Lewis Lapham, in one graceful forehand, hits on exactly why his magazine is the only one I read cover to cover.

As an editor I’ve been more interested in the play of mind than in its harnessing to a political bandwagon.

And it’s true, Harper’s Magazine is sort of the Wimbeldon of the imaginative mind. The substance and insight are there, but what sets Harper’s apart is how it is delivered. Be it letters to the editor, a photo montage of Bolivia, an assorted collection of memos and emails, or, my favorite, the short story towards the end, the ideas are more than ideas, they are also art. Deep, deductive analysis of serious topics melds with instinctual and improvised poetry. And that’s what leaves you staring off into space, your hands wrapped around a mug of coffee. It’s not the intellectual rigor - you can find that in any science journal. It’s the aesthetics of the thought; it’s the way that humans react to art.

‘I deserve this … just two hours of floating in space.’ Such was my thinking, or justification, walking over here, Harper’s and my notebook stuffed into my back pocket and Everything But The Girl in my earphones. The song Mirrorball came on with its dreamy backbeats and bizarre lyrics. All around me was a current of steady, urban pedestrian traffic and I really did start to feel like I was floating.

Some good times I remember
my birthday that September
we laid down on the lawn
and counted on till dawn

Isn’t Emily’s birthday in Septemeber? Jesus, did I even wish her happy birthday last year? Where in the hell was I last September … yeah, it was september, shit, I remember ’cause we were in India. Septermber 8th, that’s what it is. Fuck. We didn’t even find out about 9/11 until a week later …

Everytime I listen to Everything But The Girl I am reminded of one single month of my life. The flight from Taipei to Johannesburg was packed with fragrant African men (and only men) in suit slacks, brightly colored shirts, and leather jackets. Unlike other Cathay Pacific flights - comfortable, with decent meals - this one must have had an extra three rows of seats stuffed into the plane. My knee caps were jammed into the seat in front of me for the entire 12 hour flight. Emily slept on my shoulder while I tried to read, then tried to sleep, failed, and kept reading J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace. I was going to try to sit in on one of Coetzee’s classes at the University of Cape Town. Or so my deceitful memory tells me.

I fell in love with Cape Town as soon as our taxi - having passed the shantytowns that greet all newcomers - descended into the city proper. Luckily, we stayed close to the decrepit downtown that spreads from the market to the renovated waterfront. Had he approached via the sprawling mansions that dot the hills above the city, I don’t think I would have been able to handle the immediate contrasts of rich and poor; white, black, and coloured. (South Africa’s three arbitrary races, as races tend to be).

We settled into our hostel just as the spotlights were turned on, illuminating Table Mountain and its infamous, lazy tablecloth of thick fog. It hovered, shifted, and played around the steep drop-off that marks the northern boundary of the city.

Everything was perfect. Except for the fact that I could not walk. On the flight I developed deep vein thrombosis. I had thought it was just a calf cramp - something I’ve been prone to ever since running cross-country in high school. But the next day it was still there. And the day after. And the day after. Traveling around Africa while not being able to walk did not sound like a clever combination and so I made an appointment with a doctor. He was at least 85-years-old with a Jewish nose and a Jewish sense of humor. He had the sparkle in his eyes that unhurried men his age always seem to acquire.

Born and raised in South Africa, the son of British Jews, I could only have imagined all the history, the wars, the conflicts, the apartheid, the independence that his life bore witness to. Obviously, the temptation to interrogate him with my college curiosity was there, but he beat me to it. With disarmingly cheerful authority he asked me question after question. Where I was born, where I met my girlfriend, what my mother did, how my sex life was. All the while he was examining, massaging, and manipulating the muscles of my calf.

Five minutes later I was out the door with a prescription for pills and he was seeing another patient.

The next week I swam each morning in the Long Street public pool until my calf slowly began to unwind. Each 150 meters, or six laps, I’d take a break, study the other swimmers around me and look at the mural on the wall of what the pool supposedly looked like decades ago. Gliding black shoulders and triceps propelled the swimmers through the neighboring lanes. Black skin in Africa and black skin in America look so different. But then I’m told that’s not for me to say.

We listened to Everything But The Girl incessantly that entire month.

Lapham uses a term in his editorial; one that I’ve heard often, but have never really thought about. “Improvised literary devices.” It’s a way of wording thoughts, describing situations. It’s when you say something just right and even you are stunned by how well you put it. Those improvised literary devices are what keep writers going: the idea that you can articulate something so precisely, so elegantly that it will stick with whoever reads it forever. Something worth being said for more than the sake of just saying it.

Such improvisation is no longer a part of my writing process and this has me feeling creatively bankrupt. There is, of course, irony in the fact that I am now making a living doing what I love most - reading and writing - but that it has caused me to no longer enjoy either.

Most mornings I wake up around 9:30 and listen to These Days on the radio while trying to gather the motivation to get out of bed. By 10:15 I am usually on the computer checking my emails. I don’t remember the last weekday I woke up with less than 70 new emails in my inbox. Most days it’s above 100. At least 10 of those emails require me to do something and from there starts the daily to-do list - on top of what I didn’t finish the day before.

Around 2 p.m. - after a short lunch break - I start going down the list of RSS feeds from across Latin America. Using the arrows of my keyboard and NetNewsWire I skim through literally hundreds and hundreds of weblogs from all around Latin America, the great majority of them in Spanish. A small percentage of the content is brilliant and thought-invoking, but I can only invest five minutes on any one item. I look for patterns, trends, themes, something that will make a sturdy skelaton of a story.

By 6 p.m. I am burned out. I’ve traveled all over the hemisphere, read and digested the latest cyber-gossip from Tierra del Fuego to the Mexico-US border. The few posts that have really stood out deserve to be read by a much larger audience. And that’s what I try to do on Global Voices - I try to convince people that they should be reading about a protest in Bolivia or a new law in Mexico. Often I feel like a PR agent for bloggers who never solicit my services. Where possible, I try to slip in humor and clever wording, but I’ve come to learn that there are only so many ways to say “X person says Y about Z.” Ocassionally I feel like being more honest: “This is what Roberto says about how Peronism might have contributed to Argentina’s military dictatorship, but let’s be honest, we’d both rather be reading about an affordable way to make our apartments look urban-chic.”

I pick up my sister from work, or from school, or I go for a bike ride or have dinner with a friend. They want to know what I did that day. That’s the last thing I want to talk about.

That evening break, the sitting in traffic and trying to listen to the music instead of just hearing it, the just-one-glass-of-wine, the phone conversation with an old friend, the bicycle ride, goes by so quickly. I feel like I just closed the lid of my laptop and look, it’s already ten, time to open it back up. Now it is time to read every single item that was published on Global Voices today and decide what should be included in a nightly newsletter and how it should be summarized or introduced.

I can hardly complain. I usually start the nightly ritual with an anticipatory smile on my face as link after link takes me around the world, introduces me to voices, villages, and dirty urban centers that I had once hardly heard of. But I don’t typically finish until 2 a.m. And I don’t typically fall asleep until 3.

So this is why I haven’t been writing much and I haven’t been making my usual molestations around other blogs. Because leisure time no longer translates to blog time. In fact, it now tends to translate to, let me get as far the fuck away from my computer as possible time. I don’t know if that’s how it will be from now on. I miss the writing, the creativity, community. I might even miss the hair-pulling cat fights with HP.