No posting of late because, well, because everything
is in flux around here. That’s the best way to describe it.
My youngest is ending her grammar school career and
moving on up to middle school, and the oldest is finishing Freshman year in
high school. So after all the graduations, award ceremonies, and pool parties, there
is now a busy summer to prepare for – vacations, camps, aftercare coordination,
day trips, etc. Work for the oldest, probably babysitting, if we can get that
off the ground. A chore schedule so the hours at home are not wasted on devices
or endless reruns on the boob tube.
The wife is aggressively trying to get us out of the
state, and I’m aggressively trying to cope with that. She’s right, of course,
there really isn’t a sane future in New Jersey as it’s currently run. I’m
trying to be forward looking, keeping our retirement (in twenty, twenty-five
years) and the girls’ college careers (less than ten) in front of us,
financially speaking. (If college is an option; I consider contemporary college
a poison pill and am enthusiastically searching for alternatives for my little
ones.) We’re trying to get the house ship-shape for a sale that could happen at
any moment. This mostly includes triaging fifteen years of accumulated hoarder
bait and small, necessary, but expensive upkeep work.
I’ve been feeling unanchored for the longest time with
my religious belief system (I guess you’d call that “faith”). The heretical homos
running rampant under Francis and Francis himself have thoroughly disgusted me
and turned me off to the modern Catholic Church. But there’s no alternative,
either. I’ve looked into Eastern Orthodoxy and Theravada Buddhism. While the
latter has a rigorous do-it-yourself bootstrap mentality that immensely appeals
to me, the underlying theology I just can’t buy. The Eastern Orthodox Church
appeals more, but I am told has the same ongoing issues as Rome, just not as
publicized. I don’t know. I guess it’s full steam ahead into the past, in this
case the SSPX. Though there is no SSPX parish near us, we’ve been giving them
money every month and I’ve been reading up on pre-Vatican II stuff. (Though
I’ve now learned it really needs to be pre-20th century stuff to be worthy of
the greatness that was the Catholic Church.)
The past couple of weeks I’ve really delved into
Beatles music, something I’ve never really done despite a decade as a
struggling musician and forty years a guitar fanatic. The wife got me a book on
who exactly wrote the Beatles songs for Father’s Day. By “who wrote,” I mean,
what percentage of the Lennon-McCartney tunes were by Lennon and McCartney on a
song-by-song basis. Also, how the songs came about, how they morphed in the
studio, what the band thought of them. A deep dive into the musicology of the
Beatles. I am digging that immensely, and it takes my mind off weightier
things.
So, too, does my reading of the Civil War. I am
currently 150 pages into Volume 2 of Shelby Foote’s acclaimed Civil War
trilogy. What a great writer! Great with a turn of phrase. Snarky without the
snark, always entertaining. After a paragraph or two I am no longer sitting in
my chair in my house in northern New Jersey in 2019, but in the Lincoln White
House 156 years ago, or upon a frozen plain on the southern bank of the Rappahannock
just outside of a town called Fredericksburg, or steaming up the Mississippi
dodging the cannonade from the cliffs of Vicksburg or those barely-submerged
whiskey kegs packed full of TNT instead of Kentucky’s finest, floating mines
that were called torpedoes back then. The men come to life in all their
full-blown failings, and the tragedy that tore our nation apart back then
brings deep musings to my late-night mind.
I am feeling the creativity itch again, too. Want to
try my hand at nonfiction. Nothing encyclopedic, just something informative and
intriguing on a topic where my passion can pour through my pen. Problem is, as
a hopper, I am the very jack of all trades, master of none. I’ve dabbled in
dozens and dozens of things, some as long as an afternoon, or as short as
seven, eight, or twenty years. A while back I wrote a “list of nonfiction to
write,” and it turns out the list is 67 items long. How do you weed a list of
that length? Dunno, but I’m gonna try. I’ve pored over the list of all the
books I’ve read since 2000 (yeah, I’m like that, and if you’re a book lover
you’ll understand), and I’ve multi-furcated them into varies topics and
categories to see if any hidden patterns reveal themselves. I need a little
more thought time for this, but hopefully by the Fourth of July (the deadline
I’ve set) I can pick a topic and just go to town. Time vanishes when one
writes, and for one whose life has been in never-ending flux for a seemingly
never-ending time, that is just what I need.
