So ends the tenth volume of A View from this Wilderness. I started this in 2016, three months after my father’s death. Since then I’ve written 667 posts. In the past year alone there were more than 100K views from more than 9K independent viewers. One disturbing stat: This past year there were 30 views sent by Chatgpt.com. It reminds me of the student many years ago who turned in a plagiarized assignment about 911 not knowing that I was the original author of the piece. Oops.
I’ve written about every possible subject I can think of, and I’ve not written about a few things as well. I’ve finished a piece and thought twice about publishing it and so deleted it, and I’ve finished pieces and thought about publishing it somewhere else, and sent it on to newspapers, journals, and magazines. But I’ve written, which always feels good and right and somehow cleansing. It’s not unlike confession or therapy; I’ve done both in my life and I like writing better.
It used to be writing felt like a means of justifying my true ambition which was simply to wander at will. But that is hard to make a living at, so I wrote, which is also hard to make a living at, so I taught, which is also hard to make a living at, and suddenly I’m hell and gone from my original ambition of being able to wander at will, and depression sets in. SAD is going to creep in within a month or so like it does every year, and even the writing will stop at that point.
Is anyone still with me?
Anyway, so after analyzing all of that, I have come to understand a significant truth: I have worked long enough now and written long enough now to be able to just chuck it all and, finally, wander at will. I might even write about it.
You see, last night I watched Deliver Me From Evil. (Traditional transitions always bored the hell out of me). In it, a thirty-two-year old Springsteen attempts to wrestle out the demons in his soul by writing through it with dark, disturbing acoustic pieces. While recording them, he also records the songs which a few years later will become the Born in the USA album, and the record execs have heard that stuff and want it, but Bruce insists on the dark, acoustic stuff first. And to make matters worse from the execs position, he doesn’t want the songs “cleaned up” at the studio. He wants the sound from the cassette tape he originally recorded the songs on in a hotel room. His manager and friend, Jon Landau, finally sees how badly Bruce needs this and how he won’t be able to move forward until this is out of his system. Landau explains to the execs that if they want Born in the USA, they’re going to have to release Nebraska first, and they have to do it without any support from the artist–no tours, no singles, no interviews, not even his picture on the album. They agree and Nebraska goes to number 3 on the Billboard Charts anyway. Two years later Born in the USA shatters all records.
Back to me:
Curious Men: Lost in the Congo is my Nebraska. I have other projects laid out in front of me: “Front Row Seat,” Office Hours, The Coward, more. But this Monkey of a book in the Congo rode my back for forty plus years, and I knew I had to get it out, not for anyone but me. My publisher, Kim, agreed, and a diverse array of readers, critics, and authors chimed in with nothing but good things to say, but I didn’t really care all that much; Curious Men was for me. And now that the story is finally told the way I wanted it to be told, I can “Breathe in, Breathe out, Move on.”
And with cinema-like timing, the year comes to an end. Tomorrow I can wake up and start new, like we should be able to do every year, but we often don’t. We make the same honest but tired resolutions and try to fit them into the same old routine, and that doesn’t make sense. If you want something different to happen, you have to do something different.
Okay then, let’s go with that in 2026.
And now for something completely different…
a view from this wilderness 