{"id":37,"date":"2015-03-27T11:25:20","date_gmt":"2015-03-27T09:25:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.smartcommunication.com\/blogi\/?p=37"},"modified":"2015-03-27T11:25:20","modified_gmt":"2015-03-27T09:25:20","slug":"some-sort-of-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.smartcommunication.com\/blogi\/some-sort-of-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Some Sort Of Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Seasided<\/a><\/p>\n

He felt very good about hearing\u00a0from her, who had sent a pretty long and detailed letter for a change. He felt like responding right away since this evening felt right, the positive mood was conducive to self-revelations and reflections, the odd contentment gave him energy to scribble. In the refrigerator there was one-third of a bottle containing his favorite Merlot; that was just enough for two glasses that did not make him too cloudy in the head.<\/p>\n

What kind of evening was this, then? Well, to begin with it had been the first clear, sunny day for a week or so. It had been very overcast, rainy and depressing for several days and had he not the solar energy in his veins from a trip to the Dominican Republic in late January, he would have been much more down than now. Even the cars and streets had been dirty and covered by that brownish slush and today he had driven his wheels to the carwash and felt like receiving a new car a few hours later. It was just below zero and everything had dried up and frozen. The perfect time to have your car washed as the forecasts promised a week of dry weather.<\/p>\n

Even the night sky looked like a blue metallic paint on a renovated \u201956 vintage Chevy. A few stars were visible along with a long line of vapor drawn by a passing airliner, the line colored orange by the setting sun. The shadows, he had observed when walking across the market square, were extremely long; when he stood in the corner his shadow extended halfway across the square covering half a block in front of the Stables of the Russian cavalry. It felt unreal and beautiful at the same time. The sun stayed just above the horizon for a long time. A prolonged twilight followed.<\/p>\n

He had submitted the manuscript to his client this forenoon. It had taken a week to complete since the briefing last Monday. The initial reception by his confidante, the chairman of the board, had been very positive, but the key person who could still ruin the whole thing was the managing director in whose name that marketing letter was going to be sent. Anything could still happen, but he was still cherishing the loyalty of his old-time client who felt almost like a friend. So he sensed as if he had wrapped up a week\u2019s worth of work in that creative solution. Now it was wait and see.<\/p>\n

Before coming back to his office he had driven to the seaside and stopped by at Caf\u00e9 Ursula. The sea was still partly ice-covered and everything looked pretty Arctic. The wind was severe and you could expose only a couple of shots with your cellphone without having your fingers completely frozen. Indoors he saw no familiar faces, but the bright, blueish metallic colors in the sky and on the ice looked enticing. He saw a young foreign couple walking along the shoreline, holding hands, both of them wearing rucksacks, looking pretty young and being in love. He almost envied them and their youth. The young love must have warmed up them considerably.<\/p>\n

His own better half had left for work the same afternoon. One flight to an European destination and then back to Northern Finland, to the city of Oulu that is almost Lapland. She would overnight there and meet with an old relative, a dement lady who most likely might not recognize who she was. Yet, she wanted to give a try. And tomorrow would be a similar day: one European destination and another domestic one and then back home by 5 pm. For that evening he was planning to go to the Sauna-Society with his oldest son, a rather self-conscious young man of 25 years of age who was about to get his degree as Licenciate of Medicine still in\u00a0March. From that date on his son would be a legalized physician – just like his old man. From his American friend he had learned a new slang word \u2019cocky\u2019 that she had used when describing the son. He felt that being a perfectly correct observation as such, the wording perhaps being a bit Jewish if she may not mind me saying so, he thought. Should he write this to her or not? He felt she would not label him as an antisemite for a comment like that; in fact, she knew that he had grown up during some very formative years amongst Jews, even being accepted and inititated into that culture. In a way he felt like being one, at least he felt like being able to read many of the intricate codes of that culture. Some of his long-standing Jewish friends did not take him as a gentile, perhaps not really as an inborn Jew, either, but most likely something inbetween, he reasoned. Intellectually, he felt much affinity and kinship and from some of the key Jewish friends he had always received quite a bit of appreciation he would never forget. He felt like being one of them and some of them felt the same, he knew.<\/p>\n

Last Tuesday he had gone to a book publishing party in a small arty venue. The author was his old friend and even a fellow yogi. Nice, intellectual guy of his own age, now remarried to a woman about 20 years his junior. She was visibly pregnant in the occasion and he performed a headstand before the discussion about the book started. He bought his friend\u2019s book and received a dedication: \u201dTo Martti. A sensitive man.\u201d The wording felt pretty intimate, even a bit disturbingly so. On the other hand, one of the main characters in the novel was portrayed as being of the more sensitive sort, so perhaps the logic was there. He started reading his friend\u2019s first novel the same evening. He realized that his friend had fulfilled a dream that he had himself had for years. Now he had read one third of the book and he felt a bit perplexed. Undeniably, the novel had the kind of language the publishing house editors loved: kind of fresh, surprising, unconventional language. Yet, he felt the novel lacked too much in structure and clarity. There did not seem to be a message, nor a clear-cut storyline, just pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He could recall a comment from an editor he had met years ago: \u201dIt\u2019s not so much about what you write, but rather how you do it.\u201d In any case, he felt truly he could do better. Would he ever have the stamina of his friend for whom it had taken three years to complete that obscure novel on 200 pages, he did not know. What he knew for sure, it would do a lot of good for his mental health and self-esteem. And he did know there were more than enough stories that had been brewing in his head for years.<\/p>\n

Last week he had spent two days with his old parents in his former school town close to the Finno-Russian border. Mom liked to spoil the eternally \u2019young\u2019 couple, him and his wife. The meals were three-course dinners with wine and all. Very fancy and sophisticated; yet he knew it had taken several days for her to prepare all that. However, you could not say no. On the evening of their arrival, he went to the sauna with his old man. During the session he had revealed how he had waited his father to the sauna when he was eight years old while looking forward to the deep discussions they had together while bathing. Both mom and dad were old, there was no denying about it. Mom had some trouble in finding words, something she did not suffer from, say, five years ago. Time with them felt precious, very much so, yet you could definitely say that the connection was different only a few years ago. Something of the immediacy and intimacy was lost, although he felt both of them were very dearly expected visitors.<\/p>\n

After the visit he was lingering with the expression, a book title by Raymond Chandler \u201dThe Long Goodbye.\u201d This felt like one, truly.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

I wrote this piece a couple of weeks ago as a kind of diary entry, yet decided to email it to my friend whose message had prompted me to compose it in the first place. The decision to write these lines\u00a0in third person was mine, the idea being to follow a kind of distancing technique. Take this as fiction, though. All comments are welcome.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He felt very good about hearing\u00a0from her, who had sent a pretty long and detailed letter for a change. He felt like responding right away since this evening felt right, the positive mood was conducive to self-revelations and reflections, the odd contentment gave him energy to scribble. In the refrigerator there was one-third of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-yleinen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smartcommunication.com\/blogi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smartcommunication.com\/blogi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smartcommunication.com\/blogi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smartcommunication.com\/blogi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smartcommunication.com\/blogi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.smartcommunication.com\/blogi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41,"href":"https:\/\/www.smartcommunication.com\/blogi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions\/41"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.smartcommunication.com\/blogi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smartcommunication.com\/blogi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.smartcommunication.com\/blogi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}