In David James Duncan’s The River Why, Gus, the main character, decides at a young age that in an ideal world, he would fish 14-1/2 hours per day. He’s still in high school when he formulates the following plan:

The Ideal 24-Hour Schedule

1. sleep: 6 hours
2. food consumption: 30 min. (between casts or while plunking, if possible)
3. school: 0 hours!
4. bath, stool, etc.: 15 min. (unavoidable)
5. housework and miscellaneous chores: 30 min. (yards unnecessary; dust not unhealthy; utilitarian neatness easily accomplished)
6. nonangling conversation: 0 hrs.
7. transportation: 45 min. (live on good fishing river)
8. gear maintenance/fly-tying/rod-building/log-keeping, etc.: 1 hr. 30 min.
9. fishing time: 14-1/2 hrs. per day!

Ways to Actualize Ideal Schedule
1. finish school; no college!
2. move alone to year-round stream (preferably coastal)
3. avoid friendships, anglers not excepted (wastes time with gabbing)
4. experiment with caffeine, nicotine, to eliminate excess sleep
5. do all driving, shopping, gear preparation, research, etc. after dark, saving daylight for fishing only

Result (allowing for unforseeable interruptions): 4,000 actual fishing hrs. per year!!!

I was sick over the weekend. I woke up Saturday with a sore throat, soldiered through the morning, and then threw in the towel, foregoing a blogger meet-up and sundry other tasks. Sunday was more of the same. (I did, however, manage to pull myself together for a dinner with Sally Parrot Ashbrook, a GRS-reader from Atlanta. Kris and I met Sally and Dan at Higgins for a wonderful meal. It can be awkward chatting with virtual strangers, but not so with Dan and Sally.) I woke on Monday still feeling cruddy, so I called in sick to work.

When I woke a second time, at around ten, I felt fine. I got out of bed, sat down at my desk, and I wrote for four hours.

I wrote for four hours, and I wasn’t interrupted once. The phone didn’t ring. Nick didn’t come into the office. Kris didn’t call me to clean my dishes out of the sink. I simply wrote. I finished four entries for Get Rich Slowly, and one entry for foldedspace. (You’ll see it tomorrow.) It felt awesome.

Then I spent an hour running errands, followed by two hours of lounging on the porch with my pipe and some books. The took turns sitting with me. I played a little Wii.

When Kris came home, we made dinner and ate outside at the picnic table. We took a garden tour together, examining the budding grapes and the lanky peas. Later, as Kris watched Antiques Roadshow, I wrote three entries for Animal Intelligence.

At nine, we climbed into bed and watched an episode of Battlestar Galactica.

That, my friends, is close to my ideal schedule. All that’s missing is the first three hours of the day (lost here due to my illness), three hours in which I could exercise and spend time with friends.

It was exhilerating to realize that I could actually work from home, could sit in my office and write, and produce good work. It was the last step in realizing that yes, this is my destiny.

I’m cleaning downstairs. After this week’s session with Lauren, I’ve agreed to clean the house (well, I agreed to clean my office, but I need to clean the house to clean the office), and I have piles of magazines, books, and papers on the dining room table.

I put the jacket back on The Secret. In the process, I find a stupid adhesive anti-theft strip, peel it off, and take it to the kitchen. On the way, I spot my lovely new notebook. I pick it up, too. I take a few steps, set down the notebook, take a few more, throw away the anti-theft strip.

It occurs to me that I ought to check Amazon to see if they carry this lovely new notebook. I retrace my steps so that I can check the model number. But I can’t find it. It’s not on the dining room table. It’s not on a chair or bookshelf in the library. It’s not in the bathroom. It’s nowhere in the kitchen. It’s not in the living room. (I hadn’t gone anywhere near these rooms, but I checked them anyhow.)

The notebook has vanished. Somehow I’ve managed to hide it from myself.

I am getting old.

This probably won’t come as a shock to those who are close to me — or even those who barely know me — but the internet has become something of a time sink for me. It’s true that I now view blogging as my vocation, and this, by its very nature, requires me to stay well-connected; but it’s also true that I fritter away hours every day with what are essentially prolonged repetitive distractions.

• I check e-mail. Constantly.
• I monitor my site statistics. Constantly.
• I keep tabs on my RSS feeds.
• I check my favorite sites for updates.
• I google or wikipedia anything that occurs to me to google or wikipedia.
• I play mindless games.

There’s nothing wrong with doing these things once-in-a-while, but they’re constant distractions for me. They’re not productive. I have now gone eight minutes without checking e-mail or site stats. It’s astounding that I know this. It’s sad that I know this. And yet in a couple more minutes, the urge will be so strong that I’ll stop what I’m doing here to check again. And then I’ll check again in another few minutes.

The writers guild met last night. (Have I mentioned how much I’ve come to value these meetings?) I go to the pub early so that I can be frugal and purchase food at happy hour prices. This gives me an hour on my own. (Sometimes Paul shows up early, too, and we can chat.)

Last night I took my laptop. The pub has no internet connection. For one full blissful hour, I was working on my computer as I normally do but without a connection to the net. You would not believe how productive I was. I responded to sixteen pieces of e-mail and queued them for later sending. (In fact, I started the evening with 76 pieces of e-mail in my inbox; when I finished, I’d whittled that to 24 pieces.) I figured out how to use iCal’s to-do list and began to add things to it. (AmyJo, you’ll be happy to hear that I added: “Fix AmyJo’s blog” to the list!) I created a schedule for upcoming entries at Get Rich Slowly. I even wrote outlines of a few of these entries.

I was able to get more done in an hour than I usually do in a day. It was awesome.

“I need to find a place like that in Oak Grove,” I told Kris when I returned home. “A place where I can linger, but which does not have an internet connection.”

“What about the library?” she asked.

“That’s good, but it has its own distractions. The place I need can’t have other stuff to tempt me away from the task at hand.”

The quest is on. I need to find a spot I can sit and work. I wonder if the Chinese restaurant I like so much would mind if I took up a booth for a few hours on mid-Friday or mid-Saturday afternoons?

(Hooray for small victories! I managed to write this entire entry without checking stats or e-mail. That’s eighteen minutes of discipline. Discipline that ends right now…)

Get Rich Slowly has afforded me some unexpected opportunities. Among the most exciting of these is the chance to work with a “wellness coach”. Lauren Muney, who runs Physical Mind, contacted me after a recent GRS entry in which I lamented how fat I am (a subject with which foldedspace readers are all-too-familiar).

I’m a wellness and fitness coach. I’ll give you one month of coaching to get you back on your feet (no pun intended). I am doing this because I read your posts everyday and you’ve given me much to think about. You deserve a chance to work on yourself in return…(and to get away from the computer)

I was scared at first. What is a wellness coach? What does this mean to me? More to the point, Lauren’s offer forced me to make a decision. I had shared my complaints about my health with 10,000 strangers, and one of them had called me on it, had offered to help me make some life corrections. It’s one thing to complain about your situation; it’s another thing to actually act upon it.

Ultimately, I agreed to take Lauren’s help.

Last week she had me keep a daily journal of everything I ate. I didn’t consciously alter my eating habits just because somebody was watching from afar: I had KitKat bars for breakfast when it would have been the choice I’d normally make, I drank orange juice and vodka, I snacked incessantly. I documented it all.

After sending this food diary and a health assessment to Lauren, we arranged a time to chat on the phone. Yesterday morning we spent nearly 2-1/2 hours discussing my habits, proper fitness, and how to get me from here to there. Everything Lauren said meshes with the information I’ve read in nutrition books. She also had some insights into fitness that were new to me. And in a case of serendipity, she stressed the importance of mindfulness, the Buddhist concept of being aware of your thoughts and your actions. (I’ve read about mindfulness in several places this week as I’ve coped with my bout of worry.)

It was a long call, and though Lauren’s advice was good, her list of “action items” is intimidating. Here are the things I need to accomplish:

• Exercise mindfulness (not only in eating, but in everyday life).
• Clear out all the junk food and processed food from the kitchen. (Done.)
• Shop for healthy foods to replace the junk.
• Call the doctor and schedule a check-up.
• Go to a running store and have an expert fit me to a pair of shoes.
• Begin walking/running, but do so slowly. I’m going to have to learn about proper running gait if I’m going to do this.
• End the sugar. This is the most important thing for me, and it’s going to be the most difficult. As most of you know, I’m hooked on the stuff. I may be a grouch for a while until I’ve coped with this adjustment.
• Research indoor bike training.
• Begin re-reading my nutrition book.
• Reduce alcohol consumption. Special occasions only now.
• Reduce computer time. This, too, will be tough. I have a compulsion to post twice a day at Get Rich Slowly, and as often as possible here. I need to break this compulsion.

The conversation with Lauren was energizing.

A few hours later, she sent an e-mail that re-iterated everything we’d talked about, and which outlined the above steps to improving my health. I was amazed to see that she’d taken great lengths to remove mental barriers to accomplishing certain tasks. For example, though she’s on the east coast and doesn’t know anything about Portland, she researched a running store and sent me the link. She sent me information on mindfulness. She provided a list of whole foods. I have no excuses.

There’s a lot of work to do here. It’s almost overwhelming. But the reward will be worth it.

Kris has been in Colorado this week, undergoing some sort of top-secret forensic scientist training. I took the week as vacation. I had grand plans that I would clean up the yard, work on Kris’ car, whip all my web sites into shape, and maybe write a short story or two. I was also going to spend a lot of time with friends.

I took Kris to the airport on Sunday morning. I came home and wrote three articles about personal finance, and an entry for foldedspace. I went outside and cleaned up the yard. After an hour of work, I came inside to take a hot bath. But while I was soaking, I started to sneeze uncontrollably. When I got out of the tub, my nose was running.

“I can’t be sick,” I thought. “I just got over being sick two weeks ago.” No matter: I was sick.

In the evening, I went to our monthly Monday Night Football gathering. (Yes, you read that right: our Monday Night Football gathering now occurs once a month on Sundays.) Jenn and Jeremy hosted a family game night, and I tried to play along, but I felt like crap.

On Monday I had lunch with Matt. He spent some time giving me tips on how to improve Get Rich Slowly. I was eager to hear his advice, but my sinuses were killing me, so I left early. I stopped at a drug store so that I could get a bunch of sinus medication. Later, I met Mac in Wilsonville for dinner and a movie. I was miserable the whole time. (Though I must say, it was the most fun I’ve had at a movie in ages. The Prestige is highly entertaining, even if you guess the plot twists. It was great that Mac and I were nearly the only ones in the theater. We could carry on a low-level conversation without bothering anyone.)

I had planned to dive into web work on Tuesday and Wednesday, but instead I lay on the couch, wallowing in my illness, watching Seinfeld on DVD. (Great fun!) Outside, the rain came down in torrents. The sky was grey — almost black. I missed Dave’s election party. I struggled to write anything of any sort. My mood turned as black as the sky.

Basically, I wallowed in stuffy sinuses and self-pity for two days. This morning I woke feeling slightly better. I made a slow start to the day, but managed to make it outside, to talk with the neighbor for a while (as usual, he has lots of advice for trimming our holly trees), to take Kris’ car in for new tires, to spend some time at the library. I even managed to write a couple of articles.

But I’m exhausted tonight. I spent some time soaking in the tub again, reading Dale Carnegie’s How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. Worry dogs me, and I know it, but I don’t know how to stop. Carnegie shares the following quote from Thoreau:

If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

I know that quote, and love it, but I don’t often act upon it. In fact, I act un-confident. I am afraid of social situations. But why? I never used to be. I love interacting with people of all sorts — friends, families, neighbors, strangers, colleagues, etc. “I thrive on social situations,” I told Mac the other night. “I know,” he said. So why do they frighten me so?

I’m also reminded of this litany from Dune:

I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Only I will remain…

I’m sitting in the trailerhouse on a late afternoon in early October. The sun is slanting through the window. Duke — the black kitten — is basking in the ray, which strikes his forehead, turning the fur almost silvery. A mild wind is blowing, and as it has for thirty-five years, it moans softly around the cracks and crevices of the trailer.

This trailer, which is now the business office, I once called home. Sometimes it still feels like home. At this moment, with the warm sun slanting through the window, with the wind moaning, with the kitten by my side, it’s hard to imagine that it’s not home. It even smells like home.

I slip into a reverie, find a memory from childhood that seems almost real. A Sunday afternoon from just this time of year. Lunch is over. Mom is washing the dishes. Jeff and I are in the living room with Dad, who is sprawled on the couch in the tipout. He has his shirt off, and Jeff is using a felt pen to draw faces on his big belly. I am stretched on the shag carpet (harvest gold), have claimed a rectangle of sunlight, and am reading the paper. I am reading the comics. I am reading the sports section (the Beavers lost again, and so did the Ducks). I am reading the poems in Northwest Magazine. Maybe there’s a cat, or a dog, or a bird in the room. Maybe Tony is here, coloring quietly.

Outside, the wind blows dully, and, if I listen carefully, I can hear the trailer moan. I can smell —

— and then I’m jarred to reality by a fourteen minute conversation with a customer who is woefully confused about an item we made in August, but which he cannot recall…

I’m always amazed at how little things — like sunlight on a kitten’s forehead — can trigger waves of nostalgia.

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This morning on the drive to work, the sun was shooting God-rays through the lingering mist. You know the ones: the great shafts of light that slice through the trees, as if they’re something real, something tangible, something that you might be able to touch and hold.