I couldn’t sleep well last night. I turned the light on by the bed and grabbed this book from the coffee table right by me. I began to read ‘The Sun Also Rises’ for first time since school days. As good as writing gets.
Monday, February 2, 2026
On the subway heading uptown this evening.
Sunday, February 1, 2026
Harlem restaurant, food pantry, makes sure everyone has access to a warm meal
Too cold to go downtown and hold my sign. It’s what I do. 10 years every weekday. I get up early still like I’m going out with the sign. I’ve been staring at the computer. I’ll go read a real book now. Killing time till it warms up a bit. Gives meaning. Purpose.
'We go to college to be given one more chance to learn to read in case we haven't learned in high school. Once we have learned to read, the rest can be trusted to add itself unto us.'
I’ve been a schoolteacher. Right after college in 1969, like a lot of guys, I taught school as an alternative to serving in Vietnam. I was married with a week-old daughter on graduation day. I taught grade school English in Cleveland, Ohio for six years. After that, I ran, eventually owned, a longstanding bookstore in downtown Cleveland. It felt something like Three Lives in the West Village. I went on to found an alternative weekly paper like the Voice, also in Cleveland. It lasted 12 years. Twenty-one years ago I moved here, armed with an idea and a prototype for a national book magazine. Like a Rolling Stone for books. I never raised the huge amount of money I needed. I then worked for a media company, editing a couple of neighborhood weeklies, more than once using my editor’s space to talk about city kids and reading. Between the editorial jobs, I taught English for a year here in Manhattan at a Catholic boys’ high school with mostly minority kids. I was terrible at discipline. But sometimes when we found a book or a story we liked, it all came together.
gunlockeb@yahoo.com