"We were dreamers, dreaming greatly...

... in the man- stifled town;
We yearned beyond the sky-line where the strange roads go down."

Kipling, of course.

I become blue, even depressed, when unable to get away to somewhere strange, cold, and unhospitable but for people, who may stuff you with sheep or drown you in vodka. Or maybe to a hot place that smells of the sea, and rotting fish. Or maybe..

Then this offer of a quick trip to the mountains of southern Turkey came-- more soon-- and suddenly all was right again. What's a little discomfort to see strange old places and things?

The night after i got the news, the often- cantankerous Fred Reed published a column about the life of writers, or at least a certain kind of writer, that I found both moving and funny. Some excerpts:

"We are not always a happy lot, being restless, easily bored, and unable to bear routine. We have our good days when we sense the rightness of things on a sunny morning in God knows where—for that is where we have spent much of our time. We have passed days without end in roadside diners, atop boxcars late at night on the seaboard rails, in honky-tonks in Austin. We have heard the Greezy Wheels. We knew BC Street in Koza, the street of the snake butchers in Wan Wha, in Taipei where the workers brothels were. We have hobnobbed with hookers, drunks, geniuses, psychopaths, mercenaries, transvestites, and the men of the fishing fleets. We have seen fresh squid draped like glistening pink gloves on fish carts.

"Some will say that our lives constitute a sordid cohabitation with the ungodly. I hope so. Detritus we are, and detritus we will be. It suits us. The world, the part worth knowing, lives in the alleys. We have known the smoke and dimness of a thousand Asian bars, known them till they run together in the mind, and found the hookers morally preferable to the expensively suited criminals of good society, more engaging than the liars of the press conferences. There is more of life and humanity in the driver of a battered Ford who picks up a hitchhiker in the darkling valleys of Tennessee than in the moral fetor and vanity of Washington.
(Snip)

"It changes you, and starts to be a closed club. We talk to each other because we can’t talk to anyone else. Outside of Washington you can’t say you’re a writer without people saying, “Oh. And have you been published?” Well, yeah, lady, actually. So you shut up. To another scribe, you can speak of the unlikely and distant and not entirely believable, and it is just shop talk."