Twenty or so years ago, I was part of a team negotiating an international fisheries convention at the United Nations. We spent our days at the UN, our nights at the Iroquois Hotel on W. 44th St., and our evenings a block or so west of the hotel, at Jimmy's Corner bar. I was a boxing fan back then, and would drunkenly peruse the pugilistic memorabilia on the wall, never imagining I might one day be in some capacity involved in the sport, and certainly never anticipating that two decades on, I would be at the same bar, this time shooting video with Manny Pacquiao, Timothy Bradley, Joel Diaz, Freddie Roach - and Jimmy Glenn himself - for HBO.
George Will, climate change denier, opening a Washington Post op-ed the other day: "Someone who is determined to disbelieve something can manage to disregard an Everest of evidence for it."
It is the freelancer's curse: the fear of saying no, particularly the fear of saying no to interesting, well-paid work. A series of commissions, even commissions that overlap, commissions that require almost complete focus even as you already are committed to ongoing work and travel, is seductive - creatively, financially, to a degree egotistically. But there is only so much writing a writer can do, and there are times when taking on too much means deadlines are stretched, and those who have commissioned the work start making urgent and anxious inquiries.
In Sunday's Washington Post, former United States National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice writes, in an op-ed addressing the ongoing situation in Ukraine, that "the United States must restore its standing in the international community, which has been eroded by too many extended hands of friendship to our adversaries, sometimes at the expense of our friends."