I only want to read the best writing, which is easy because apparently no one else does. A hundred book-books piled atop a dresser, awaiting their turn. I arrange them in sets of two to five, related in some way, and tackle them a bunch at a time. The audio lineup, for reading with my ears, t he original way to take in stories. It all had to start around fires, with grunts and mutters and hand talk, long before curious squiggles could be understood as communication and only a few could understand anyway. And the online services, Kindle and Everand for me. I know I should move over to public library fare, a believer in the communal mission in place since B.C., which is something, over 2,000 years now. I’m in a prolonged book phase, which cuts into time with more journalistic sources, New Yorker, Economist, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and back in the day Outside, Sports Illustrated, Time and Newsweek when they were the best and had not yet cratered. The going is a little rougher in the day job. Good thing I’m an earnest follower of William Faulkner’s advice to read everything. Here’s his quote: “Read, read, read. Read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it.” I draw the line at social media, Substack, influencers and freelance punditry. Faulkner said to include the trash and the bad writing in your reading, not gulp from the sewer. I don’t think of myself as snobbish. Only out of step. Maybe a little less anxious and a little more attentive, too. Some believe the Japanese term Tsundoko signals intelligence. If so, I’m brighter than you think, smarter than the evidence in my own writing. At the least my reading and reading-in-waiting hint at curiosity outpacing the ability to satisfy it. That and just being a little crazy, the more likely diagnosis. This raises that question about time in the day. We like to rue there isn’t enough. But it is what it is, that same precise span between moments unless you are a physicist who knows better by some theoretical equation or that mathematician with proofs that 2 plus 4 doesn’t always equal 4, exactly. But I think you know what I’m saying. Or would if you got your nose off your screen and whatever artificial, virtual stand-in for life you are absorbing yourself in. It’s why I quit Facebook, sit-coms and Major League Baseball games. Not enough time in the day, which is to say I prioritized all that out. All but Denver Broncos games, my last spectator sports addiction. I write, I read, I get outside with the free time I get back from longer work weeks than yours. Only my job doesn’t feel like a job, a calling instead, and I’ve been blessed that way if not necessarily with income. Hey, we all have our obsessions and prices to pay. Does this make me a better person? Oh, I wish. What I’d give to be better, smarter, wiser. I don’t want to waste my days is all. Life, real life, is too big, too interesting. Which of course raises that other question: What is real life? Simple, I think: Where we spend our most precious coin or squander it without thought. This is a free will question, actually. Maybe a proof. Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745.   The post Journalism Matters: Choosing our obsessions, or they choose us appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less