Writing a column is a strange, many-sided enterprise. It is, first and foremost, a privilege: to be able to reach readers—most of whom you’ve never met and never will but also family members, lifelong friends and recent acquaintances, writers you’ve worked with, your faithful editor, and more—on “a regular basis,” as I myself have read so many columnists coming in so many flavors over a lifetime, going all the way back to the sportswriter for the Pomona Progress-Bulletin whose column in the second half of the 1950s was the first I devoured regularly.
On any given day I am thinking about my next column for this publication (the column appears every other week), by which I mean that never does a day pass in which I don’t think at all about the “current” column or some possible subject down the road or both—and often, in the interval between columns, I change my mind two or three times about what the next subject will be.
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