John Swinburn

Today is our thirty-eighth anniversary. We lived together before we got married, but neither of us remembers for just how long. So, we’re celebrating thirty-eight years, but it could be forty or more. I’m grateful that we’ve “clicked” for so long.

Day before yesterday, my wife drove to Little Rock to run errands. She stopped for lunch at a little place on the western edge of town. It’s the sort of place that, when they deliver your meal, they drop your check on the table and you pay the cashier when you exit. While she was finishing up her meal, a guy who was sitting a table in front of her but with his back turned to her got up and headed toward the cashier. As he passed her table, he reached down, snatched up her check, and strode toward the cashier. She was surprised and wasn’t quite sure just what happened. She looked to the table where he had been sitting and made eye contact with a fellow who had been sitting at the table with the man. Her face must have expressed her surprise and question about what had just happened. The guy said, barely loud enough for her to hear, “He’s just a really nice guy.”

Janine heard the cashier say to the man with the check, “That’s not your check.”

He responded, “Yeah, but I want to pay for it, too.”

The guy got change and walked back toward the table where he had been sitting. Janine said, “Thank you!” He nodded and may have said “you’re welcome.” He left a tip on the table where he’d been sitting and he and his lunch partner left.  Janine left a tip on her table and bought a brownie to go. She was touched by an act of kindness from a complete stranger. So was I.

I’ve daydreamed about picking up someone’s check in a restaurant. Or covering the cost of groceries. Or something like that. But I’ve never done it. I’ve always assumed Janine would not approve. She is very tight with our household dollars. But I think I’ll be able to do something like that now, on rare occasion, with no complaints.  The question in my mind now is whether to be completely random about it or to try to discern who, in a given context, such a gift might be of greatest value. That thought, though, makes me question whether I would be making a judgment about a person’s relative “need” based on external appearances. And I suspect that would be the case. But maybe that’s not so bad? Maybe being “helpful” allows us to allow our bigotry and bias to show? No, that doesn’t sound right. I feel like something is out of kilter when my thoughts about being randomly helpful are reined in by my concern that my helpfulness might be judgmental. Ach. I still want to do it. Maybe randomness is the way to go?

Mundane days appeal to me sometimes. Those days that just rock along at a comfortable pace without dragging or spinning into chaos—they are the ones responsible for helping smooth my numerous rough edges. Yesterday was one such day, though I didn’t know it until the day was almost over. I started the day with my usual coffee and reading online news, then rewriting an absurd fantasy piece that I’ll probably bury once and for all before long. I puttered around the house, waiting for a technician to perform seasonal maintenance on our HVAC system, while my wife drove to Little Rock for a day of errands and shopping. I swept the garage of leaves and blades of grass that hitchhike in on car tires. I vacuumed the dust and flour and salt and such that accumulated on kitchen floor since only the day before.  Lunch comprised a tuna sandwich and finished the remaining scraps of Manchego cheese. I mourned the Manchego’s disappearance, but began planning how and when I would replenish the supply.  I washed dishes, fiddled with window blinds that needed adjustment, and otherwise occupied myself with minutia that did not require much energy, attention, or skill.

When my wife returned home toward 4 p.m., I suggested we go to the new(ish) pub & grill a few miles away. She agreed (only out of pity, I think, hoping it might boost my somewhat sluggish sense of joy that I was alive. It turned out that a visit to the pub (the Beehive Gastropub) was just what both of us needed. I had a Core Brewing Arkansas Red Ale and Janine had a spicy margarita. My beer was tasty, but her margarita was out of this world good! And we shared a plate of pork piccata bites; tiny plate, but nicely presented and quite good—and inexpensive! The place serves appetizer-sized plates, something I truly appreciate.  After that diversion, we dropped by her sister’s house to pick up a package Janine had asked her sister to order (After Eight mints, one of Janine’s guilty pleasures), using Amazon Prime (we don’t have it). Carol invited us in for a drink, so we sat on her deck, lazily sunning ourselves and chatted for a bit. During the conversation, the talk turned to a new(ish) pizza place in downtown Hot Springs. We decided to give it a try. We headed to town and made our way to Grateful Head Pizza Oven and Beer Garden. The place is in a multi-level, very old, building that has been outfitted with several multi-level decks (using reclaimed lumber, it seems). Neat looking place. It took quite a while to get someone to seat us (the sign told us to wait). Once seated, we waited and waited and waited and waited. Finally, I went to the cashier’s area and, after being ignored for a while, finally caught someone’s attention. I asked, “May we expect that a server might eventually make his or way over?” Yes, of course, many apologies. From that point on, things picked up dramatically. Good service, extremely good pizza, and a decent beer from, of all places, Nebraska. I’d had too much beer by that time, but that didn’t stop me from ordering another one, a beer from Rahr Brewing in Fort Worth, Texas. I’d liked the other Rahr brews I’d tried and the name of one on the menu appealed to me: Adiós Pantalones. As disappointing as it was (I left most of it), the evening capped off a rather nice day. A rather dull, lazy day turned into a relaxed, kick-back-and-enjoy afternoon and evening. My wife drove home, a good thing given that I’d had about four beers during the course of our impromptu multi-venue shindig. We ordered far too much pizza for the three of us to consume, so we left with two boxes of pizza. It should last two days, but I’m afraid I will cut that down to a matter of hours.

My sister-in-law took the photo, which captures my mood about as well as any photo could.

—

My wife is, by far, the more rational of the two of us. She’s compassionate, but rational about compassion. I’m rational, but compassion swallows my rationality and digests it in less than the time it takes my heart to complete a single beat. People who value compassion over even shreds of rationality that might impinge on compassion might label my wife a monster. People who value rationality over even shreds of compassion might label me an idiot; a socialist, communist, moron, dim-wit, imbecile, and then some.

The labels are invalid. They are produced by simians who value descriptions over decency. Their arms drag on the ground. They merit euthanasia, if for no other reason than to put me out of their misery. God, am I that much of a heathen? Am I that harsh and gritty and judgmental? Only partially so. Your job is to figure out which.

Okay, here’s what brought this on. I watched a documentary last night on PBS entitled 120 Days. It followed the story of a guy who, after living ten years in the U.S. as an upstanding “citizen,” was pulled over by the cops for nothing. That notwithstanding, the outcome of his brush with the law was that he was ordered out of the country, under ‘voluntary deportation’ within 120 days. Ultimately, he left, leaving his wife and two daughters behind. And then, a year later, after his family could not make ends meet in the U.S., they too self-deported. It’s a horrendous story that illustrates the lack of compassion that undergirds our immigration system.

On the one hand, I’m a believer in the philosophy that our only true “citizenship” is that we are citizens of planet Earth and should, therefore, be free to roam the planet. On the other, I understand the pressure to protect borders from an onslaught of people seeking shelter from political and/or social repression, hunger, economic depravity, and other forms of oppression. Yeah, but those things wouldn’t exist if the world were truly an open system, a system in which geographic borders did not constrain the free sharing of resources.  I reveal myself as a social idealist, I guess. Yet my darker side reveals my more dangerous, felonious side. I’d happily label 45 and his entire clan as enemies of the State, subject to deportation on sight. Take every speck of wealth and prestige from them and release them naked in an area of the Serengeti least hospitable to human survival, much less health. A guy can dream can’t he?

That paragraph frustrates me. I want to be a better person. I want to value every human life equally to the next. But I can’t bring myself around to do it. The value I place on Donald Trump’s life is equivalent to the value I place on a mosquito. That is, very, very little. I do think there’s an argument to be made that preemptive euthanasia should be legalized by the state, so that certain people who pose threats to the state and its people could be put out of our misery. Yet, I’m fundamentally opposed to the death penalty. Go figure. How can I oppose state murder of certain criminals, yet be perfectly fine with preemptive euthanasia? I suppose it could be explained like this: in the first sense, the state has ostensibly “proven” the defendant has committed a heinous deed. In the latter, the public has witnessed the inherent indecency of the man and can demonstrate, using history as an example, of the danger posed by the monster in question. And that, my friends, is one of the reasons I will never be admitted to the bar.

If I weren’t involved in a thirty-eight-year-long marital relationship, when I awoke this morning just after 4 a.m. I might have thrown a few clothes in a bag, tossed the bag in the car, and headed west. That’s what I felt like—feel like—doing. Just beginning an impromptu road trip that might take me, eventually, to the San Francisco Bay area. Or, instead, I might have veered north after getting as far as Dallas, opting to drive to the Twin Cities. I haven’t been to Minneapolis in many, many years. I’d like to see whether I remember anything at all about it or its twin. I do remember that my wife and I once boarded an Amtrak train in St. Paul bound for Whitefish, Montana. The thing I remember most vividly about that train ride was the stark, desolate scenery along the way. And I remember hearing comments from other passengers who found the desolation boring. I, on the other hand, found it enormously thought-provoking. There’s something about a naturally barren landscape that clarifies for me the nearly meaningless role humankind plays in this corner of the galaxy. I get the same sense of wonder when I’m in parts of west Texas and New Mexico. The vast sky and endless flat terrain emphasize how inconsequential each of us are, in spite of the enormity of our egos that tell us otherwise.

If I were a better psychologist (can one be better at being something one is not?), I might understand why I feel such a strong desire to just get up and leave this morning. Even if I were single with no commitments of any kind, it would be madness to head out this morning. Heavy rain, punctuated by brilliant flashes of lightning and violent cracks of thunder suggest driving in the predawn hours would be more than a little stressful. But I suppose whatever it is that might compel me to get in my car and go isn’t apt to be deterred by a little bad weather. Or volcanic eruptions. Or cataclysmic ice storms. I just get in these moods sometimes. I want to shed all my responsibilities and begin life anew. Would that we had the option of doing that. Just erasing the past and, in the grandest do-over of all time, putting all the lessons of a lifetime to use in creating a new lifetime. Without the maudlin lessons of “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

These thoughts remind me of a story I began to write a year or two ago but haven’t finished. It’s set in an undefined point in the reasonably foreseeable future. All people have bio-magnetic chips that can be programmed to erase memories implanted in their brains. The central character, a very wealthy lawyer, learns he has a terminal disease. In this future, an economy based on a bio-economic conversion algorithm enables individuals to buy back up to thirty years they had already lived, effectively purchasing youth.  Purchases are limited to terminally-ill patients, who—through their purchases—can revert to an age-state prior to that at which their diseases had manifested.  The purchase price, though, involves the individual’s erasure from the memories of everyone with whom the person had ever dealt (through the bio-magnetic chips). However, the beneficiary (the terminally ill patient) does not lose memories of his life. My main character wrestles with whether he wants to live, knowing that he will completely disappear from the memories of his family and friends or whether he wants to finish his life surrounded by his loved one. There’s more to it than that. For example, my wealthy lawyer also has to wrestle with whether he can cope with losing his wealth and professional prestige, inasmuch as his “new life” would be involve a time-limited financial stipend and a low-level administrative job.

With rare exception in my adult life, I’ve not just gotten in my car alone and headed for parts unknown. In fact, I can remember only one time. My wife and I got into a terrible argument (over what I don’t know) and I told her I was going to leave for a day or two to clear my head. And I left, just like that. I drove for five or six hours and stopped for the night in a small town. I ate dinner in a crappy little diner, stayed in a crappy little motel,  and spent the night wishing I were back home. The next morning, I got up and drove five or six hours back. There’s nothing romantic or compelling about that. That’s not the kind of impromptu road trip I have in mind. But I suppose the trigger that launched it—a wish to be away from the turmoil and consider a different direction—is related to what put the thought in my head this morning. Not that I’m in the midst of a particularly tumultuous  time. But I’ve been feeling a little caged in of late. Too many obligations (most of which I could easily break without significant consequence), too many claims to my time (again, few that I couldn’t control if I simply exercised my control), too many diversions from whatever it is I would rather be doing (which, if I knew what that was, I might be doing).

Last night, we were scheduled to go on a Lifelong Learning Institute trip to North Little Rock to watch an Arkansas Travelers baseball game. The appeal, for me, was that a guy I’ve met once or twice, a guy who lives in Hot Springs Village was going to throw out the first pitch. He is , Bill “Youngblood” McCrary, who played in the Negro League in the late 1940s. I’ve met him once or twice and have a book about him, written by a friend of mine who also lives in the Village. I expected it was going to be a nice time. We would drive to a church parking lot in the Village and be taken by coach to the game, where we’d dine on hamburgers while we watched the game. Unfortunately, my wife wasn’t feeling well for much of the day yesterday, so we cancelled. While I was sorry to have missed the event, it was an example of the things that fill my calendar that I sometimes just want to erase but feel like I can’t. But we did and I’m not the lesser for it. I could just as easily bow out of a the string of dinners on my calendar, dinners with people with whom I’d like to dine. I could stay home on Sunday morning instead of going to UUVC. I could opt out of a writers’ event on Monday. I could excuse myself from the Village history committee meeting scheduled for next week. I could disappoint my artist friend by not attending his showing. Yet I’m not going to cancel my participation in these things because the relief of “free” time would be offset by guilt or…something.

I think I’m just complaining for the sake of complaining. Maybe that’s what I’m doing. Maybe I don’t really want to just hit the road and be a free spirit. But maybe I do. If there’s a chance I can over think something, I generally try.

Soon, it will be daylight and I’ll be able to hang the hummingbird feeders. I wish I could leave them out, but if I do the raccoons get to them and spill sugary water all over the deck. Damn raccoons. See, there’s something else I can complain about.

I hit post instead of save for this piece of fiction I began writing. Never mind.  😉

“No one can love a person who doesn’t love himself. That’s been drummed into me since I don’t know when. I guess that’s why I’ve always understood, deep down, why I’ve never felt loved the way I envisioned love ought to feel. Sure, I’ve felt the love of my mother and father and my siblings and my wife. But I’ve always been suspicious that the love was given not freely without strings but, rather, as an obligation. Because that’s the only reason someone would love me. Out of a sense of obligation. I’ve tried to view myself in other ways. I have exchanged the lenses through which I see myself, dozens, if not hundreds, of times. But there, at the core of that man who looks at me in the mirror, is someone who isn’t worthy of love, who isn’t sufficiently honest and open to warrant love. No, what I should get isn’t love but scorn. Contempt. Dismissal.

Is it any wonder, then, that I grew up skeptical? Is it any wonder that I questioned the motives of people who spoke well of me? Is it any wonder that I didn’t trust people? Why should I? People who would lie to me,  people who would say things about me I knew were not true, were not to be trusted. They must have ulterior motives. Otherwise, why would they lie to me? Why would the suggest I was worth their praise?”

Tonight—I suppose last night is the more appropriate term, given the time of day—is/was another odd one. I went to bed early, just after 10:00 p.m., and fell asleep quickly. But I awoke around 1:00 a.m. After tossing and turning for two hours (and possibly drifting off intermittently), I decided at 3:00 a.m. to get up for a while. Awhile has now been quite some time and I see no signs that a return to bed would result in sleep, so I think I’m up for the duration of the day. During the last hour and a half, I made the mistake of trying to make sense of the world by reading online news. I might as well have broken a half-dozen incandescent light bulbs and ingested the shards of glass for all the understanding the news has given me. Realizing the pointlessness of that endeavor, I decided to watch and listen to an online course in which I’ve been participating (with others, who meet periodically to discuss the content). I must not have been in the right mood, because my reaction to it was along the lines of, “this is not education, this is cleverly disguised propaganda.”

Those efforts failing me, I decided to write something. But what? Again, I can’t be sure, as I’ve not yet written it. But here goes. There’s something wrong with the skin between my fingers. Not all of the skin, just the skin between the fingers where the fingers join the rest of the hand. There must be a medical term for the spot where the “wrong” is, but I don’t know it, or have forgotten it. At any rate, within the last two days I’ve noticed that the skin itches in those spots. Now, there are small red welts erupting between several fingers on both hands. The itching continues, but it now seems to be joined by a bit of pain. Methinks I should attempt to see a doctor, but methinks, too, that I may be a bit of a hypochondriac and perhaps should wait to see if this thing, whatever it is, decides to leave me alone without expensive intervention. I may hold off on the decision until my favorite spouse weighs in on the matter. She’s often more rationale about health care “emergencies” than I.

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Yesterday afternoon, I visited an acquaintance who I think is becoming a friend. He invited me over to play in his wood shop. I’ve done just a bit of wood working in years past; enough to know I wish I had the space and tools to practice it more often. We spent several hours working on his wood lathe as he showed me how to turn pieces of wood into pieces of art. First, we made a ring (like the things people wear on their fingers) for my wife. I had to guess at her ring size, inasmuch as the last ring I bought for her was her wedding band, purchased about thirty-eight years ago. I guessed wrong. I guessed size seven; apparently, a size five would have been a better guess. That notwithstanding, she now has a size seven ring; a stainless steel circle to which a very nice piece of very dense wood was attached and turned, finished with a high polish. The second item we made is the top of what will become a wine stopper when I get the polished stainless steel base. For now, it’s just the wood top of the wine stopper. The wine stopper was made from several pieces of wood that my friend had previously glued together. The pieces apparently were not all flush, but I think the “flaw” where they were not completely joined adds character. I think I could become addicted to turning wood. I wish I had space for a lathe. Maybe I can make space for a lathe. If I do, I will need money. Not just for the lathe, but for all the gadgets associated with wood-turning. Perhaps my next business could involve making and selling wooden pen cylinders and wine stoppers and bowls. I’d guess there are only seven hundred to a thousand guys in Hot Springs Village who are doing the same thing. Oh well, I understand why.

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Wednesday evening we will attend a wine tasting with a group of people we met at the World of Wine events we’ve been attending for the past year or two. We sit with one another at each event as we are offered wines from various countries around the world along with a menu ostensibly from the same country. We’ve tried wines from South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Italy, Spain, Argentina, France…maybe more. At one of the recent dinners, my wife had the idea that we should gather at one another’s homes from time to time and do tastings of the same wine from various wineries and eat hors d’oeuvre. Each of us would bring a bottle of wine and each would bring hors d’oeuvre. We held the first such event at our house, tasting Malbec wine. Wednesday evening will be the second such event, hosted by another member of the group; we will taste Pinot Noir.  We have very little in common with most other members of the group aside from enjoying food and inexpensive wine. But we enjoy socializing with them. And so we shall.

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It’s now 5:15 and I’ve gone through two large glasses of water since I arose at 3:00. No coffee yet. Despite evidence that coffee does not keep me from sleeping, I decided not to have coffee on the off-chance that I would try to go back to sleep. I don’t know why I don’t trust the evidence. Awhile back, when I was in the midst of watching calories, I opted to forego wine and beer and other forms of booze. Instead of enjoying those refreshments, I drank coffee in the evening and had no trouble going to sleep. But I still harbor this sense that coffee “should” keep me awake. I will not do caffeine free. I tried it years ago and thought it tasted like bitter metal. People tell me decaf has improved since I tasted it in my thirties. I do not believe them. I should watch my calories now. Perhaps now more than ever. Beer and wine and other forms of booze are not good for my waistline or my liver. I would be taller and thinner if I were to forego alcohol again. I guess I could do as I’ve done thus far this morning and just stick with water. Word on the street is that water is good for our life form. But I just heard the coffee maker start up, letting me know that in just moments, it will be ready to produce for me. I think I’ll take a break and go get a mug of hot black French roast. My water-only regimen did not last long.

+++

That is all. For now.

We’re entering a tumultuous season, that time of year in which graphs of daily temperature  variations look like jagged evidence of the stock market reacting to chaotic economic news. It’s hard to dress appropriately when temperatures zig-zag between 38 and 78 degrees. Yes, I know: dress in layers. Sure. Wear your coat into a bank when the air temperature flirts with 80 degrees and you can expect to be wounded by an overly-ambitious security guard. But I’m not here to write about the dangers of Spring season banking. That having been said, I’m not quite sure what I am here to write about. But we’ll soon find out, won’t we? Maybe we will, maybe we won’t. The suspense is what makes writing this so interesting. For me, anyway. For the reader, if there is one, perhaps not.

Back to the weather, an appropriate topic given the onset of “in like a lion” time: it’s dicey of late. One day the chilly morning morphs into an afternoon sauna, accompanied by clear skies and only a hint of a breeze. The next day, angry, roiling clouds spit out brilliant blue bolts of lightning and shake the earth with claps of thunder so powerful that I fear massive oak trees will buckle from the sound waves. Somewhere between the calm and the fierce, sheets of rain wash the yellow pollen—that covers every surface—into streams. But a day later, the pollen has once again hidden cars and outdoor furniture and rock outcroppings. Despite the vacillations in temperature and atmospheric behavior, memory tells me that Spring in Arkansas lasts only as long as it takes for Zeus and Zephryus to toss a celestial coin to see who gets to flip the switch between winter and summer. Spring is short. Summer is long. This year, though, Winter was short, almost non-existent. Except for a week or so when the temperatures dived into the low double digits (maybe the high single digits once or twice), we had no Winter. It was like late Fall, without the leaves. A dull intemperate autumn. I am asking myself why I am capitalizing Fall but not autumn. I have no answer, though I’m sure I could find one if I were sufficiently motivated to find out, which I’m not.

+++

Several years ago, I managed to seek out and find a childhood friend. He and I had been good friends from second grade until high school, when he moved away. We stayed in touch for awhile, but ultimately we went our own ways. He was more outgoing than I and more inclined to go with the crowd. I found him by searching for his name online. It took longer than I expected it would, given how easy I found it to find others, but I finally found him and managed to get an email address. I sent him a message and said I’d like to call and catch up. He responded a day or two later with his phone number. I called. It was an awkward conversation. I hadn’t seen or talked to him in forty years. I learned that he had gotten married, twice, and that his daughter was attending Baylor. He had moved to the Boston area many years earlier, though I don’t know why he chose Boston. While there, he went to a vocational school of some sort, but didn’t finish. He spent several years working for Circuit City until it closed. He had moved back to Texas several years earlier; when we spoke, he lived in or around Kemah. He was working as an installer of speaker systems and electronics for Best Buy. He told me all of this, but I got the distinct impression he didn’t much want to talk to me. He didn’t ask me many questions. I told him I’d recently retired and was in the process of taking care of post shut-down activities. I don’t think he asked what business I was shutting down. I suggested to him at some point in the conversation that maybe I’d get down to the coast and we could get together to talk about old times. He said he was still working, but if I happened to be down there on an off day, he’d be willing to see if he could fit something into his calendar. It wasn’t really quite like that, but it felt like the message he was sending.  I’ve never bothered to call him back. That was probably five or six years ago.

I suppose I was expecting, or hoping, to rekindle a friendship that, as a kid, seemed strong. But as I reflect back on it, we weren’t really friends. We were “buddies.” We hung around with one another. We didn’t really share much with one another. And the more I thought back about the guy, the more I wondered what possessed me to call him in the first place. We didn’t really drift apart. We split apart. I remember what changed the comfortable relationship between us. I was at my friend’s house with several guys from his sphere of friends, taking advantage of the fact that his parents were out of town. We got our hands on a bunch of beer and drank it. A lot of it. I either passed out or decided I’d had enough and went to sleep in one of the bedrooms. I awoke to my friend and one of his other friends trying to take money out of my wallet. That’s what caused us to “drift” apart.

Forty years later, that incident tucked away just beneath my conscious memory, I called him. Maybe his distance was because he remembered the incident that I’d almost forgotten. Or maybe it was something else. At this stage, it doesn’t matter.  Yet here I am, writing about it. I wonder why?

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My wife and I have been planning to visit some friends who moved away from Hot Springs Village not long ago. They now live more than seven hours away. Our intent is to make it a short visit but we’d like to take advantage of the opportunity to see parts of the country we’ve not seen before—Mississippi, in particular. We’ve been to Mississippi, but only for a single night in Jackson on the way to visit friends in Florida. We’ve not seen Tupelo and Oxford, two cities along the route we’ve decided to take on the way to visit our friends.  In trying to make our plans, we discovered (though we knew already, really) that our calendar is absolutely jam-packed with commitments: dental appointments, committee meetings, church meetings, newsletter deadlines, social events, HVAC service, propane service—it seems endless.  Yet I’m talking about (and planning) to start a business of some kind. Am I out of my mind? We’re retired, yet our calendar seems far more packed that it ever was when we worked. Well, maybe that’s not true. We had a jammed calendar, but none of the social events and committee and church stuff. We could choose to clear the calendar. But that would result in social isolation.  You know, the way we used to live our lives.  I’m stunned, though, that we’re finding it so damn hard to find time to get away for a few days. We’ll find a way to fit it all in, though I wonder whether I have filled my time with too many commitments. When we first moved here, people said to us, “You’re going to have to learn to say ‘no’ to people who want you to volunteer.” I thought that was a bit dramatic. But it’s true. I’ll learn.

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The only store at a the only marina on the largest lake in Hot Springs Village burned to the ground night before last. I have no idea what caused the fire, but it’s evidence the place is a complete loss. A couple bought the marina and store several months ago and, as I understand it, have invested quite a bit of time, energy, and money in renovating the place. Someone—a friend, I assume—started a gofundme campaign to raise $10,000 for the couple. The campaign creator said the couple is insured, but insurance would not cover all the losses.  Someone posted a link to the campaign on a public message board on Facebook. Immediately, two responses were posted, suggesting the couple were either: 1) inept because they did not have sufficient insurance or 2) were trying to profit from the loss, because insurance would cover their losses, including loss of income…and that if they didn’t have that kind of insurance coverage, perhaps they were incompetent and basically deserved to lose their business. I can barely control my anger at the utter lack of empathy and compassion demonstrated by the posters. I know absolutely NOTHING about the couple’s financial situation, how much or how little insurance they might have, or what they may be facing as they deal with the shock of the fire and their loss. But I surely can appreciate that, in the short term, help in the form of cash from a few hundred people who benefit from the marina’s existence  would be appreciated and appropriate. Sometimes I feel that large swaths of the population have been taught that empathy and compassion are signs of weakness and that people who need help are losers and moochers. And my blood boils and all my attempts to internalize the belief in “the inherent worth and dignity of every person” vaporize into clouds of unbridled rage and passionate hatred. I suspect that’s not particularly good for my already high blood pressure.  Chill. Chill, John, chill.

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I’ve written far too much for far too long this morning. My writing seems to be in lieu of understanding. That’s precisely what I did NOT want to accomplish this morning. Off to conquer the remains of the day.

I’ve admitted it openly, both to myself and to the Facebook universe: I want to start another business. I don’t have the details worked out, but I know I want to do it. My entrepreneurial blood has felt confined and restrained for quite some time; I need to give it room to spill, as it were. So, I’m giving serious thought to what I might want to pursue as a business. I have a thousand ideas. But the first thing I must do is talk to my wife about it (you and I are among the first (aside from the Facebook universe) to know of this revelation and she is not yet privy to my admission).

Once that’s done, I need to examine my bank accounts. Might I need to borrow money? Beg? Break into bank vaults? Sell neighbors’ homes while they are away on vacation? Needless to say (I hope), I shall do nothing immoral or illegal, but I might have to adjust my lifestyle. But my first priority (aside from deciding what it is I want to do) is to do whatever it is on a shoestring. That’s how I started my association management company. I quit my job, took $10,000 from savings, and vowed to build a business. And I did. I never took another penny from our personal accounts. When all was said and done, that $10,000 brought in many, many, many, many times its value over the fourteen years we ran the businesses. I’ve never calculated our total revenue, nor our cumulative “take home,” but both were significant. Luck played a part. But I will say with conviction that most of our success flowed from hard work.

But I veer off the path, as I am wont to do. I am not planning this new endeavor, whatever it is, to generate an enormous amount of cash. I can’t afford for it to be a cash drain, either, but a modest income would be not only appreciated but expected. Might this be a flash in the pan? A spark that doesn’t ignite? Yep. Could be. But tonight I don’t feel that’s the case. Tonight, I feel the spark igniting the flame up and down my spine.

Now, what does that flame want to burn? I’ve actually thought about candles (another ex association executive friend bought a soap and candle business after retiring). And I’ve considered hot dogs (yeah, but I have some GREAT ideas!). I’ve thought about creating and selling my own line of rubs for BBQ and smoking.  I’ve even thought of creating my version of a Third Place. Oh, there are more. Many more. I’m nothing if not prolific with ideas about businesses I’d like to create under the right circumstances. I’ve even considered organizing group travel, wherein my clients would rely on me to organize and orchestrate trips to exotic/interesting places and I would rely on them to fund trips for my wife and me and add a little extra to the bank account. There are SO many more. I’ve heard so many times how it’s much harder to start a business than I might imagine; this from people who have not started a business, telling someone who has started more than one that he’s deluding himself. Am I drifting to another topic again? Excuse me.

One thing is clear to me. I do NOT want to ever again be in the association management business. I do not want to be in a business remotely like the association management business. My self-respect is too important to me; it took me a long time to regain it after leaving a business that required me to advocate for causes in which I not only did not believe, but actively though immoral. I do not know if I’ll ever get over having been the amoral lobbyist-equivalent who suppressed or betrayed his own beliefs in return for paychecks or payments.

In the past, I was insistent that my businesses would be MINE! I did not want to share the glory with someone else. For a time, I considered allowing my staff to buy in to my association management company, in fact I even offered it up as an option, but no one stepped up. It does require an entrepreneurial spirit and a tolerance for a certain degree of risk. My staff members, with one exception, didn’t have those characteristics. The one who had was only slightly infected. I ended up urging her to submit a proposal to one of my clients (which she had managed) to provide management services. She got it! And she’s still with them. But she looks at it, I think, as just a paycheck, not as the first rung on a ladder. Such is life. Today, I’d consider partners.

I may be too old to seriously consider this stuff. I’ll be sixty-five in October. What?! I still feel like I’m in my late thirties or early forties, tops, save for my arthritic elbows and knees and ankles and wrists and the enormous belly that hides my feet from view unless I implement extreme measures. I’m not yet collecting Social Security. My wife is, but we’ve agreed I’ll wait until I’m 70 so we can maximize our benefits. So, except for her monthly income, we’re living off savings. And here I am, Mr. Entrepreneur, wanting to start a business of some kind simply because he needs to feel productive and not so bloody old! What the hell am I thinking? I’ll tell you what I’m thinking. I’m thinking I don’t want to just rot away. I don’t want to be a member of society whose only contributions are tax dollars. And I don’t want to be a member of society whose contributions parallel available “charitable time giving” opportunities. People who give their time are marvelous; we need them. But I am not, for the moment, them. I need to do something else. I need to be productive an innovative and able to delay my old age for as long as I can. I guess that’s it, in a nutshell. I’m becoming a bit afraid of being old.

When I turned sixty, I had my first and only experience of being absolutely depressed by my birthday. Until then, they were basically meaningless. I shrugged off the “you’re getting older” birthday cards. They meant nothing. But when I turned sixty, something changed. I was depressed for a week. But then intellect kicked in and I got over that in a hurry. Sixty was nothing, I decided. But now, as I approach sixty-five, I feel different. It’s “retirement age.” Even though I retired at fifty-eight, I didn’t feel retired. As I approach sixty-five, I feel like society is effectively putting me out to pasture. I’m looking forward to Medicare, but only because I am sure it will put money in my pocket compared to the legalized thievery that provides my insurance now. But that’ the only positive thing.

I want to run another business. I want to be productive and I want to prove that I’ve still “got it.” That’s pathetic, isn’t it? I don’t know, maybe it’s not. I ascribe motives to my own actions that I don’t seem to feel inside. But I look at myself as if I were someone else and I don’t like what I see. And I do ascribe motives to what I want to do. But I argue against them. I argue and argue and argue.  I haven’t won the argument yet. But I haven’t lost, either.

What is it? Is it an entrepreneurial flame or an effort to defer the inevitable? God, I do love the idea of being an entrepreneur;  I always have. But I’ve also always dreaded the idea that I, too, would be old and valueless one day. What’s my motive?

While searching online for a recipe for carne guisada this morning, I came across one on a “mommy-loves-to-cook-and-write-about-the-challenges-of-motherhood” blog. I scrolled past paragraph after paragraph and photo after photo before I finally came to the recipe. It seemed a little too tame for me, but I decided to read the comments to see what others thought of it. I could make absolutely no sense of the following comment:

What about cutting fingernails? That one is death for me. We’re talking full-on pinning down with a dose of threats and/or pleading. This looks amazing. Definitely a dinner option for this week!

What is hell was this comment about? My first reaction was that it must have been posted by a bot that posts random nonsense (it happened to me on this blog before I installed spam-killer software). But then I noticed that last sentence: “Definitely a dinner option for this week!”

I scrolled back to the top of the page and began reading the narrative. The blogger wrote  about the challenges of brushing her toddlers’ teeth. The response I had found so utterly bizarre began to make sense; the comment referred to cutting babies’ fingernails which apparently requires threats, cajoling, and physical restraint.

It occurs to me that most of my posts here ramble on about multiple topics (or focus like a laser beam on pure madness). Responses to my posts, if any, might be understandably confusing if they referred to an issue tangential to a point I might have been trying to make (yet on which I spent three quarters of the post as I wandered down the rabbit hole).

Communication can fracture into a thousand incoherent thoughts, if given enough opportunity, can’t it? Yes, it can, but have I mentioned how odd it is to be prompted to think about carne guisada thanks to a grey, foggy morning, only to notice the skies cleared during my search when, finally, I look out the window to see blue skies?

There’s a certain nobility in acknowledging one’s psychological faults until the sheer volume of such faults triggers an avalanche. See what I did there? No? Nor do I.

My niece called me this afternoon while my wife and I were eating an early dinner. We had stopped at the Bubba’s Catfish-2-Go food truck for fried shrimp, fried okra, and fries (a fry-fest, I guess). Just as I was biting into a large butterly-fried shrimp, my cell rang. Caller ID named my niece. She calmly informed me that her father, my brother, was about to be wheeled into surgery for an emergency pacemaker implantation. In mid-sentence, she apologized and said the doctor had something to tell her. “I’ll call you back in a few minutes.”

She did. From what she had learned, a neighbor had taken my brother to a hospital in Huntsville, Texas because he was feeling very, very bad. The Huntsville hospital immediately transferred him to a hospital in Conroe, thirty miles south. The doctors said he needed emergency surgery for a pacemaker. And so it went. My niece said the doctors told her it would be about an hour.

After finishing our early dinner, my wife and I drove the forty minutes home. That forty minutes was a long time. We’d spent most of the day after lunch on an aimless road trip, driving to Malvern to visit a furniture store, then west toward Arkadelphia, then drifting back toward Hot Springs. Our day was as much decompression as anything. We both had been involved in planning for and executing an auction for the UU church; last night the event was held and I was responsible for entering data about each winning bid. Not a terribly stressful role, but more taxing than I might have thought. Anyway, the auction was a success. It brought in well over fourteen thousand dollars.  And our donations to the auction (a smoked pork loin and a tamale-making party (tamalada) from the both of us) did quite well. Three couples spent $230 each for the tamalada; another couple spent $90 for my smoked pork loin. We’d better be really, really good at what we do. But I digress. We headed home, expecting a phone call.

It didn’t take much longer than an hour to get word (maybe less). The prognosis, they said, was good. He was, by the time I spoke to my niece on the phone, barely awake and doing well. The surgery was successful; it accomplished its intended aim.

I’m available to drive to my brother’s home in Texas to stay with him for a while if he needs it. My many obligations suddenly seem like easy promises to break. In an instant, my obligations to everyone but my wife take second place to my remaining family. Even the auction can wait. I’m expected to finish up part of it, reconciling payments with bids, tomorrow. If all’s well, I will. But if not, I’m not irreplaceable in that role. I know that.

I just watched an episode on CNN of Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown that brought tears to my eyes. Seriously, it presented a city (indeed, a region) in which I spent eight unhappy years in an entirely different light. The city I remember as deeply conservative, decidedly unsophisticated, and intellectually stunted apparently has changed.

Before I go too far off the deep end, Houston wasn’t a backwater when I lived there. It had its share of ethnic expressions in the way of restaurants, “culture” in the form of opera and symphony and theater, and open-mindedness in the existence of the Montrose neighborhood. But it was in more ways than one a conservative and unwelcoming place, afraid of chance, proud of many of its uglier roots, and deeply in love with the automobile. Based on my last visit, I’d say its love affair with the automobile has morphed into a full-on and deeply unhealthy lust, exacerbated by combustion fumes that trigger explosive auto-erotic reactions. (See what I did there with words?) But otherwise, the Parts Unknown episode suggests the city has matured in ways that make it extremely attractive. In fact, as I watched people from Nigeria, Mexico, Viet Nam, India, Singapore, Zimbabwe, and other places express their love for the U.S. and what it has done for them and, especially, their love for the people of Houston and Texas who have welcomed them, my heart swelled with pride and hope.

For those who aren’t familiar with Anthony Bourdain’s program, let me say I once thought he was an arrogant blow hard. Now (not just because of tonight’s episode), I am ashamed that I allowed a closed mind ripe with preconceived notions to judge him. His ego must be pretty damn big to allow him to prance around the world as a food and culture expert. But his ability to pull it off with more than a little believability suggests to me that he’s a pretty damn well-qualified food and culture expert. His obvious embrace of the underdog appeals to me. His fierce opposition to (and mocking dismissal of) Trump’s imbecilic southern border wall gives him many brownie points, too. The people with whom he speaks also dismiss the wall as the work of an idiot, but they never say it. Smart. The asshole in the White House might well command their removal from the U.S., citizen or not. But I digress into my unadulterated loathing for the scum of the earth.

I love the fact that these refugees from around the globe retain and celebrate and share their cultures. I would hate them to renounce their life experiences in favor of adopting an imaginary “American” demeanor. “American” does not mean we behave or  believe or look alike. It means only that we live where we live. I’d relish knowing more about my English history. Or my African history, if there is any. I’d actually bounce off the walls with joy if I were to learn I am certifiably Canadian or Chilean or Icelandic! Ha! Back to cultural celebration. How might we continue to celebrate our cultural roots after that inevitable day when we become, in the eyes of the world and each other, merely “citizens of Earth,” eligible to move freely between continents simply because we’re human? I don’t know. But we should. Somehow.

With all the happiness embedded in the paragraphs above, I am deeply, deeply embarrassed and ashamed to be “American” today. That is thanks only to Donald J. Trump and the deviants who cast their votes in his support. I would give my left nut if it would cause this country to recover from that ugly, ugly mistake. Shit, let me go all the way: remove the billionaire bigot from office and you can have both!

I wonder whether, given the opportunity in my thirties or forties or fifties, I would have moved to Mumbai? When I was an undergraduate in Austin in the mid 1970s, a friend and I talked about going to India. Our starry-eyed dream was that we’d walk across the country and, in the process, learn the secrets of humanity through experience. Both of us were dreamers. Neither of us had any inkling of what such an undertaking might involve. Perhaps that’s why we seriously considered it. The absence of experience in the world allowed us to ignore the potential dangers such an endeavor might have presented. We didn’t give a thought to the endless possibilities for calamity we might encounter on a walking tour of a country about a third of the size (in land area) of the U.S. Nor did we think for a moment about how utterly different the experience would have been, in comparison to our lives in the US. Only this morning, after reading a bit about the country, did I realize that India’s population is more than four times the population of the US. Imagine that. In a country a third the size. And consider the issue of communicating in a country in which the most prevalent language, Hindi, spoken by only thirty percent of the population. According to an article I read this morning, thirty languages are spoken by more than a million people in India and 122 language are spoken by more than ten thousand.

The trek would have taken more courage and money than I had at the time. And it would have taken more of both than I have now, I suppose. Once before, when I mulling over the fact that I didn’t explore India, I said courage isn’t born of youth but, rather, of a thirst for experience. So, I wonder, where was that thirst for experience? Thousands of other people did precisely what I said I wanted to do. Why didn’t I? Was my thirst for experience satisfied by entering graduate school in a small east Texas city? That’s what I did instead of travel to India. Hmm.

This entire stream-of-consciousness conversation with myself started when I read an article on BBC online about the extremely high cost of “ex-pat housing” in Mumbai, which corresponds to the extremely high salaries of ex-pats in Mumbai (I presume ex-pats from England), which average more than $217,000 per year. “Ex-pat housing” seems to be a euphemism for high-end housing that mirrors the kind of housing people would find “back home.” That is, lavish places with ample western amenities and with access to services reserved for those with the money to buy them. That’s not quite what I had in mind when I thought about trekking across India. I imagined myself a contemplative ascetic. Youth has a way of opening the doors of the world to impossible possibilities!

Though I’ve occasionally wished I’d taken action on my plan to wander the Indian subcontinent, my regret has not been so much that I didn’t make it to India as that I didn’t make time to explore the world in general. I’ve been a lot of places around the world, but not as a sponge sucking up knowledge of different cultures. Where have I traveled? Let’s see, I’ve been to Russia and Sweden and China and Saudi Arabia and Croatia and France and Portugal and Spain and Germany and Australia and New Zealand and England and Mexico and Canada and more. Reading off that list of countries sounds like I’m “well-traveled,” but most of my trips have been short stints on business or brief vacations during which I tried to cram too much into too little time. In most instances, I didn’t absorb the culture in any significant sense. I swept in, did my thing, and swept out. I suppose I could wallow in regret for a misspent life, but that would be taking my trip down memory lane down a dark alley, which I’d really rather not do.

Now, as I sit on the cusp of the trip toward old age, I’m not inclined to live the life of an ascetic. I’m not particularly intent on going to India, either, though I might go if offered the opportunity and someone else picked up the bill. I’d rather return to Sweden, I think, or Croatia. Or maybe take another overnight cruise from Stockholm to Helsinki. But this time I’d spend more than a day in Finland. I’d like to explore Canada more thoroughly than I’ve done in the past. A coast-to-to-coast train journey, with plenty of week-long stops along the way would be nice. I’ve tried, with no success, to interest my wife in driving to Nova Scotia. I visited Halifax on business once and was enamored of the place. An online friend who I’ve never met face-to-face lives in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia. She describes the little towns around her in ways that make them extremely appealing to me.

When my wife and I retired, our intent (or maybe, on reflection, it was purely my intent) was that we’d take frequent extensive road trips around the U.S. and Canada. I retired seven years before “normal” retirement age in part because I wanted to have time to do that sort of thing. But that hasn’t transpired. We’ve settled into domestic stagnation. I shouldn’t call it that. We’re not stagnant. But we haven’t done much traveling. We did spend three weeks in France a couple of years ago and a couple of weeks in Mexico last year, so we’re getting around. A little.

My wanderlust and sad-eyed longing for life on the road is simply a mood I go through every so often. I invariably get over it in relatively short order. Sometimes, it takes a trip to do it. When we went to France two years ago, as much as I loved it, it felt good to get back home.  Yet I often contemplate whether I might feel like I was at home if I lived in another country. If I mastered the relevant languages, could I feel at home in Iceland or Denmark or Chile or Portugal? I suspect I could. I suspect I’d find the attitudes about society in general and community to be more appealing than in the U.S.  Ach, but I’m becoming less flexible as I grow older. I do appreciate my creature comforts. My American style bathrooms appeal to me. Electrical outlets and switches that I’ve lived with all my life are known quantities; might I find it difficult to adjust to other systems? If I had ample financial resources, I’d like to try. Maybe rent a house in a small Spanish village for three or four months. Or an apartment in Santiago, Chile or Oslo, Norway, maybe for just a month or two. I’m just day dreaming. There is about as much chance that we’ll do that as that we’ll win the Powerball lottery. What the hell, though. I can dream, can’t I? And it costs nothing but my sense of self. <Insert winsome chuckle.>

I read a question posed on Quora recently, asking whether something might be “wrong” with a person who others generally don’t like. A respondent then described a young woman who’s intelligent, witty, socially aware, confident, and physically attractive but who sometimes breaks down in tears during the school day because she has no friends. The respondent confirmed that, indeed, she has no friends. She then said the young woman was a little too perfect. She did damage to others’ fragile egos simply by failing to demonstrate faults and vulnerabilities. She was the sort of person against whom the rest of us measure badly, the response said.

The answer to the question took me back to high school. That situation wasn’t that the “perfect” girl wasn’t liked. Everyone liked Jane; she was almost worshiped. She was beautiful, socially adept, and as sweet to everyone she encountered as anyone I’ve ever known. She was a cheerleader, an accomplished artist, and of above average intellect, though not brilliant. I remember wanting to ask her out. But I was not of her caliber. I was painfully shy, socially clumsy, not very attractive, and avoided extracurricular activities for fear of making a fool out of myself. I remember thinking a young woman like Jane would never go out with me. Even though I never saw her make fun of anyone, I remember thinking she would laugh at me if I ever asked her to go on a date. So I didn’t. In fact, I asked only two or three girls out during the entire time I was in high school; each time, I felt like I was putting my life on the line.

Many years later, in my late fifties, I happened to meet Jane again. We had lunch and engaged in conversation about “old times.” I wasn’t quite so brittle as I had been as a high school boy. I told her I’d had a crush on her in high school but didn’t have the nerve to show any signs, for fear of rejection. She told me she’d felt that something was wrong with her back then. She was rarely invited to go on a date during high school. Later, she realized it was because she was seen as “too perfect” and other guys, like me, were afraid of rejection. We collectively protected our egos; by protecting ours, we subjected her to feelings of inadequacy. During high school, she’d felt unwanted. Her radiance and beaming smile concealed a lot of pain.

I have no children. I don’t know how to rear kids and can’t offer advice on how to do it. But I do wish there were ways to instill in children resilience in the face of rejection (so I would have not feared it so much) and deep empathy and acceptance of people at all stations in life. I’d like to see children taught to truly love and appreciate others and to reach out to those who seem isolated, whether drawn into themselves or standing alone on a pedestal. This is an aside; I don’t know quite where it came from.

My self-inflicted protection—against a make-believe wound from which I felt I might never recover—lasted a long time. I was shy all the way through my undergraduate years and into my brief stint at graduate school. Only in my mid-twenties—after I took a job in which only a gregarious, social, extremely outgoing person could excel—did I come out of my shell. That is to say, I faked it. I can’t say whether the forced extraversion was a good thing or a bad one. On one hand, I overcame (rather, I learned to disguise) the shyness that had impinged on my ability to have much of a social life. But on the other I may have erased the personality from whence that shyness grew. I may have “overwritten” the real “me” to such a degree that the person remaining is artificial.

Perhaps I’ve faked it for so long that I don’t know who lives beneath the armored veneer. The idea that I may not know who I really am, at my core, has been on my mind for quite some time. Years. It’s an odd sensation, wondering whether the person who speaks and behaves and thinks as I do may have been manufactured, as a defense mechanism, by the person I once was. There’s a story in there somewhere. It would be about a boy who is so afraid of rejection that he radically changes his personality;  later, he realizes he had rejected himself and can no longer even reach back to that abandoned child to apologize for the abandonment. That sounds a little too melodramatic, I guess.

Children can be fragile things, though most of them weather the bumps and scrapes of childhood and young adulthood to become reasonably well-adjusted adults. Some of us, though, create pockets of fragility that we carry with us well into our adulthood and even into early old age (I can’t bring myself to acknowledge that I’m in middle old age, at sixty-four). I wonder  at what age the act of exploring hidden aspects of one’s personality becomes a pointless endeavor? When are you too old to see a psychologist or psychiatrist? Of course, it may not be a matter of being too old. It may be a matter of being too afraid of what one might find. The fear that what may be uncovered will reveal inadequacies happily hidden for decades.

Five turkeys just ambled by outside, stirring me back to reality and dragging me out of the well of ennui into which I had descended. I take that as a sign. Onward and upward to face the day!

I sit in my study (the term is more appealing than “the guest bedroom”) staring out the window at the rain and fog. We’ve had days and days of very heavy rains. All the lakes are full and streams overflowing their banks. My NOAA weather radio has blared flash flood warnings at least a dozen times in the past 48 hours. The road behind my house, just down the mountain from us, is closed due to water rushing across the pavement. A car wandering into that fast-moving water would be swept across the road and several hundred feet down the side of the mountain. “Mountain” may be too grandiose for the terrain. Regardless, the occupants of a car washed off the roadway almost certainly would be killed and would ultimately end up several hundred feet lower than the road, probably in a pasture on the farm below us. But that’s not why I’m sitting here writing, is it? No, it is not. I am sitting here writing because I feel a need to share information about the food in which I’ve been indulging myself.

If you’ll look carefully at the photo, you will see a glass full almost to the brim with coffee milk stout. Slightly to its left and in front is a small plate loaded with two cheeses (manchego and extra sharp white cheddar) and large green olives stuffed with garlic and jalapeños. I find the image of the plate appealing, but not as appealing as emptying the glass and causing the plate to become bare. Yet I had a bit of a time convincing myself to ruin the “painting” I made without acrylics or oils. I’m enamored with the beauty of simple foods, put together in such as a way as to look elegant. While my photography skills may not capture the beauty of my culinary artwork, my eye appreciates it. And so do my taste buds. The only things missing from the plate were pickled herring and sliced radishes.

All this talk of food seems to be causing the fog to lift and the sun to reveal that it has not left us for another galaxy. Though the view outside my window is not bright, it is no longer a picture of doom. And the bitter cold weather seems to have loosened its grip. The world promises to reward our sullen days with a bit of warmth and, if we’re lucky, a few dry days. After a brief break, I look out the window again to see blue skies and real sunlight. I believe in my heart of hearts that my milk stout, olives, and cheese are responsible for the change in the weather or, at the very least, my change in mood.

Yesterday’s fierce rains, still continuing but to a much lesser extent, have filled lakes, reservoirs, and roadways. The police and sheriff’s departments have issued warning about inundated roadways and impassable streets. Some water crossing roads may conceal wash-outs. The bottom line is this: it’s wet. Wet. WET! As I gaze out my window, I see fog. Or perhaps I see clouds. We often find ourselves inside the cloud layer hugging the higher ridges.

Aside from the gloom outside my window, what’s on my mind that prompts me to sit at the keyboard? Nothing, really. I just feel compelled to write something lest I lose my ability to think through my fingers. I’ve written far too little of late. I’ve ignored my “novel,” that thing that I hoped would snowball into a whirlwind of writing. I think the reason I’m ignoring it is that it’s plot driven. I’ve never been one to write plot-driven stuff, yet that’s what I picked as a major writing project. What I’ve written so far seems dull and lifeless. The people are wooden, two-dimensional, uninteresting. They’re not people I’d be particularly interested in knowing. I don’t like their jobs, their way of thinking about the world…I don’t even like the way they look. The only thing about them I find appealing is that they are all subject to my whims and that I could, if I wished, have them annihilated in a nuclear blast, a very real possibility given the plot that’s developed thus far. Like all my writing, the story developing in the novel goes in too many directions, none with a destination in mind. Maybe I should ditch the effort and return to focus on what I prefer doing, developing complex, troubled characters who mirror the man creating them.

Or, perhaps what I really need to do is get active. Not like jogging, but like fixing leaky faucets and showers, making and installing garage shelving, clearing out tiny pine trees growing behind the house, and installing the toilet I bought months ago when we replaced the one in the master bath (they both needed replacing, but the one in the master was in more serious and immediate need). I think I must be lazy. Actually, it’s not that. It’s that I’m no longer as willing to take risks with home repairs as I once was. The reason, I think, is that my wife gets nervous when I start talking about doing something, like she has no confidence that I can actually get it done. I don’t know why that is. In our first house, I built in a desk, then covered it with laminate that looked like cherry wood. That was a big job and I did it well, if I say so myself. And I built a workbench in the garage and installed fluorescent lighting about it. And I built a deck. I’ve replaced all sorts of broken parts of faucets, heaters, etc., etc. Yet she gets nervous when I talk about doing work myself. She’d rather we hire it out, paying exorbitant amounts to people who, I am convinced, simply use us as opportunities to learn how to do what we’re asking them to do.

Oh, maybe what I should do instead of writing or getting active around the house is to complain! Yes, that’s it! I do that so damn well. But you can never get enough practice. It pays to sharpen one’s skills by exercising them.

No, that’s annoying to others (are you with me?) and tends to make one’s thoughts get shrill and reedy. I envision my mind developing an underbrush of thin, brittle grasses that make high-pitched noises as the wind whistles between the empty spaces between ideas. If I were taller, the wind would make an even higher-pitched sound; but I’m short, so the sound is muted and slightly bass, if that’s even possible for a high-pitched noise.

Today, I will take no irrevocable action. I will do nothing that can’t be undone. Except this. I can’t undo the writing I’ve done, as much as I might wish I could. And I can’t unbreathe the breaths I’ve taken. So, I end this stream-of-consciousness blather with the admission that I’ve lied, even to myself, about what I will not do. That, in itself, is an assertion of what I will do, isn’t it? And that’s what’s wrong with the way this day has started.