You got to love Richard Ford. I just finished his book The Lay of the Land and highly recommend it, and the trilogy, of which it is the 3rd part. He punches you in the gullet all the time.

 (You got to love Richard Ford. I just finished his book and highly recommend the trilogy, of which it is the 3rd part. [1-The Sportswriter; 2-Independence Day] He punches you in the gullet all the time. The following are excerpts from The Lay  of the Land, this first one is from toward the end of the book.  It is November 2000, after the Gore vs. Bush presidential election.)



"When I'm turned loose from this current challenge, I am going to sit down and write another letter to the President, which will be a response to his yearly Thanksgiving proclamation--generally full of platitudes and horseshit, and no better than poems written for ceremonial occasions by the Poet Laureate.  This will be the first such letter I've actually sent, and though I know he will not have long to read it and gets letters from lots of people who feel they need to get their views aired, still, by some chance, he might read it and pass along its basic points to his successor, whoever that is (though of course I know--we all do). 

 It will not be a letter about the need for more gun control or the need for supporting the family unit so fourteen-year-olds don't steal cars, own machine pistols and shoot people, or about ending pregnancies, or the need to shore up our borders and tighten immigration laws, or the institution of English as a national language (which I support), but will simply say that I am a citizen of New Jersey, in middle age, with wives and children to my credit, a non-drug user, a non-jogger, without cell-phone service or called ID, a vertically integrated non-Christian who has sponsored the hopes and contexts and dreams of others with no with for credit or personal gain or transcendence, a citizen with a niche, who has his own context, who does not fear permanence and is not in despair, who is in fact a realtor and a pilgrim as much as any.
      


...I'll write that these demographics confer on me not one shred of wisdom but still a strong personal sense of having both less to lose and curiously more at stake.  I will say to the President that it's one thing for me to give up the Forever Concept and take on myself the responsibilities of the Next Level--that life can't be escaped and must be faced entire.  But it's quite another thing for him to do, or his successor.  For them, in fact, it is very unwise and even dangerous.  Indeed, it seems to me that these very positions, positions of public trust they've worked hard to get, require that insofar as they have our interests at heart, they must graduate to the Next Level but never give up the Forever Concept.  ...there is an important difference worth considering between the life span of an individual and the life span of a whole republic."



[p. 466.]

Richard Ford

"Chances are, with the year I've had, I was headed there anyway....When I asked what it was I had to do before I was sixty, maybe it's just to accept my whole life and my whole self in it--to have that chance before it's too late: to try again to achieve what athletes achieve when their minds are clear, their parts in concert, when they're "feeling it," when the ball's as big as the moon and they hit it a mile because that's all they can do. When nothing else is left. The Next Level."

"More tears are falling.  I could laugh through them if I didn't have a potentially self-erasing pain in my chest.  What is it I'm supposed to accept?  That I'm an asshole?  (I confess.)  That I have no heart?  (I don't confess.)  But what would be the hardest thing to say and mean it?  What would be the hardest for others? 

"...and of course, the answer's plain, unless we're actors or bad-check artists or spies, when it's still probably plain but more tolerable: that your life is founded on a lie, and you know what the lie is and won't admit it, maybe can't.  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

"...deep in my heart space a breaking is.  And as in our private moments of sexual longing, when the touch we want is far away, a groan comes out of me.  'Oh-uhhh.'  The sour tidal whoosh the dead man exhales.  'Oh-uhhh.  Oh-uhhh. '  so long have I not accepted, by practicing the quaintness of acceptance by....'Oh-uhhh.  Oh-uhhh.'  Breath-loss clenches my belly into a rope knot, clenching, clenching in.  'Oh, oh, ohhhhhpp.'  Yes, yes and yes. No more no's.  No more no's.  No more no's."

"As I said, acceptance is goddamned scary. I feel its very fearsomeness here in my bed, in my empty house with the storm past and Thanksgiving waiting with the dawn in the east. Be careful what you accept, is my warning--to me. I will if I can."

[All excerpts above from Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land]