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Light-hearted looks at the occupational hazards of being a writer

by Garrison Gibson

Created on: November 28, 2007

The free press was created for the benefit of Guttenberg's disciple's, it was necessary to revolt against fascist collectivism in one guise or another through enscriving faster, cheaper and better. When the broadcast 'industry' producing raving lunacy finally tired of rational writing competition they began to dismiss writing as 'lecturing' even if it written just for those reading of their own free will, who wanted just the facts. Are their hazards in writing just the facts, of course. No pay, long hours without a keyboard, dim lighting conditions, all these may beset a writer as he goes through a day in the life...

The Gulag Archipelago of Alexander watched over ya. It was an historical reality so much worse than this incredible lightness of being.

At the seventh hour of the third try to find the direct way out of the wood I saw the beginning of the decomposition of reality. White pinpoints of light appeared within my field of vision and body. My consciousness became aware of the plasticity of time and being. The moving deck of the sailboat became less substantial, and the seven mile distant horizon of the ocean blued into the McAllister effect, the shift of being from environmental integration into the transubstantial realm of ideas-in-themselves. The last thing I saw of the ocean was a happy memory.

I raced downhill in an uncontrollable slide amidst dark wet tree stumps on the crusty frozen surface of a clear-cut mountain slope. I slid at high speed on my stomach,side and back as I ricocheted against stumps through the depressions at their bases and bounced on. The clear-cut was at least a kilometer long. I fell diagonally over two fall lines in the cut as the image of Thomas Beckett's chapel in Salisbury England passed through my mynd. I was a pinball for all seasons.

The sky was dark. Through the falling snow the moss-enshrouded green conifers gave no indication of direction.

I was lost. I knew I had to find shelter or die. All I thought of was a will to live. Like the experience of being the only bit of sensory feeling in existence, the mode of being in himself was reduced to essential simplicity. In the desperation of struggle to live I managed to arrest the slide as my shoulder cracked into another tree stump before I continued into nothingness.

My feet had lost all feeling and I assumed they were frozen. In the wet, iced-over combat boots, my feet inside the Army leather had no warmth. I lay sprawled in the snow wondering how long it would take to

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