Blog

  • Sunday Serenity

    I had a very strange feeling come over me this past Sunday. It wasn’t a special Sunday by any stretch. We did things that we normally did. The wife and I were up at 7:30, and the kid rolled out of her room at 8. We watched Sunday Today, then at 9 we switched over to Sunday Morning. The wife made pancakes, and I walked the dog. We ate breakfast on the couch watching the interview with Liza Minnelli. When Sunday Morning was over, the kid disappeared into her room to play while the wife and I watched the last thirty minutes of This Week, and then at 11 changed over to hate-watch Meet the Press. Then at 11:30, we put a John Coltrane radio playlist on the speakers, while we started to clean the apartment.

    And while I was cleaning the kitchen, this feeling of peacefulness came over me. I felt secure and happy, which is something that I hadn’t felt in a long time. There wasn’t anything magical or profound happening other that the weekly routine that we follow on a Sunday. It was also a feeling of satisfaction.

    If I was being cynical, then I would say that as I have gotten older, my expectations have fallen, and basic and easily completed tasks have taken on an outweighed significance in my life.

    That is possible.

    Or, it could be that family life has become rewarding in its simplicity. Not that I have stopped being ambitious, or striving for a better day, but I think I have enough perspective to see that in my current state, I do have something special and worthwhile.

    Maybe it was the reward of honest work, which has an honest reward in providing a safe, clean home for my family.

    Maybe my attitude toward life has been slowly changing, and only now is it registering.

  • Losing a Best Friend

    Yesterday, my Uncle Arnie passed away. He was my godfather, and he was goofy, silly, and had a very original midwestern accent that I have never been able to replicate. He was a good uncle, a great father, a dedicated husband, and he was my dad’s best friend. They grew up together, and in a funny twist of fate, they ended up marrying sisters, which meant they legally became family to each other. They liked martinis, and in family gatherings, sometimes they had to be separated at the table, because they could be a little rowdy and obnoxious. You know, just like best friends do. My heart just breaks for my Aunt Margaret, who lost her best friend, too. He was a good man, and he will be missed greatly.

    Then the other day, a friend from high school posted that another classmate of ours had died. My friend wrote a very moving post in Facebook, talking about how close they were in school, and even when they followed different paths and lived in different places, they stayed in contact, and stayed close. You could feel through her words how devastated she was in his passing, that there was a hole in her heart now.

    So, best friends, old friends, have been on my mind this weekend. We all make friends, and then those friends end up becoming family. And I miss my friends. I think what I miss most is just listening to them tell me about their lives. Their loves and adventures and experiences. To make them laugh, and vice versa. It is a motley crew of people we choose to share our lives with. Some for a short while, some forever. A friendship really is one of the greatest gifts you can give to someone.

  • ODDS and ENDS: Sounds of the City, No Vax Athletes, and Tottenham

    ODDS and ENDS is my continuing series of random thoughts and follow ups…    

    Last night, or I guess early this morning, at about 5am, I heard this faint sound of a bell ringing. Like one of those school bells; metal and red, with the piercing sound that tells you class is over, or this is a fire drill. This bell sound wasn’t close to our apartment, but it present enough to not be ignored. I got back to sleep, but when I woke up to my phone alarm, that ringing was still going. Things could have been worse. I remember when I moved to this neighborhood, and would routinely get woken up by car alarms. Also, I am very glad that car alarms has gone out of fashion.

    Novak Djokovic got his visa revoked again in Australia, for many reasons, but mainly for not getting vaxed. I think everyone should get vaccinated, but if you don’t want to, be upfront about it. Also, you have to come to terms with the fact that your choice has consequences. Like, a whole nation saying you have to be vaccinated to come in. Or, a sports league saying you have to be vaxed if you want to participate in all aspects of the league. I hold to this; if Novak was a stocker at the local CVS, making minimum wage, and he refused to be vaxed, his ass would be fired same day, and no one would give a shit.

    Tottenham has to beat Arsenal this Sunday if they want to salvage their season. Spurs have to start beating top 5 teams, or they will lose Harry Kane this Summer. There, I said it, I have no regrets, and if you look at my track record with Premier League predictions, it, most likely, will be wrong.

  • Go to Work

    When I was in high school, I had a Humanities teacher tell me a story about Edward Hopper. Later in Hopper’s life he gave an interview, and the reporter asked if Hopper enjoyed the process of creating his work? To which Hopper answered; No, because it’s hard work. Hopper got kind’a cranky later in his life, but I liked how honest his response was. Sometimes hard work isn’t fun, and also, being creative isn’t a joy either. I am very glad that Dr. Tripp told me that story, as it has stuck with me for twenty-eight years.

    This also reminds me of the debate I would get into while in college studying theatre. There were two camps of thought in class; the planners and the improvers. You had to fit into one of them. If you were planning out things, then you weren’t in the moment, but if you were improving all the time, no one could plan on what you would do next which really pissed off the technicians and designers. And round and round it went. I found improvers to be selfish, they were people who didn’t want to be told what to do. But planners lacked a spontaneity in their work.

    The truth, I found out in the real world, is that you have to be a little of both.  

    Oh, I was a planner, in case anyone one was wondering.

    But it is about each person figuring out what their process is. Such as, the other night the wife and I were asking each other about our day, and I told her I was feeling frustrated that I haven’t been able to work in the way I feel I need. What this boils down to is that I’m not allowing myself dedicated time to work. I can journal, and I can blog, but I keep placing fiction last, and with the least dedicated time for it.

    And I have I mentioned that I’m not the best husband. I work at it, but I’m still not the best.

    What my wife suggested was that maybe I should try what our friend, who is a published writer, does which is write at the library. This is probably the third or fourth time my wife has suggested this to me in the past year in a half, and this time, it sunk in. She went on to say that I should schedule the time at the library, and then build the rest of my day around that.

    I did get very lucky in landing my wife.

    What she suggested doesn’t sound like fun, it’s work. And I think that’s what I need. I have to plan my creative time. I have to go to work.

  • Short Story Review: “What the Forest Remembers” by Jennifer Egan

    (The short story, “What the Forest Remember” by Jennifer Egan, appeared in the January 3rd & 10th, 2022 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Why did our parents do the things that they did? Why did my dad stop buying sports cars in the 70’s and then start buying station wagons? I can guess, which is that he started a family, and two door sports cars just aren’t practical for a growing family. That’s a logical answer, and most likely correct, but there is an outside chance it could be something else. Do I want to know his thought process as to why he made this decision when it came to cars? No. I want to believe he made that decision because he loved his family and it was the right thing to do. I would hate to know that he was guilted by my mother to give up his sports car for a station wagon, and he spent the rest of his life resenting her and his kids. It’s not a pleasant thought, but it is possible.

    I feel that was what Jennifer Egan was trying to tackle with her short story, “What the Forest Remembers,” which is a fun read. She tells the story of four men, three of which who are married with families, all living around the San Francisco area in 1965, who go on a trip to the wilderness around Eureka, CA. The point of the trip is to visit a marijuana farm/commune, experiment with grass, and have a good weekend. The crazy right turn of this story is that the narrator, Charlie, who is the daughter of Lou, one of the four men going on the trip, has access to the memories of her father, the rest of the men, and even some of the people at the commune. This is because Charlie exists in the near future where people have uploaded their memories into a Collective Consciousness, and thereby, one can review memories and thoughts of the past. It was a bit of a jarring twist, but it had a slight Vonnegut feel to it, so I went with it. I don’t want to spoil the story, but this trip plays an important role in the three married men’s lives.

    I had to read this story twice, because the first time through it, I just felt like I had missed something. The story and the writing is very, I think, charming is the best way to describe it, but the ending left me feeling unsatisfied. I sat on it for a day, and then decided I needed to take another crack at it. The second time through, I began to pick up on a little of the nuance of disappointment Charlie has with her father, which I found at odds with the concept of the story. If the premise is that Charlie can see and hear her father’s thoughts and memories, then there shouldn’t be any vagueness on her understanding of his intention and thought process of those decisions. There are moments and lines that are dropped by Charlie about her father’s thoughts towards her, that you would believe would be difficult for her to hear, but these thoughts are treated like adjectives in describing a person’s hair color. In fact, at one point in the story, Charlie rhetorically asks what should be done with this overload of information that comes from viewing a person’s memories? Which causes Charlie to state, “Not every story needs to be told.”

    And I think that is where my issue with this story lies; why is this being told? If Charlie is not affected by her father’s memories; they neither make her happy nor upset, then why is this being shared? If you remove Charlie and the Collective Consciousness database, then this is a story of a consequential weekend for three men in 1965. But Charlie and the database is in there, so the question must be asked, as to why? Shouldn’t Charlie and her feelings towards what happened be paramount to the story’s resolution? And that right there is why the story felt unsatisfying for me; what does Charlie think about all of this? It’s like a punch got pulled at the very end.