I've been dry for a long time. For a while, I believed the need to write had passed from me... the world seemed flat, tired, tamed, and all I could think was that I'd grown up, nothing was new, what lay beyond the crest of each hill would only slightly vary from those things I'd already felt or thought before. As you pass into adulthood, your tastes and beliefs and perspectives seem to coalesce into a system that finally works for you. It happens subtly; you don't notice the numbness crawl through your life, slowing the great, robust metabolism of your childhood imagination. The liquid silver of your mind finds the ruts carved out from blueprints you settled for, gradually, gradually. The freeflowing eddies of eye and ear get pulled in and strung along rotations of arbitrary new gearwork; like thread on a spinning wheel, they find the bedding of their track and move with great dependability in the narrow passage of their function. Meanwhile, you only know that you finally feel safe and reassured and comfortable - a sort of peaceful rest after the tumult and confusion of your teens and twenties. Then one day, if you're typical, you wake up and twenty years have gone by and you double over in horror wondering where things went wrong. You find that you have become an automated human being. Press one for our pre-recorded happy response. Press two for our pre-recorded angry response. Press three for apathy... I'm sorry, the number you have entered is not an option. To hear the menu again, press seven...
If you're lucky, you wake up after a couple years or so and pick up "Something Wicked This Way Comes" and read "And if it's around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash gray at twilight, it seems Halloween will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bedsheets around corners." And you realize that magic still exists, that life is poetry, and that those things which wait over the crest of the hill can still transform you - but only as much as you actively seek to transform them.
And so you begin to write again.

Thanks, Ray.

You're right. I teach a literature course at our community college. I always have Farenheit 451 and Martian Chronicles listed as a choice for mid-term and final reports. Students who have not been exposed to Bradbury always come away more alive. Bradbury's style and subjects bring people out of numbness into a more alive experience. At 46, I find I need a jolt of Bradbury to reinvigorate me. Otherwise, I'm a pretty danged boring person.

I too have been inspired by Ray. It was as if I had walked (should that be trudged) through through my own apprenticeship as a writer. Everything was plot, plot, plot and not much room for anything else, especially not the beauty and imagination Ray brought into my life through his words. And now, when I dip down to those low deep waters of discouragement and i'm seriously running out of air, I pick myself a lifesaver from the shelf -- Zen, or my personal favourite Death is a Lonely Business - and I flick through, taking in the good air again, filling my lungs and my heart with enough courage to carry on. Ray provides the one voice in the wilderness, the shouting mad prophet of beauty -- Live! Live! he cries. See this world is more than war and heartache. Smell, touch, taste, but most of all feel, feel as though it were going out of fashion (read Trainspotting and tell me there aren't writers who think feeling is old fashioned) Ray gives all writers a distant star, true north to aim for, to follow. And following such a bright star can we possibly lose our footing? I think not. Thankyou Ray, from the bottom of my heart, and the thousand, million other hearts you've reached into and touched.

Now leaving Dry Spell, Arizona, for greener fields!

Greener Fields?

Let's GO !!!!

Thanks, Nard, for moving these threads up.

No Problem, Dandelion...........