To Everything There Is A Season

This morning  I was at my computer at 5AM. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't write either. So I wandered cyberspace. I signed on to all my social networks. I read blogs. I checked the news to see if that brain trust at BP that knows how to drill for oil so well had figured out a way to clean up their mess. And I thought.

I thought about being a writer in the age pre Internet. When being a writer of fiction meant holing up in a garret somewhere, smoking cigarettes and pounding out words on an old Smith Corona. When mistakes were corrected with white out and not a delete button and questionable spellings were checked in a copy of Merriam Webster that also doubled as a door stop. When if you had a need to connect to the human species for inspiration you had to leave your house and could not substitute with a Twitter chat with a stranger.

I have always wanted to write. When I wasn't writing I was reading.  Books are like oxygen to me. But I am not sure how I would have done as a writer before the age of the computer and high speed Internet access.  I do not know how easily my words would have flowed if I could not take a break from the solitude at will through  the miracle of cyber connection.

I sometimes wonder why I didn't leave the Corporate world sooner. Doing this feels so right. But then I think about all that typewriter ribbon and how I never really mastered replacing it and I know why. It wasn't my season yet.