Had a good time at the very, very hot (I mean literally — 90+ degrees in Oakland yesterday) East Bay on the Brain reading last night with my buddy Sam Hurwitt and a host of other readers. Kudos to Lauren for getting a successful reading series together. I ran one for a while, and it’s a pain in the ass but worth the effort. The night before, I did my first talk of the season at Cal Shakes, which meant two public speaking gigs back-to-back, and this after a different and pretty major public speaking gig a couple of weeks back. I was just leaving for a book tour around this time last year, which means that K.O. inc. has developed a habit of talking a lot in front of people in the summer. Which is one of many reasons why I am going on an eight day silent meditation retreat in July. I did a three day warmup retreat in January, and it was a revelation; not only is it a total relief not to speak, but being among a whole mess of people who are also not speaking, and thus being relieved of the burden of small talk, you are actually able to think.

As a person of Irish origin, my extreme verbosity is probably a given (my late father would be nodding at this idea, while talking — and cursing — a lot), but because I teach, and therefore talk to people for a living, and seem to have inadvertently developed a secondary career also involving talking, I get pretty sick of my own voice. Thus the idea that one can go days, weeks, even in some cases months and years in a nonverbal setting becomes rather appealing. Of course, the flip side to not talking is the need to express oneself otherwise, which in my case means writing, which means… more words. That’s the catch-22, I suppose. Without words, more words. And more and more and more.