You know, some people got no choice

And they can never find a voice

To talk with that they can even call their own

So the first thing that they see

That allows them the right to be

Why they follow it

You know, it’s called bad luck

—Lou Reed, “Street Hassle”

This morning I’m thinking about the too long-lived nature of a hollowed-out friendship and its impact on one of my last unquestioned beliefs.

Know this about me: I’m a cynical guy. Oh, lots of folks claim to be cynical or warn against it as if it were a bad habit born of a highly questionable lifestyle. But in most of instances, they are essentially tourists passing through the nation of cynicism on the most cliched and vanilla of junkets: The cynicism label is reflexively slapped on the slightest deviances from any kind of ideological purity.

For instance, those self-proclaimed “cynics” who say that the Syrian airport missile strike by the US was actually stage-managed political theater do so with an outlaw swagger. And those Right Wing ideologues who disagree invoke the same label with curled lips and a revulsion better suited to incest—and feel righteous for doing so.

This is cynicism? Oh, please. Amateurs. They simply have no idea what it’s like to move through life believing in the least number of things possible. Because lies, strained credulity and obvious manipulation extend beyond political theater to, well, most all aspects of 21st Century Life. You have only to look into my dark, disbelieving eyes and into my seemingly cold heart. Amateurs. I disbelieve things you haven’t even thought of putting your faith in yet. But this is not a screed about how to reach my state of disbelief—it might possibly kill you if you did. And anyway, there was no path to near-total cynicism—I’m simply wired this way. So there goes any possibility of monetization and a cult following.

The key term here is near-total, because, well, I’m human. My handful of beliefs may be breathtakingly minimal, but are most definitely there. And one of them is belief in friendship. To understand this, you need to know another thing about me: I’m an extremely private person with mostly acquaintances. And by “mostly,” I mean 95 percent of the people who socially know me. Let’s work out the math: it means I have 95 acquaintances for every 5 friends. And this happens to be very accurate.

It takes years to become my friend—often to my disadvantage because most promising candidates wind up giving up on me, as well they should. I’m okay with that because I have to be—like my cynicism, my insular, private nature is hardwired. It’s me; it’s all I’ve got.

The consequences of my Greta Garbo nature is that I have few real friends, but those I do have are pretty much there for life. It takes so long to become my friend that, by the time it happens, both the other person and myself understand each other extremely well. And because of this, I have almost no experience in flipping the off switch on friendships. But that’s what I had to do yesterday after pondering the possibility over the weekend.

At this juncture, you’re thinking “Ah—and here comes the heartrending tale of the difficulty of flipping said switch and the psychic distress that followed.” And yeah, that would make this essay a lot more dramatic—and I sure wish I could oblige. Because if there is distress, it’s my discovery of how easy it was given the circumstances. I’m certain that flicking the switch to off was seen as unexpected and sudden, but it was actually the result of a steadily increasing amalgam of disrespect, passive-aggression, self-victimization and, yeah, egomania on the part of my now ex-friend.

I’d let it build over five months or so because, damn it, I believe in friendship. And the strength of that faith held the relationship together from my side for nearly half-a-year after it had become steadily toxic, one-way and even a little bit delusional.

My feeling on the other side of ending it is one of relief. Not because the friction has now stopped, but because I no longer have to watch my friend slowly disintegrate at every meeting along with the friendship itself. And although I put off leaving the relationship for too long, I think it worked out for the best: I ended our friendship assured that it was indeed in fatal decline, but before his bitterness and projections could disfigure the good times we shared, forcing all my memories of him into a closed casket.

This is where the laws of  personal essays demand that the building prose crescendo resolves into insight. For me, I think, it goes back to where we began—to my need to believe in as few things as possible. And, for today, at least, I wish I didn’t believe in friendship to the degree I do. Right now, all I can think of is Scotty’s self-directed, spat-out criticism at the conclusion of Vertigo: “You shouldn’t have been . . . you shouldn’t have been that sentimental.”

This morning I’m thinking about those instances where the trees briefly and helpfully blur, allowing the forest to momentarily come into view. I’m thinking about living in the future: Present me is working in a way that Past Me would find, well, staggering.

I’m a man of a certain age: young enough to have embraced the digital age at its beginning, but old enough to have worked for years as a writer and editor prior to it. In terms of technology, I tend to be highly adaptable—when something new comes along, I happily incorporate it into my workflow if it proves to be useful. Which is Very Good, I think—especially when I compare myself to other people my age grappling with tech. At the same time, however, it also makes me a little it like the proverbial frog in that hypothetical slowly warming pot of water: I tend not to notice just how much my workflow has actually changed.

But this morning for some reason, I suddenly thought about How It Used To Be. Present Me is a thoroughly modern writer—on this gray, very wet morning, I’m sitting in front of a MacBook Pro that in terms of the early 1990s is unimaginably powerful. It’s simultaneously playing Max Richter’s Three Worlds and presenting me with my work in Ulysses—the writing application of the gods—which runs in splendid isolation on its own desktop.

Ulysses has freed me from worrying about lost formatting—something, when I think about, which is rarely, thrills both the writer and the editor in me. Extended Markup has made my work infinitely exportable, even while indicating to me that it’s formatted the way I’ve intended. And the minimal writing environment ensures that Ulysses fades away, leaving me with only my writing.

When needed, a contextual attachment sidebar slides in from the right offering the notes, URLs, and graphics I may need for what I’m currently writing. I can also embed there links to OmniOutliner, OmniGraphics, Evernote and DevonThink Pro—my research database.

With a key combination, Wirelesshead’s estimable Paste app slides up from the bottom, a perfect match to Ulysses’ interface, and offers me 50 of my most recent clips from any of my Macs

Sliding my fingers to the right on the track pad reveals other parts of my manuscript in a sidebar, while sliding to the right again takes me to a further sidebar list of all my projects. Dragging and dropping allows me to quickly reorganize the piece at hand—down to paragraph level, if necessary.

And, of course, the MacOS’ built-in dictionary can be popped up at anytime.

This is in no way how it was in the analogue days prior to 1984—and, truth be told, even for a while after 1992. Same guy, same job—but with a breathtakingly different toolset, access to research and method of composition. Hell, the machine in front of me even plays my working music—even the obligatory mini-stereo on a nearby file cabinet has been swept away.

My work life today is made possible by advances in chip design, miniaturization, the evolution of the Web and, of course, wifi. Collectively, this is the infrastructure of what I do. But all of this fails to describe the actual impact. My work slinging pixels as opposed to ink is now integrated, organic frictionless, and astonishingly faster than in 1983. Writing started on my iPhone in a Starbucks is instantly on my MacBook Pro, waiting for me on my return home, and if I wake in the middle the night, the current revision is also on my iPad waiting for tweaks. I can ask Siri to pull up further research and sip my coffee while I wait for it to appear.

Frictionless: Present Me no longer deals with the staggering amount of impediments that made the concept of flow almost a joke. Gone are the Exacto knives, the scotch tape, the index cards, the stickies, the physical galleys, the trips to libraries, the research assistants, the bulletin boards, the multiple pens with multiple colors of ink, the fax machine, the post office, the traveling to do interviews, the special deliveries from the typesetter, the conference calls dependent on suitably equipped boardrooms, the secret wifi network I personally bought and set up without telling IT so my magazine staff could move about our floor at will, the three-month waits for reader feedback, the physical comprehensives of art directors and—yes—the necessity of keeping a duplicate set of cassettes and/or CDs at the office for music—the special sauce in my writing.

All of this stuff went away—got the hell out of my life—leaving only me and the work at hand. Well, mostly.

On this grim, wet morning, as I write, sip coffee and listen to Richter, it occurs to me that I’m moving through the sort of workaday, almost banal future that William Gibson took pains to create: Tech as the mostly unnoticed background to the characters’ lives, and not a shiny end unto itself. I’m very okay with that.

This morning I’m thinking about the death of an iPhone 3 and why I’m unaccountably saddened by its demise.

I’m a music lover and a music collector; music accompanies me everywhere. I was the owner of every scroll-wheel iPod beginning with the first model (purchased at the world’s second Apple store in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia). Oddly, however, I haven’t owned a modern-day iPod.

This is because years ago, upon updating to iPhone 4, I kept my decommissioned iPhone 3—I deleted all the purchased apps and the attendant data and repurposed it as my music player. At this point, I can’t recall if the iPod Touch had been introduced—and I haven’t had enough coffee yet to research the topic—but needless to say, my reimagined iPhone 3 either anticipated the iPod Touch or was one of of the earliest work-around equivalents of one.

And that’s where matters have stood these past nine years: on the go, I listened to music on my old iPhone 3. The damn thing never wore out. It held a charge like a champ; always kept in a case and with a screen protector, it looked mint; and it simply worked. Each time I was tempted to buy an actual modern iPod, I gave my old iPhone 3 a spin—critically listening to its musical fidelity, testing its speed in music selection—and always came to the same conclusion—why?

Yearly, the iPhone 3 went to Maine with me. It accompanied me on business trips. And when I crawled into bed at night, it streamed its contents du jour through my Bose Wave Radio. The damn thing just kept doing a good job in its retirement years. Why didn’t I use my current iPhone for music? Well, prior to Apple Music making it a moot point, the available storage on my succession of later iPhones was never enough for a music lover like myself. As I say, I have a lot of music and I like to keep a lot of music with me. This mindset, I assume, accounts for the ongoing existence of modern iPods.

Yesterday, however, death came for my old iPhone 3—or, more precisely, a terminal illness that demanded euthanasia. I noticed that it looked odd sitting in its charging cradle and discovered that the battery had catastrophically swollen, pushing one side of the screen out beyond the bezel and cracking the back of the unit in two places. Remarkably, however, it still worked—because Good Old iPhone 3, I guess. I played Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue on it one last time—it seemed fitting to do so—and then sadly wiped all its contents, all those thousands of songs, reverting it to its factory settings for the first time in nine years.

It was late at night, and I now had to grapple with what to do with it. I wasn’t going to bed and trust that the battery wouldn’t explode while I slept. So I filled a dutch oven full of water, put it in the kitchen sink, and, gulp, dropped the iPhone 3 into it, watching is sink to the bottom. I then covered pot with its massively heavy lid.

I’m thinking of the iPhone 3 this morning because I’m surprised by how its long-expected end saddened me. it felt like putting down a pet. It was, after all, just a tool—and an old tool at that. New and better replacements await. I’m thinking that the feeling has to do with two things:

First, it was the longest-lived Apple product I’ve owned—or rather, the one that I continued regularly to use for the longest time, as opposed to an antique Apple device that one sometimes fires up as a curio—say, the first Apple Powerbook with the roller-ball precursor to the track pad. I’ve been a lifelong user of Apple products because of their technological transparency—when I’m working, they literally melt way, leaving me with the project at hand instead of tech mediation. But I kept the old iPhone 3 long enough for anthropomorphization to surface. Which leads me to the second reason for my sadness.

I think that what the iPhone 3 did—and did four times longer than it served as, well, a phone—the dispensing of music to a music lover—made my relationship with it far more intimate than what exists between tool-user and tool. Its contents mapped to my musical obsessions. It was an emotional time capsule, with certain songs never moving off it for sentimental reasons. It provided non-stop soundtracks to my life, no matter the circumstances. It became a way by which Past Me spoke to Present Me through music—and also provided the ability for Present Me to leave a few melodic messages for Future Me.

So yeah, it was a weird feeling to wipe its aesthetic and musical history and then drown it.

This weekend, probably, I’ll lope into the Apple Store and purchase a space-gray iPod Nano—you know, just like Today’s Hip Youth. And I’m sure I’ll enjoy it—though, I’m certain, not for nine fucking years. It’ll get the musical job done before reasonably expiring in, say, three or four years’ time.

Like my other Apple devices, it’ll be transparent and it’ll be a tool.

This morning, as every other Wednesday morning, the housekeeper is on my mind. The cats needed to be locked in the guest room in advance of her arrival. Breakfast needed to be earlier. Those sorts of things.

Rosalita and I have a unique relationship—although she’s been my housekeeper for 21 years, she speaks almost no English. And for my part, I speak almost no Spanish. Now you’d expect that after more than two decades, both of us might have made more of an effort—or that one of us might have blinked regarding the Language Thing. But no.

I suspect that what began as an unfortunate communications barrier has over the years morphed into a point of principle. I know I think “For god’s sake Rosalita, you’ve lived in the US for more than the 21 years I’ve known you. Really?” And she most likely thinks “I’ve been keeping house for you for 21 years, and still don’t know how to ask in Spanish “Do you need more Windex for next time?” Really?“

I also think that on occasion each of us suspects the other of a fake-out. I know I have. I entertain the fantasy that upon pulling away from my house, Rosalita sounds exactly like Vanessa Redgrave as she makes a phone call; that the last two decades have been some kind of rarified performance art on her part. And perhaps Rosalita imagines me speaking perfect Spanish to my next door neighbor only to suddenly snicker and switch to English as she pulls into my driveway.

But also know this—Rosalita is splendid person; after 21 years, she’s extended family. And I’m pretty certain she feels the same way about me. When one of us inevitably dies, the other will be at the funeral—and no doubt wonder about what the eulogist and mourners are saying.

This is how things stand every other Wednesday morning: My conceptual model for our communications is that she’s another one of my cats—that she hears “Blah-blah-blah-blah, Rosalita. Blah-blah-blah, Windex.” Meanwhile her conceptual communications model regarding me is based on her dog—that I hear “Blah-blah-blah-blah, Kultur. Blah-blah-blah paper towels.”

Over the years, complex communications have come to be handled in two ways.

The first is that we have both become adept at amateur theatricals. If I’ve happened to have boiled water on the stove for tea before she arrives, Rosalita is treated to my Academy Award level performance as the-clueless-person-who-has-touched-a-hot-burner. (“Genius! Heartwrenching!”—The Washington Post.) And on more than one occasion, I’ve witnessed her dramatic depiction of drowning-as-the-Titanic-is-going-down, which means that the water in bathtub is draining slowly again. (“Emotionally affecting! Her best performance to date!”—The New York Times.)

And if the need to communicate is critical, she dials her college-aged, bilingual son, and says “Johnny! Blah-blah-blah-blah Still no Espanol,” and hands the phone to me. So yeah, we have our very own ad-hoc United Nations translation service going on.

I sometimes wonder just how long our standoff will last—but I already know the answer to that. She’s as likely to reach for that box of Rosetta Stone installation discs as I am: “Hey, Rosalita—blah-blah-blah-blah Never.” To which she’ll reply “Blah-blah-blah-blah Yo también.”

And I can respect that—we both realize that in this day and age, it’s good to have principles.

Here’s what’s on my mind this morning: gratitude to the universe. Last weekend one of my cats experienced a medical emergency, a reaction to a vaccine, and it’s taken the last five days for him to recover and now, at last, he seems himself again.

In general, I’m a lover of animals, but cats especially command a place in my heart.

Like everywhere else these days, the world of animals lovers is partisan, and many dog-owning friends of mine don’t understand my affection for felines. But I’ve always understood cats—and by understanding I mean a acceptance of Rumsfeldian “known unknowables.”

Their independence drives some people crazy—but then again, so do I for exactly the same reason. And because of this, I think that cats also get me. I’ve never known a cat who on first meeting was anything more than simply wary. The same can’t be said for dogs—there’s subset of them that operate with a snarl/nip first, decide later philosophy. Cats, on the other hand, coolly size me up at first meeting and begin to calculate the trust quotient. Which, again, is pretty much how I meet new people.

Because of this, in even worst case scenarios, cats and I start at a place of almost professional courtesy and build from there.

The succession of cats that have lived with me, always in pairs, have had relationships with me that resemble friendships in that they were not first and foremost built on dependency. Cats and I share our lives together in the same way good matches of roommates inevitably become friends. As I write this in my office, one of my cats is downstairs in the living room looking out the window, while the other one is in the upstairs grooming on the bed. All of us doing their own things, together-yet-otherwise-directed. And then, at lunch, we’ll probably touch base again and enquire about each other’s days. Not pets and owner, but, well, colleagues.

Hunter S Thompson memorably, if idiosyncratically, captured the essence of being an animal lover when he wrote:

I have always loved animals. They are different from us and their brains are not complex, but their hearts are pure and there is usually no fat on their bodies and they will never call the police on you or take you in front of judge or run off and hide with your money . . .

Animals don’t hire lawyers.

But with regard to cats, that has always struck me as far too much of 30,000-foot view. Instead, I’ve always favored naturalist Henry Beston’s description of cats:

For the animal shall not be measure by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.

Yup—a perfect description of my feline friends.

I woke this morning thinking about my workflow. Oh, wipe that pitying expression off your face—yes, you; you in the back. I know what you’re thinking—I’m one life short of a life.

But you would be wrong. I am currently writing a novel and The Workflow is everything. The Workflow giveth and The Workflow taketh away. The Workflow makes me lie down in green pastures and The Workflow leads me beside quiet waters. And Lo, though I stumble through the valley of the shadow of The Endless Novel, I shall not fear because I have The Fucking Workflow.

So yeah, it’s that important, and as a result I find myself regularly thinking about it. Sometimes it has to fixed because of updates to the constituent apps that comprise it. Sometimes it needs to be improved (Paste app, meet Ulysses, my writing app—I know you two are really going to get on!) And sometimes it simply needs to be revisited because my book on an essential level is the workflow in the same way we are what we eat.

The workflow is so critical to what I do that I have three Field Notes ‘Pitch Black’ notebooks filled with entries dedicated to it. But let’s pause here because the notebooks are also part of the workflow—the headwaters as it were. Field Notes ‘Pitch Black’ is the notebook of the gods—durable and with a light gray dot-graph pattern on its pages, making it perfect for capturing ideas and, if need be, visualizing them. I go through the notebooks at the rate of six a month. I write in them with two Uni Kuru Toga .05 mechanical pencils—the plastic model when out and about and the gunmetal Roulette version when I’m at my desk. The Kuru Togas are self-sharpening with use which, of course, makes them mechanical pencils of the gods. And lastly on-the-fly rethinking is made possible with a white Staedtler Mars Plastic eraser that doesn’t shed and folds into it own protective housing—making it, yes, the eraser of the gods.

I’ve geeked out on the above details to illustrate how much thought goes into a great workflow. The notebook/pencil/eraser combination above is not expensive—far from it. But they’ve been meticulously chosen to work well with each other—so well (and this is the most important thing, this is everything), they completely disappear as tools. When I have an idea, I capture it. The end. The Field Notes ‘Pitch Black’, the Uni Kuru Toga and the Staedtler eraser are utterly transparent to me. The work simply—wait for it—flows through them.

But as is the case with anything in life that is seemingly effortless, a lot of work went into achieving the lack of friction. The approximate $22.00 investment represented by my notebook, pencil and eraser ($26.00 if you throw in some additional leads for the pencil) is paltry. The availability of all three is wide—five minutes on Amazon and you’re all set. But getting there—ferreting out those three models and field-testing each one and then experimenting with combining notebooks with pencils and determining the best eraser for the finalists was a bitch; a genuine pain-in-the-ass.

But it was worth it in the end. Now when I’m capturing an idea, I’m thinking only about the idea and not worrying about the pencil smudging on the notebook paper, the lead breaking or that I can’t cleanly erase something. Transparency. It’s the same reason I’ve always used Apple products—they’re designed to be tools to an end and not an end (and thus stumbling block) in themselves.

And yes, you can kill creativity by overthinking things, but the selective overthinking of the critical channelling of creativity—The Workflow, Praise Be it—only pays dividends down the road.

Here endeth the sermon. If I’m so inclined, I may in the future describe the software side.

The final scene of Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid takes place in a Bolivian stable surrounded by dozens of soldiers ready to shoot Butch and Sundance on sight:

Sundance Kid: “It’s your great ideas that got us into this mess. I never want to hear another one of your great ideas. Ever!”

Butch Cassidy: “Australia. I thought that secretly you wanted to know so I told you.”

Sundance Kid: “That’s your great idea?”

Butch Cassidy: “The latest in a long line. We get out of here alive, we go to Australia. Goodbye, Bolivia. Hello to Australia.”

And then just before they run out of the stable to certain death:

Butch Cassidy: “Hey, wait a minute. You didn’t see Lefors out there, did you?”

Sundance Kid: “Lefors? No.”

Butch Cassidy: “Oh, good. For a moment there I thought we were in trouble.”

Among other things, Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid is about the relentless march of time—bicycles replacing horses, bank security improving, law enforcement getting more sophisticated. And it’s also about optimism when surrounded not by Bolivian soldiers, but by time closing in : Australia—hell, yeah!

Then there’s that last moment—the end comes when you’re not expecting it, from an unforeseen direction and despite all of your planning . . .

I woke up this morning thinking about this because I’m in the middle of a new round of king-hell bronchitis—the fourth bout this year. And the bronchitis is an uncomfortable subset of a larger run of less-than-optimum health that’s extended over the past 12 months or so.

This is new territory for me. My health throughout my life has been robust. (I’ve always wanted to say that in context.) And further, I recognize that most of the problems have been bits of me beginning to wear out. I am, after all, officially A Man Of A Certain Age.

But if not Peter Pan, I’ve got a lot of Butch Cassidy in that stable in me as I confront these shifting circumstances: Australia—hell, yeah! The recent string of health glitches have reminded me that, like it or not, it’s finally here—My Third Fucking Act. And the question now becomes what to do with what’s unavoidably become a finite resource—time. What precisely is my bespoke version of Australia? And further, how can I ensure that it’ll fully be Hell, yeah!

This situation is complicated by the other lesson of Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid—it’s never Lefors who gets you, it’s the Bolivian Army. As I’m busy constructing My Private Australia, chances are good that a battalion of something dreadful will unexpectedly surround me.

The answer, of course, is the point of William Goldman’s screenplay—it’s better to travel hopefully than to arrive. (Which, for the record, was said by Robert Louis Stevenson and not Buddha, thank you very much.)

And, yes, this is not a new problem—merely a problem that’s new to me. I’ll have a mope, cough my way through my work day, kill a couple boxes of Kleenex, have precisely one Laphroaig too many tonight and then, tomorrow, begin to fill a new notebook with ideas about My Third Fucking Act. I think I’m gonna need a big production number there.