On Lazy Sundays, Coffee Addiction, and Writing About King Arthur.

And so another lazy Sunday passes here in Maine!

I don't know what it is exactly, but I've never been able to get it together on Sundays, even when I was a kid. It has always felt like it was the longest, slowest day of the week. If it weren't for black coffee, I don't know if I would survive them week after week.

This man knows what I'm talking about!

Apparently, I still haven't been able to shake it, since other than my blogging duties and some zazen, I've done more or less nothing today. On the one hand, I know that spending time doing nothing is an important and necessary part of my life, and that I absolutely need the time to recharge, even if it is just zoning out in front of Youtube videos. On the other hand, Americans have an insane work ethic generally, and New Englanders and Mainers even more so, so I never can feel entirely comfortable if I'm not working at something.

It looks peaceful, but you can bet that there is some existential angst going down in that Maine lighthouse when Sunday rolls around.

In some ways this works in my favor, especially as I prepare to dive into my research for my next big writing project, centered around King Arthur. I've already written one short book of Arthurian tales, but I quickly realized as I was writing it what a bottomless, and yet wonderfully rich and fulfilling, study it is to research Britain's Once and Future King, and how the research I had done for that book just skimmed the surface of the Arthurian world.

In fact, I hold Arthur as one of the most important figures in all of Western literature, given that the writing of the great Arthur and Tristan romances at the height of the Middle-Ages, with their emphasis on individualism and personal choice, even to the detriment of social or religious opinion, helped give voice to the developing humanistic sentiment in the West (of course, as to whether there was a 'West' at the time of the Middle-Ages is up for debate). And the Arthur myths were some of the first pan-Western tales told that were popular more or less everywhere in Western Europe, from Spain and Italy to France and Germany and Scandinavia.

As a result, I think he is an incredibly important figure today, particularly as one of the uniting symbols of Western life born in the proto-secular age, and I absolutely love writing about him for that reason.  So on Monday or Tuesday it will be off to our city library (which is far better than the standard for small American cities; once again, I believe Mr. Stephen King has a big role in that, and I know he donates to it quite frequently) to see what I can dig up.I'm hoping to dive-in to the early Welsh material that provided a backdrop for later tales, and try to uncover the mythic heart of the Arthur legends to be used later in the stories I'm planning right now.

The Bangor library; my refuge. (Credits: Maine.gov)

And with that, I bid a happy and enjoyable Sunday to you all! Hopefully, it is more productive for you than it has proven for me.

If you are capable of enjoying Sundays like a sane person is meant to, instead of running around in a big impotent circle of guilt, please treasure it. Treasure every last beautiful second.