So I’m sitting in the Arcadia Bookstore in Spring Green, Wisconsin, with my daughter, our keyboards clicking like self-running machines, and then I can’t write anymore. How do you write in a bookstore/lunchroom with a bust of Shakespeare on the top of a bookshelf staring down at you? I could quote him, I suppose, to get him off my back, but then he would just frown and say, “Plagiarism is not writing,” and I would answer, “You plagiarized everyone, including your friend Marlowe,” and he would answer, “Yes, but I did it so well, so much better than the original.”

As if I or anyone today could do that, even with the modern aid of high octane caffeine streaming through my veins like a torrent of contradictions from “To be or not to be…”

I don’t believe we can write if we’re trying to outdo someone, even if we’re only trying to outdo ourselves. Since I’m currently writing to entertain rather than inspire, I see that it’s time for a joke, or at least a modicum of irony. So I just went to the men’s room after a nut brown ale, some chili and a cup of coffee and found the ultimate women’s revenge, here in this bookstore/lunchroom run by women. It was a spotlessly clean men’s room, with a toilet lid that would not stay up. It’s one thing for them to complain about putting the seat down, but to go this far, to install a seat that will not stay up – that’s just too strategic, especially in a room women will not use. It seems like one of the women had a slightly too-large smile for me when I walked past the counter. The bust of Shakespeare is not amused.

Now I look past my dauighter and I see an ironic metaphor for our country – stacks of books with No Easy Day, the Navy SEAL’s account of the killing of Bin Laden, next to another volume entitled, The New Deal, a study of FDR’s plan to save the country. Death or life, which will you read?

Writing is “righting,” an attempt to make life better, or at least to shine a light on something wormy and so to make it shrivel and die. Writing is building something with words, a city or a life. The words are humble things, like the stones that become a cathedral. All life is metaphoric if one looks at it closely enough. It is so much more than the thing itself. An apple is more than an apple; it is a logo, a variable of gravity, a temptation that boots our parents out of Eden. An apple is more because our thinking makes it so. The apple does not matter. It could have been a walnut, a potato, or a plum. What matters is not the color, shape or taste, but rather, the fact that it fell and someone noticed it and saw there was meaning there.

Writing is that meaning, the moment someone picks up a stone, an apple, or a plum, studies it for a moment, and then smiles. “What?” says a friend, who is not a writer and does not hold the apple like truth-in-hand.

Will Shakespeare, you need not smile at me like that. I have held an apple in my hand and smiled at it when I saw that it was alive, teeming in its redness, redolent with sweet juice, firm as flesh, and holding in secret a truth we can hardly imagine. What is that secret? All things fall, and the falling is a beautiful thing to those who understand it. The falling makes an apple so much more than an apple. A fallen apple is one of us.

I am a writer. When you fall, I will bear witness. When I fall, someone else will witness. It is a beautiful thing.

Just for the record, I do not recommend taking too much caffeine in very good coffee after a bowl of white bean chili and a nut brown ale, even if Shakespeare smiles down upon it. It means that you will write about busts, toilet seats, life, death, apples, irony, stones and Eden. Yes, Will is definitely smiling at me.