Why It Matters

For the last 14 months I’ve avoided writing in diners because it’s an expensive and unhealthy routine for writing.

Also, I haven’t found a diner down here in Lower Alabama in which I’m comfortable. My new small town features a handful of fast food restaurants, an Applebee’s, a pair each of buffets and barbecue joints, and three Mexican restaurants. Until recently we’ve only had one diner, and while mostly friendly the folks there are sometimes a bit curt. That’s a lot of empty calories for a little Southern town, but no place to sit and stare out the window for an hour or two when the pen doesn’t seem to want to move.

That changed recently. A couple of months ago a new diner opened up near the truck stop on the main highway, and it’s that diner where I’m writing at this moment. Red and black swiveling stools line the counter like Beefeaters, booths along the plate glass windows, both kinds of music on the radio: country and western. Right now Lefty Frizell is reminding us that if you’ve got the money, honey, he’s got the time. Just before that Buck Owens and His Buckaroos had a tiger by the tail. I’m picking at a pecan muffin and sipping from a tall glass of iced tea that my waiter never allows to fall below half empty. He can’t be more than 25 years-old, but he would fit right in at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert circa 1976. Heck, he’d fit into Lynyrd Skynyrd circa 1976, with his reddish-blonde beard and his feathered shag.

Writing has been difficult for me since leaving California, my home for nearly 35 years–almost impossible, really. I doubt whether over the last year and change I’ve produced ten pages, and if you squeezed those with a diamond’s pressure they wouldn’t amount to one decent paragraph. The routine is the thing, and I no longer have one.

I don’t just mean writing–my days have no structure. As a result, the days bleed into the nights. Rare is the evening that finds me asleep prior to three a.m. (Buck and His Buckaroos just reminded me that all I gotta do is act naturally, which I think may be more the problem than the cure. Lack of routine has inched me closer to my animal nature. I’m becoming more house cat than human.)

Insomnia is probably a bigger concern than lack of writing, I guess, though both have their health consequences. Sleep deprivation leads to myriad ills, while not writing leaves me feeling more and more worthless and isolated. Both maladies need to be addressed, and routine is likely the cure for each of them.

As a young boy, when I couldn’t sleep I would imagine my thoughts as trains running along parallel tracks. The key to sleep was to stop all of the trains, which I would methodically do one by one, quieting my mind thought by thought. This was a fairly bright strategy for a kindergartener if not for the fact that the last train was the “stop all trains” engine. I could never figure out how to stop that one, and so I simply stared at my ceiling until the Devil crawled over the foot of my bed and dragged me to Hell or I fell asleep, whichever came first. He never got me, by the way. Credit for that goes to the circle of stuffed animals that guarded my perimeter every night.

One common cure for insomnia is to find something upon which to focus one’s attention, but not something likely to hold one’s interest. This is the concept behind counting sheep, for example, or watching Peter Jackson movies. But three and a half hours of King Kong constitutes cruel and usual punishment in many jurisdictions, so my sleepless nights feature silent movies with the sound muted so that their scores don’t draw my attention. I love the Germans–Lotte Reiniger is a current favorite–but usually I opt for early American comedy. Harold Lloyd, Fatty Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, and Charlie Chaplin are often the last faces I see before I finally nod off. I’ve watched their short silent films so may times that I recognize long forgotten screen stars like Snub Pollard, Mabel Normand, and Edna Purviance.

I also see where the tracks connect–Fatty doing the “Dance of the Rolls” in 1917’s The Rough House, eight years prior to Chaplin making the same bit legendary in The Gold Rush, or seeing six year-old Jackie “Uncle Fester” Coogan performing with Chaplin in 1921’s The Kid. My favorite connection, though, is the oversized influence those early silent comedies had on Looney Tunes, Keaton in particular. No Buster, no Bugs.

I’m oddly fascinated by the fact that solely in terms of lifetimes my train tracks overlap with Charlie Chaplin’s and Harold Lloyd’s. How is it possible that a man as young as I am breathed the same as air as silent film stars? How can my AI lifetime intersect with horse drawn wagons and hand-cranked movie cameras?

And that’s when the railroad tracks clearly reappear, this time not as thoughts stretching all the way to the horizon but rather as segments laid parallel, our lives with their distinct beginnings and endings overlapping one another’s. Combine any two chunks of track and extend the line. One can travel on James plus Chaplin from today all the way to 1889, Charlie’s birth year. The Lloyd-James line is a bit shorter, extending only as far as 1893. We cover a lot of chronological ground, these black and white comedians and me.

I spend an inordinate amount of time watching the extras in theses movies, particularly the elderly ones. Assume the old guy in a Chaplin movie made in 1918 was 70 at the time it was filmed. That puts the old timer’s birth year at 1848–13 years prior to the start of the Civil War. On screen, Chaplin is interacting with a man who had firsthand memories of what at least one of my diner companions likely refers to as The War of Northern Aggression. Connect my hunk of train track to just two pieces and the line extends all the way to the Antebellum South–that’s how recently slavery existed in the United States.

Add just one more piece of track–that old movie extra’s piece overlaps with Abraham Lincoln’s, who was born in 1809–and we’re back to a time when Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were still alive. James to Chaplin to old guy to Lincoln is how little track we need to reach back to folks who intersect with the founding fathers.

This isn’t a game played solely with the famous, by the way. One of my grade school teachers had grandparents who were slaves, or so the playground stories claimed. My great-grandparents all were certainly old enough to intersect with people whose lives predated the Civil War. Unfortunately, Buster Keaton is more real to me than my own great-grandparents, only one of whom I met and then only briefly.

During my short lifetime, 71 nations have claimed (or reclaimed) their sovereignty. That’s over 1/3 of the geopolitical map drawn during my lifetime, at least in terms of flags. The White House has been home to 11 presidents, 25% of the total number in U.S. history. I was born on a planet where Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band didn’t exist and whose moon featured no human footprints. MLK still walked the Earth, as did both Picasso and Magritte. Henry Miller, John Steinbeck, Groucho Marx–my segment of track overlaps with all of theirs.

It’s pretty staggering how much has happened in so little time when measured by lives laid end to end. We’re only eight Shakespearean lifetimes away from Shakespeare, for example, and while my train track doesn’t quite reach J. Robert Oppenheimer’s, I have living relatives who predate the atomic age.

Yes, and it’s pretty staggering how little I’ve accomplished on my tiny chunk of railroad. My tracks are dusty, heat warped, rusted, no more than scrap iron. I’m just that old man standing behind Chaplin, nameless, anonymous, with no more purpose than to fill the frame.

These are the late night thoughts that rattle through my brain, resistant to my efforts to shut them down. It’s no wonder that I can’t sleep, but maybe my luck will change now that I have a diner in which I can write again.