Inspiration

When I first started reading Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running I got bummed out. A friend had given the book to me because he knows I'm into running and writing, occasionally at least, and Murakami's book is about how he connects the two.

I didn't know Murakami from a pothole, but I was anxious to read the book. The book is thin, and after just a few pages I could tell that I liked the author's style, albeit style translated from Murakami's native Japanese.

But after just a few more pages I reached a crossroads: keep reading and feel really bummed about the fact that I haven't been writing much, and that I've put my running on hold because of a nagging groin injury, or plow ahead and try to get something out of it.

I chose the latter path and am certainly glad I did.

Murakami has an easy way of writing, but he's very straightforward about how hard he works at it. "I have to pound the rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of creativity," he writes. "To write a novel I have to drive myself hard physically and use a lot of time and effort."

He puts the same effort into running. During a 62-mile race, he feels his entire body breaking down. And as so many long distance runners know, Murakami's battle was as much mental as it was physical. He comes up with a mantra to get himself through the roughest miles: "I'm not a human. I'm a piece of machinery. I don't need to feel a thing. Just forge on ahead."

Repeating these lines and narrowing his focus to the three yards in front of him, he plods forward. Finally, at mile 47, he "passed through something....After that, I didn't have to think anymore."

He is upfront about aging (he was 56 when he started writing the book; he's 63 now) and how he has to lower his expectations for training and running or doing triathlons. He admits to his quirks (he can be somewhat anti-social, not unlike a lot of writers, yours truly included), discusses a few hobbies (he's a major, major record collector) and makes a book about running and writing flow by very easily and quickly.

I certainly plan to read some of his fiction now that I've read his memoir.

As for what I got out of the book, there are two answers. First, I realized that I have to keep myself in shape until my groin feels better, so recently I started going to the gym regularly for the first time in five years. Second, I started working on a memoir of my own.

I know, I know, the memoir market is tighter than Monty Burns' wallet. Everybody and their brother, mother, sister, father and backwoods cousin has put out a book in recent years talking all about drug addiction and recovery, setting up schools in Afghanistan, traveling to Venus with their pet monkey, ad nauseam.

So what do I have to add to all this? I don't know, but I'm working on it.

I'm mining material I used for some of the stories in my first book, (C)rock Stories: Million-Dollar Tales of Music, Mayhem and Immaturity. Yes, I'm churning through the tale of my four-month odyssey in 1988 on the road from New England to New Mexico and back.

Four years ago I posted a 10-part series on my old (but still active) blog, DaveBrigham.com, looking back 20 years to the trip I took with three buddies in a 1977 Dodge Tradesman van. I remember at the time that my buddy Jay Kumar said something along the lines of, "You should put that stuff together into a book."

Well, it takes me a while, but I do listen to my friends. My buddy Ric Dube, like Jay, a former coworker at Webnoize, told me after reading some of the original versions of my (C)rock Stories, that if I could get 15-20 really good ones, I'd have a book.

I've been having fun going through my original blog post and adding tons of details from my journal, two newspaper articles I wrote during my journey, and from my cobwebbed memory. I'm also adding background info about places we visited, as well as updates about some of them, and delving into my childhood, my personality and my previous experiences and how they played into the trip.

Ideally, I'll publish the book as an ebook. Thanks for the inspiration, Haruki.

(I wrote this post a few weeks ago and in the meantime have finished Murakami's book and have moved on to Jack Kerouac's On the Road: The Original Scroll. After college, and before going on my above-referenced road trip, I read the originally published version of the classic book, which edited out the names of Kerouac's friends, as well as many (if not all) of the sex. I'm thoroughly enjoying this livelier version.)