Algorithm of My Life

Algorithm of My Life

How one fills their days is interesting. Personally I prefer to live my days, the filling comes as a consequence of living, and then occasionally reflect on what those days consisted of over the past few days, weeks, months, or years.

Clearly, interacting with family and friends is a regular enlivening activity that is in the forefront of my personal algorithm of life. Ongoing activities, including occasional TV binges like Manifest, Bosch, Upload, Morse, Vera, and others, while indulging with ice cream and chips, are interspersed. Weekly visits and calls with family, weekly pizza and beer with friends that have continued for decades, and weekly dinners out with other friends, all are essential ingredients.

Fulfilling? Yes. But on balance the most reliable activities, they don't actually qualify as hobbies, that pleasantly occupy and engage my mind and life are reading and writing, and occasionally doodling, and it has been this way since I checked out my first book from the school library in the first grade. "Hundreds and Hundreds of Turkeys" was it's title and I will remember it until either dementia or death intercede. If reading is a virus, that is where I caught it.

Reading is first and foremost. I allow my library to procure the books I read because they have a better selection than any bookstore and they are free. If I bought the books I read, there would be no money left for food. Feeding my book habit, I assume, would be as costly as an out of control drug habit. One of the things I have learned is that a well written book, whether written last week or in the last century, is still a well written book and still a good read. Zane Grey, Max Brand, Thomas Hardy, Washington Irving, and Edgar Allen Poe are still out there, and available.

Today's library is supplemented by e-books online and speed up the acquisition and return of my borrowed books. I read several hundred e-books last year when the library was closed during the pandemic. Other free sites on line have digitized classics by all the great writers of the past, and Amazon prime regularly offers free reads of authors I would not normally select. I can report that there are many good, entertaining, and informative authors in the e-world. I just finished two e-books and checked out three new books from the library last week.

Writing is second only to reading. Bits of paper with song lyrics and story ideas clutter the drawers in my desk and fill the edges of calendars, notepads by the phone, and the litter in my shirt pocket. I regularly pick up a piece of paper and find a couple of lines of a song idea, or a brief book idea, or the start of a story.

In recent months I have been stimulated by vocal.media prompts and challenges to post on their digital platform. I've discovered that the combination of prompts, deadlines, and contests are sufficient to channel most of my writing to that platform. My set aside story ideas and false starts from years past emerge as complete stories of 600 to 2000 words, and I have the option of revisiting and flushing them out in the future if I wish. It is fun to see a story which started as a civil war piece two years ago turn into a modern day treasure hunt just because of a story challenge.

Vocal.media recommends that you post your stories on Facebook to share and enlarge readership. I do that, not expecting new readers so much, but to share with family and friends my product so that they may hopefully enjoy the short stories and poems I write and better know me, to whatever level they care to. Assuming this piece will be posted, it will be my 91st story or poem submitted to vocal.media.

There can be no better indicator of what brings contentment to my life, and to what I turn.