The Social Distancing Champion Thrives in the Pandemic

I have a T-shirt with a quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald on it. The quote reads, “You don’t write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say.”

This is the reason why I so seldom write blog entries: because I usually don’t have anything to say. Well, now that I’ve been living through COVID for the past seven months, I finally feel like I have something to say. Here goes…

I spend next to no time online anymore, so I don’t know what other people have written about their year in the time of COVID. However, I imagine there have been more than enough posts about how horrible life has been this year—how COVID has prevented people from traveling, seeing their family and friends, and in general disrupted their lives.

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The pandemic and the uncertain, combative political climate this year has reminded me that most of Life is out of my control, which is why I’ve spent the majority of the past nine months focusing on two things I can control: my writing and my fitness.

Compared to other occupations, many of which have been severely disrupted by COVID, mine as a novelist has actually benefited from the pandemic. The reason is the lack of distractions. I haven’t been able to go anywhere, so every day I’ve simply risen early, sat down at one of my eleven typewriters (yes, I got a few more this year), and continued work on one of the five novels I have in progress.

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Honestly, this year it’s been far easier emotionally to bury my head in the metaphorical sand by buying typewriters and focusing on my writing. The social and political unrest, the violence, the protests, and the restrictions and inconveniences of COVID have all made me want to utterly ignore the “real world,” and instead escape each morning into a fictional world that I create and (to some degree) control.

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Besides the staggering COVID numbers and the deaths caused by the pandemic, there was news this year of other deaths that affected me deeply, causing me to feel nostalgic for my long-gone childhood and reminding me of my own mortality, which in turn spurred me to write more, and faster.

“Ars longa, vita brevis. Art is long, life is short.” — Latin translation of a Greek statement by Hippocrates.

“Work, work, for the night is coming!” — Michelangelo

For different reasons, the deaths of the following people had a significant impact on my outlook, in some cases sending me to bed, depressed, for a couple days:

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Kelly Preston. I loved her as the single mom in For Love of the Game, as the driven, man-eating, emasculating girlfriend in Jerry Maguire, and in Stephen King’s Christine, but the nostalgic side of me loved her most in the obscure teen sex romp Mischief, from 1985. It’s a great coming of age story about a teenage boy in the 1950s, and Kelly Preston plays the sexy teenage Alpha girl perfectly. Over the past four years, while I’ve been writing my own “teen epic,” the antics in Mischief have given me frequent bursts of inspiration.

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Elaine Sadofsky. The mother of my best friend, Mrs. Sadofsky was, in my opinion, a great painter—particularly of watercolor still-lifes. She had considerable difficulties managing motherhood (particularly trying to raise a genius son like Jason), and was lacking in some life skills, but I always found her to be warm and compassionate and artistically inspiring. I’ll never forget the first day I visited Jason after school at his family’s apartment (on the other side of our development, Green Hills of Glenham in Fishkill, NY). When I went in the door, three things struck me: one, Mrs. Sadofsky’s warm smile; two, the fact that the apartment was a terribly cluttered mess; and three, most of all, the stacks of her paintings all over the living room, including an easel with a painting-in-progress on it. My mother always loved Mrs. Sadofsky’s artwork, and one of my few regrets in life was never having bought a painting from Mrs. Sadofsky for her. Although I hadn’t seen her for many years before her death, I will miss her.

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Eddie Van Halen. When he died in October, my mind was flooded with memories of all of those great Van Halen songs from my teen years, and I—a man my wife says is perpetually about 14 years old—instantly felt my age. Back when I was 13-17, I kept Van Halen cassette tapes in my cassette clock radio, so I could wake up every morning to songs like “I’ll Wait,” “Panama,” “Hot for Teacher,” “Runnin’ with the Devil,” and “And the Cradle Will Rock.” Indeed, Van Halen’s music plays a major role in my “teen epic” Big Book, starring 16-year-old Avery Craig. Here is a “sneak peek” from a scene in the novel that mentions the dearly departed Eddie Van Halen:

Avery went over to the jukebox, dropped in a quarter and selected Van Halen’s “And the Cradle Will Rock.” The song opened with a wallop. To Avery, its killer opening guitar work sounded like an electrical storm, and its swanky, driving beat made him imagine supermodel Elle Macpherson sashaying down a catwalk in nothing but high heels and a skimpy string bikini. Singing along with David Lee Roth, Avery swagger-danced like Roth back to the counter, where he stomped his heel to the music and skimmed the “Cosmo Quiz.” … At the precise moment Eddie Van Halen launched into his scorching guitar solo, Caitlyn slinked half a step inside, held the saloon doors open and stood still with one knee seductively bent for all to admire. Avery’s eyes widened, his breathing stopped, his heart quaked in his chest. An overhead light shone down on her, making her hair sparkle red, as if there were small rubies in it. Her Blow Pop was gone, but her smirking lips were as voluptuous and slippery-looking as ever.

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Sean Connery. Anyone who really knows me and has known me for a long time will tell you that I’ve been a Bond fan since I was seven or eight years old. When I was a little kid, I was enamored of the James Bond portrayed by Roger Moore, but when I became a teenager, it was all about Sean Connery and the Bond from the novels. Indeed, my bedroom at ages 13 to 17 had a poster of a still from GOLDFINGER: Sean Connery in the Alps, leaning on the front fender of his Aston Martin DB5. I can admit now to watching certain Connery scenes over and over, trying to figure out exactly what made him so damn cool. It was just that: Connery was the epitome of cool. Whatever character he was portraying in a movie, he gave the role authority, style, and masculine strength. Besides the Bond movies, I loved (and still love) him in The Great Train Robbery, The Untouchables, and even the otherwise forgettable, modern action flick, The Rock.

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Diana Rigg. The “Bond girl” in one of the lesser-known and less-appreciated Bond movies, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, she brought an elegance to her role as Bond’s wife, Tracy Bond, that none of her fellow Bond girls have managed to before or since. Along with the aforementioned poster of Sean Connery in the Alps, leaning on the front fender of his Aston Martin DB5, my teenage bedroom also contained a bulletin board with images of my favorite Bond girls, and a small poster of the lovely auburn-haired Diana Rigg in her figure-skating outfit in the movie was among them. When I learned earlier this year that she had died, I actually felt a throb of hurt in my chest. It was as if I’d heard that a former girlfriend had become sick or fallen into penury or addiction before dying. And I will admit here and now that Diana Rigg, along with Barbara Bach in THE SPY WHO LOVED ME, was a major inspiration for my character Svetlana Krüsh in the Dakota Stevens mysteries.

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And with that, back to my writing. Specifically here’s what I accomplished with my writing this year:

Now, while I’ve made great progress this year in the actual writing of new material, my book sales have been way, way down. But, as if to counterbalance this reduction in writing income, my stock portfolio has positively crushed it this year—all stocks that I picked, by the way, not because Cramer or some other loudmouth declared them a good buy.
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One innovation I’ve incorporated into my writing process this year that I’d like to mention, is the acquiring of an Epson ADP (Automatic Document Feed) scanner. With this baby, I’ve been able to type pages on one of my typewriters (my new favorite is a recently acquired Olivetti Studio 44), and at the end of each writing day scan them into the computer. This is proving to be an incredible time-saver, obviating the need for me to re-type typewriter pages into a computer.

I’ve marveled at how far the scanning and OCR technology has come in the past 20 years. Back in 2002 or so, I was using this same process while writing the first draft of the Dakota mystery A Real Piece of Work. Not only was the scanner the slowest flatbed chunk of crap I’ve ever worked with, but also the OCR software was wonky and inaccurate. Not so anymore.
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A couple weeks ago, I decided I wanted a digital copy of all the hand-edits I’d made to hard copy pages of the Big Book. Remembering how long similar scanning projects had taken me in the past, I earmarked 20 hours (or about one hour each workday afternoon for a month) to complete the project, but I did it—scanned 2,600 manuscript pages—in less than 4 hours! Incredible.

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Fitness, or…”Work, Bitch!” As I mentioned above, the other area of my life that I can control and which I’ve been focusing on this year is my fitness. Perhaps anticipating COVID (but more likely out of a desire to be able to work out every day independent of gyms), I spent a lot of time last winter outfitting a complete home gym in our basement. We have a NordicTrack treadmill facing our older HDTV, so I can have cardio cinema every afternoon. And I have, hiking or running 3-5 miles a day while watching any number of my favorite movies.

Recently I bought a rowing machine for the home gym to augment the weight bench, weights, resistance bands, TRX straps, yoga ball and other equipment I already had in place. My wife, Alexas, has been incredibly active with our gym as well, taking PiYo classes twice a week, and doing online Peloton classes every afternoon. Seriously, I don’t know how we would have been able to handle the isolation and restrictions of COVID without our little home gym.

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On a related note, the Outdoors. If we didn’t have a home gym, I probably would have been spending even more time outdoors—that is, more than the 20 hours a week that I’m already doing. Since January, I’ve climbed about 15 small mountains in New York and nearby Connecticut and Massachusetts; hiked hundreds of miles in state parks and on the Appalachian Trail; and, when there’s been snow (like the past week), cross-country skied tens of miles as well. My skiing has gotten better as I’ve aged, probably because I’m no longer pushing myself to go as fast as possible. Instead I’ve been focusing on form and technique, knowing from my youth as a tennis player that if I can get the form down, the speed and power will come eventually. I practice every chance I get. Here’s hoping we get another 2 feet of snow during the Christmas to New Year’s week!

While I’m mentioning the outdoors, I’d like to take a moment to credit some men and an institution that opened up this world to me and helped me to develop these skills. In recent years it’s become customary to bash the Boy Scouts of America, and some of that criticism is certainly justified. However, I can’t speak to any of the allegations leveled against the organization or some of its former leaders—allegations of sexual molestation (or worse), homophobia, etc.—because none of those things were my experience. My experiences with Scouting were unequivocally positive. In fact, the more time I’ve spent in the outdoors, the more I’ve come to realize that I have my excellent Scoutmasters of Troop 95 in Fishkill, NY to thank for my skills and comfort in functioning in the woods. Most if not all of them are probably dead now, but I have to thank the following men for their lessons and leadership, and for being such great, supportive role models: Mr. MacFarlane, Mr. Loven, Mr. Dewoodie, Mr. Griffiths and, yes, even you, Mr. Cruickshank (the “mean Scoutmaster”). They all taught me well. Almost 40 years later, their instruction on hypothermia, building a fire, orienteering, mountain rescue, knots, filtering water, building a shelter, identifying animal tracks, etc. has stuck with me and served me well for decades.

Case in point, back in April, while hiking along the Taconic range in Eastern Dutchess county, I went to a stone edifice marking the spot where the borders of New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts meet. On the way back from the site, I encountered a lost hiker who was stumbling around, looking for the trail. It was a cold, windy day, and with the wind-chill on the bare mountaintop, probably only 20 degrees. He was thoroughly unprepared. I mean completely. He had a tiny water bottle and a power bar for food, but nothing for a shelter, nothing to start a fire with, and was wearing cargo pants with holes in them (no base layers), sneakers, and no hat. As I got closer, I noticed this hiker was limping to boot, and I said to myself, “Chris, if you don’t do something here, this motherf-cker is gonna die.”

What I did next amazed me. With no conscious thought whatsoever, the hundreds of hours of training I’d received in Scouts and the elite Scout organization, The Order of the Arrow, kicked in. I got his attention, asked him some questions and established that his speech was slurred and he was confused (symptoms of hypothermia), covered him with a Mylar emergency blanket, built a fire and sat him down in front of it, and took out my backpacking stove and made him some hot tea. Within half an hour, he was much better, and because it was late in the afternoon and clouds were rolling in, we headed out. I asked him where he was parked, and it turned out to be at the same trailhead that I was. The only problem was, to get back to our cars required climbing down the same steep (and in places, outright sheer) ridge that we’d climbed up in the morning, and now he had to do it with a sprained ankle, and if he tried, I knew he’d fall to his death.

At the back of Boys’ Life magazine (the magazine about Scouting), each month there used to be a comic strip of sorts called something like “Scouting in Action.” Each month, the strip told the story of a Scout who had saved the day by putting his Scout training to use—saving old women from burning houses, getting pets out of wells, pulling hapless kids out of ponds where they’d broken through the thin ice. As I gave the hiker one of my hiking poles to use as cane or a crutch, and we hobbled back towards the cliff top, I thought what a great comic strip my current adventure would make, if it weren’t coming 35 years too late.

When we reached the top of the cliff where the trail zigzagged down the steep rock and scrubby face, I opened my pack and pulled out a 50-foot rescue rope (I’m not kidding). I’d purchased it before a failed late winter summit of Mount Washington a couple years earlier, and, despite its weight of 3-4 pounds), kept it in my pack, because, after all, the Scout motto is, “Be Prepared.” I’d bought this rescue rope for myself knowing that I might need to self-belay on my way down Mount Washington’s exceedingly steep Lion Head trail. Now I was really glad I’d kept it in my pack.

I’ll spare you the tedium of the mechanics involved in lowering an injured hiker down a steep trail, and then getting yourself down. Suffice it to say, it involves a lot of bowlines (a crucial rescue knot) and double-bowlines; a length of cordage for pulling the rope down to yourself; securing the rope to a tree or rock; and repeating the process every 25 feet or so. It took almost two hours to get off that mountain with him, and when we reached the bottom and snow began to fall, I was incredibly grateful for my knowledge and experience, and for my Scoutmasters teaching me all of this stuff so long ago.

As for the hiker, I never received any substantial thanks from him for what I’d done (seriously, a Harry & David fruit assortment would have been nice), which was to rescue his stupid, sorry ass. But then again, Jesus cured ten lepers and only one thanked him, so I’ve come to believe that ingratitude is the norm. Afterwards, I gave the guy some advice about buying a basic survival kit before he went hiking again, but I doubt he followed my advice. I’m afraid that guy is destined to join the hundreds of people who die in the woods every year because they grossly underestimate nature. Sigh.

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The isolation of COVID has given me ample opportunity to reacquaint myself with other loves, hobbies and skills that I possess, including cooking, chess, and “being handy”—that is, doing things like putting up curtain rods, taking apart the pipes under the kitchen sink to clear a clog and assembling furniture. The cooking especially is a double-edged sword, because my cooking is excellent, and invariably I consume most of what I cook. Oh well.

In an unrelated note, I also got into T-shirts in a major way this year. After 20 years of working at home, it finally occurred to me that I could wear whatever I want, so I started wearing T-shirts with messages on them that I liked. Here are a few that I got myself this year:

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SO…now that 2020 is almost over (thank God), I’m starting to think about 2021 and what I want to accomplish. Here is my plan:

If you read this to the end, why not drop me a line to let me know how you’ve been faring through COVID? Send me an email at corcutt007 -at- yahoo -dot- com. Thanks. I hope to hear from you!