The Return of Yo Ivanhoe!

Your Man For Fun in Rapidan is now doing business over at Substack. 

Thirty two years ago, beached in my early 30s, I decided to attempt a personal version of The Thousand and One Nights, in which I would assume the role of Scheherazade, and attempt to tell myself stories every night to stay alive. I feel as if I am tempting fate even writing these words, but now, half a lifetime later, I have continued that project through 11,271 nights, and have never missed a night. No matter where I was, what time it was, or what was going on in my life, I have written my words. The challenge of dredging up new words every night from the foothills of sleep means that I have very, very seldom gone back and revisited the words I’ve already written. I now, however, recognize that this is *the* project of my life. Everything I’ve ever felt, learned, thought, and experienced is in those black books—fiction, fairy tales, travel narratives, boundless joy and bottomless grief, rage, portraits, essays, eulogies, long, rambling excursions into every single one of my passions and hobby horses. The goal has always been to ceaselessly drift between fiction and reality, to take whatever might have transpired on any given day or night and toss it into the blender of my imagination, to tell the stories of my life through myriad voices and points of view. I’ve finally decided to begin the excavation that was always the inevitable end game of all this work, and I’ve started the arduous process of reading through every one of the books, with the goal of dragging at least some of this stuff out from under the bushel. (The longest entry I’ve so far discovered is 37 pages.) It’s daunting, though; there are now more than 10 million words, which is the equivalent of 100 100,000-word books. I’m sort of terrified now that I’m getting started too late, but it is nonetheless time for me to get started.