were being played.  This has happened often enough, because you've read any number of well-constructed mysteries, that you enjoy the game of being caught out, but apparently you will have learned something of enough significance to move you away from your prejudices and closer to a rational, reasonable person.  Good luck with that, too.

With apparent elements in play, you are dancing as well with another weasel word, seems.  A fitting synonym for seems is appears.  Something apparent or appearing seems to be emerging, seems to be in place, seems to be orderly or logical or sensible or even tangible.

Ever hear of the rationalization, Seemed like a good idea at the time?  What about, We seem to be in substantial agreement.  Watch out for those appearances because in the long run, we have to face the apparent reality that what seems apparent may only be provisionally apparent and what is actually apparent is--here it comes--what is merely or barely or some other adverbial weasel word undercutting what can be seen and examined.

When you having a debate-type argument or discussion with someone and your conversant nods, maintains eye contact, and even makes vocal and sub-vocal sounds of agreement, you have considerable cause to think you are in apparent agreement on the points under discussion. This seems more evident as the conversation continues, adding more fuel yet to the apparent argument you might engage in the future when each of you discovers the apparent concord or accord was no such thing.

A story doesn't seem to be working out as you'd thought earlier in the game because apparently there are elements missing or too many divergent elements present.  You appear to have lost control.  You appear to be on the wrong end of an argument.  You seem not to be able to do anything about it.

All boils down to perception, doesn't it?  But whose?  We're back to that again, don't you think?  Seems to get more complicated when an answer appears to be closest at hand.

Reasons for Being Cranky

Jane Austen's most quoted universal truth is at once a splendid way to begin a narrative and an intended irony of equal splendidness.  You have learned much about your craft of choice from Ms. Austen, much of it built around the constructs of irony, your most favored of all learning platform of hers the novel Persuasion.

The truth of universal acknowledgment you are beginning to notice is that a man of your age or thereabouts is apt to be cranky.  There are longish laundry lists of reasons for this crankiness, moving in as though squatters who have found a fine, unoccupied home in which to squat.  

Some in your generation are afflicted with noticeable arthritis, others have taken on the dreaded ring of adipose tissue about the waist, while yet others have been blighted with gravitational downturn, which is to say wrinkles, bags, and sags.

Yours is also a generation which is some sort of plateau so far as career advancement is concerned, a time where our Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon forbears would have amassed many tales of successful woolly mammoth hunts or heart-rending portraits of aurochs and bison on the walls of caves.  Men who have aspired but not yet delivered on their aspirations to a satisfactory pre-set standard are wont to be cranky.

Men who have played it safe and are now mired in safety and regrets have tendencies toward cranky, and while we're on the subject, men who have spent much of their time allowing their own cynicism and negativism to rule them appear to have embraced a dystopic vision of the universe, its engines and attractions.

There are, to be sure, myriad reasons for being cranky, many of which are not at all a part of the individual genome but which are entirely accidental.  Among these is the play between envy and jealousy directed at another who appears to have profited from mere happenstance rather than purposeful industry.

If you were to grade yourself (which you suppose you are in the act of doing at this very moment), you'd say you were less cranky now than you were at , say, a past time of twenty years back.  You'd also say that on an average, you were cranky now less than twenty percent of the time.  

You also have to admit the arrival of an insight as you enter this paragraph into being.  The insight, a not so gentle tap on the metaphoric shoulder, demanding your attention, is that being in the presence of someone who appears to be not cranky more than ninety percent of the time provokes your suspicion if not your direct crankiness.

This means you have parameters in which being cranky does play a part or, to rephrase that, you are suspicious of parameters or philosophies or lifestyles in which there is no room for cranky responses.

Your best supposition at the moment is that in your more salad days, your cranky index was well into the forty percent range, meaning among other things that you were carrying about a load of resentment and anger that needed to be addressed with the same kind of oversight a street corner salesman must display to avoid being rousted by the cops.

Resentment and anger take effort to deal with.  Far better to work them out by inventing characters and situations whereby you can write your way through them and in the process begin to recognize trends and tendencies which in effect allow you to give them up, offer them, as the Hindus would say, to the fires of Brahman, certainly to bid them a fond farewell.

Reading and writing have led you to conclude that anger and resentment, while among human traits, are also apt to bring forth characters and situations that are cliche, a place you wish to avoid.

Reading and writing lead you to conclude that another hard wired condition--fear--although fraught with potential for cliche, is quite positive if used with close consideration.  You do believe--at least for the moment--that at some distant point, you were fearful of the effects of crankiness on your person.

You have suspected for some time that your default position is enthusiasm and thus you see, via another messenger, a kind of cosmic pizza deliverer, the strategy of looking for something to enthuse over or around or about when the crotchets of crankiness are pestering you for any spare change.