Dispatch
By: Glen Hines
Tags: Personal Development, Perspective, Self Improvement, Memoir, Life

I came out here across the bridge to try and write a story. Or an update. Maybe a dispatch of sorts.

It’s been hard lately. I’ve had a lot going on. I’ve been trying to finish the manuscript for my third book, Crossroads, for months now. I’m literally down to the last story, but I can’t get it done. It’s more than 84,000 words now, and I probably should just fire it off. But I can’t for some reason. I want to finish one last, good story.

I don’t know why I’m like this. Maybe it’s because my father inculcated me to finish well; “End on a good one,” I hear his voice say. Of course, that was in the context of sports; never leave the batting cage until you hit one final line drive. Never walk off the football field until you hit a long, high punt or split the uprights on a long field goal. Never exit the driving range without hitting a good golf shot.

You get the idea.

But how to finish?

The rhythm I had going for so many months has dropped off almost completely. It seems the ideas come fewer and longer in between, as if I have said everything I want to say. I don’t know if this means anything. I don’t think it does. I just think I’m tired. I’ve had a lot going on recently. But I’m not uninspired.

Sometimes you are just bereft of ideas. And then you look inward and grow contemplative. How do I get out of this?

I think I read where Hemingway addresses writers’ block by advising us to “Write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So I will try.

The writer’s life can be a lonesome one.

Even for those fortunate enough to be known primarily as writers. Try taking it up later in life after you’ve been branded with so many other labels that people want to keep permanently affixed to you. It’s a difficult path to carve through the proverbial forest where you’ve never gone before. And yet, I push forward.

So now I sit in Crystal Coast Brewing on a Monday. There are a total of three people in here, including me. From the looks of things, sitting in a brewery on a Monday, of all days, is not favored in these parts. From my time living here in 2008–2010, I remember how this area is more like the old Bible Belt than the place I just came from, Washington, DC. Maybe most of the people out here frown on this activity. Or maybe they’re just busier than I am at this moment. Or maybe they just make excuses for not doing what they really want to do. Maybe they don’t have my freedom.

Whatever the reason, I have the run of the place, and it’s nice. I can proceed at my own pace, unhurried by the staff. My thought processes and concentration are untrammeled by the cacophony of the crowds that surely must fill this place later in the week and on weekends. Like every single establishment like this in the capitol. It’s actually quiet. Imagine that.

There’s the buildup to a football game droning softly in the background on one of the big screens, but it doesn’t blare in here like it does in most parts of the country. The usual overpaid talking heads are blathering on about two teams I know nothing about; I don’t know what players are on their rosters, what their current records are, or where they are in the standings, and I don’t care.

I, like most Americans, was once addicted to football, but I cured myself of the affliction. For me, football has now entered the realm of English Premier League soccer, which plays on the big screens on weekend mornings and early afternoons on the northeast coast at most local Irish pubs or sports bars. I can’t identify any of those teams, players, or records either. And I don’t care. But the background movement and idle chatter on the TV screen that fails to register any hint of interest still provides a strange kind of soothing, ambient noise.

I turn my gaze back to my laptop screen. I glance left out through the window and observe a few vehicles pass by heading west and east. Many of the storefronts across the road are closed down for the season. But a few lights flicker here and there in the waning light.

My watch, set to military time, says it’s 17:53. I can feel the sun setting almost imperceptibly behind me through the building’s big picture windows. The warm glow on my back is now cooling a bit, so it must be dipping behind the dunes that separate the town of Atlantic Beach from the Atlantic beyond them.

Yes, I came out to Bogue Banks, the island that — along with the Intracoastal Waterway that passes between — shields the Crystal Coast and the towns of Beaufort, Morehead City, and Cape Carteret from the Atlantic; not as a lawyer, Marine, or any of the old labels. I came out here as a writer, looking for a story.

Atlantic Beach is the easternmost town and one of the five communities located on Bogue Banks. The population was 1,495 at the 2010 census, and it can’t be much more now. This is a languid little place anytime of the year, but especially in the late October dusk, the masses of summer tourists now safely ensconced back in the comfort of their homes, wherever that might be, away from here. One can cross the bridge and be deposited into a different world where the vehicles are now few and far in between, as the seasonal flux has slowly dissipated and by the eve of November, totally dissolved, and you’re left with only the locals, of which I’m one, again. Thankfully.

I’ve found this area provides me a kind of respite, calm, and perspective I’ve never quite captured anywhere else.