In Flux

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.