I’ve kept a small corkboard for over twenty years with a paper on it that has withstood time. It’s a contract to myself that says, and I’ll paraphrase: I, Benjamin Talbot, shall write every day for the rest of my life until the day I die. And I signed it at the bottom with a black pen. It’s a miracle that the paper has remained on that corkboard with a thumbtack and that the paper hasn’t torn all the way throughout the years. But it has stains on it, wherever the stains had come from. They look like blood, sort of how dry blood would appear: a light brown blotch that I could’ve mistaken for coffee on the white paper. But how would I have spilled coffee on it in the same fluke as if I’d spilled blood on it?

The corkboard is in my apartment in Palm Springs. It’s in the kitchen next to my work desk, which I never sit at. It used to hang on one of the walls of my Hollywood apartment.

My friend at the time, in my twenties, came in one afternoon and saw it hanging there and said, “Wow. Look at this.”

I told him that it was a contract that I’d written to myself.

He read it and said, “You signed it?”

“Yessir. That’s my signature.”

“Where’s the date?” he said.

Oh shit. I’d never dated it. All signatures should come with a date. I didn’t even think of that. I smacked myself on the forehead. There’s no sense in composing a new contract now. I’ve signed it already. What’s done is done. How hastily I’d typed it out and printed it from my desktop computer back then, way back when printers actually worked and didn’t break down on me all the time. Oh well. At least the contract is still there, and it reminds me of my daily goals.

But it isn’t all that’s on the corkboard. I tacked a black-and-white photo of the one Ernest Hemingway above the contract. It’s of old Ernie, in about his fifties, standing in what appears to be the woods, grinning in a suit with both hands in his pockets. I hold that photograph near and dear after finding it in a Hemingway book that I’d bought from the Iliad Bookstore in North Hollywood. The book is called The Nick Adams Stories, which is a collection of shorts based on his character Nick Adams, who fancied fishing and camping. Most of the stories I’d read, you would guess, were of Nick Adams doing those things. The stories were pretty bland, very slow. Not much happened from beginning to end. Nevertheless, I respected his writing style enough to read his biography. How could anyone cram that much information about a person in one volume? Someone did. I found it interesting to find that photo in a book I’d bought for about two dollars, but I discovered a lot of incredible gems at that bookstore.