I’ve been up since 04:00, trying to get a jump on today’s writing.  So far, so good.  I’ve grown to like these pre-dawn hours: all decent people are asleep, so lots of quiet and no interruptions.  Even those weenies on the east coast are still sleepily stumbling around their lofts looking for caffeine and trying to find a clean shirt to wear today.  Ha!  I’ve already put down 500 words.  Indeed.

In other badass literary news, on this day in 1859, a young Samuel Langhorne Clemens—better known as Mark Twain—earned his steamboat pilot’s license, a gritty milestone that would shape one of America’s literary giants.  This might seem like a trivial event to the uninitiated, but it was anything but.  At 23, Clemens had been apprenticing on the Mississippi River since 1857, learning the treacherous currents and hidden snags of the waterway while working on comic travel letters for the Keokuk Daily Post.  This wasn’t simply another day job for an aspiring writer – it was a baptism by fire into a rough-and-tumble world of river men, gamblers, and hustlers—a world that would later fuel the raw, unfiltered voice of classics like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi. Twain’s time as a pilot gave him an ear for the dialects and tall tales of the American South, grounding his work in a realism that cut through the era’s sentimental fluff.  He navigated a river that could kill you in a heartbeat, lived among hard-drinking, hard-living folks, and later used that lens to skewer hypocrisy, racism, and human folly with a pen as sharp as my newest switchblade. His steamboat days ended with the Civil War, but the swagger and insight he gained on April 9, 1859, informed the bulk of his work.

Damn…it’s now 06:30, that wretched sun is rising, and I just hit the first of what will probably many walls today.  A day like this, starting as early as it did, may warrant a Triple Mocha Frozen Coffee with an extra shot of espresso, or cocaine…whatever they have on hand.

N.P.: “Dayman” – RMB