February's summer

Exactly the kind of day needed. Laying on my back in the grass at Live Oak Park, Berkeley. 70 degrees, winter on holiday.

Nothing to do but think and, not having the energy for that, not thinking.

The sound of a tennis ball being hit, not very well, by two people.

Reading two books, one I've written and one written by Mark Greif about men in crisis and the books they write.

Greif has a theory about the 1960s being the "big bang" in US cultural history, while also writing that the four or five "postwar years from 1945-1950 might have been more nerve-racking for Americans than the whole rest of the thirty-year crisis since the beginning of World War I."

I was born in 1950 and came of age in the late 1960's. Knowing now that I was born in a nerve-racking year, I'm determined to complete Greif's book to learn how I lived through the "big bang."

Greif's book is titled, "The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973." My book's, "The Classical World: A Novel of Ideas."

Grief's book is about the past, my book's about living in the past right now, 2015 and beyond.