Where's the 'off' switch?
It’s hours before the turn of the year in the US, and 2025 is a landmark. In a few hours it will be 50 years since I officially began my journalism career.
In all that time I interviewed politicians, bad guys, gang bangers, business leaders, royalty and heads of state. I wrote countless columns and editorials and movie and theater reviews. I covered city council meetings in Chicago and county board meetings in Florida.
I loved every minute of it. It was like eating chocolate pudding nearly every, single day of my working life.
Having said that, 2025 is supposed to be the year that I do what people my age are supposed to do: retire. Or at least as my teacher, friend and mentor Sr. Lorraine Trotter advises “Slide into retirement.”
Right. She then adds, "“Well then of course, writers don’t retire.”
So what exactly am I to do?
I’m a poet, so I’ll spend some of this “retirement time’ writing verse, teaching a poetry class blue-haired ladies who want to pen Valentine messages to their grandchildren.
Then I’ll fiddle around with a couple of novel and short story projects for which I had little time when I was ‘on deadline.”
Finally, I’ll pitch a few stories - mostly about the industrial uses of gemstones or Poet Laureates in the heartland - to the small, but consistently appreciative publications to which I regularly contribute.
Sooner or later though, I will start to miss the politicians and the bad guys and the gangbangers. This whole retirement thing will fly out the window and I’ll find some way to practice journalism again.
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published
Pursuit
I
have
lived
a
lifetime
chasing
losers
and
liars
and
freaks
and
all
the
while
I
learned
to
love
them
so
no
wonder
I
can't
stop
running
toward
them
and
start
chasing
after
youI can’t turn off the journalist switch, but I will try anyway.



Love it. And the shades. And THANKS for liking today’s male writers. Let’s catch up.
Righteous