he within and she without 
freedom viewed from bitterness 
where the sky and sea are one 
artistry and littleness 

sat confined the mind goes blind 
panoplies made similar 
through the filter of a brain 
seeing she, but never 

her

I watched him fall apart obsessing over a woman who didn’t even know he was there.

It wasn’t that he interacted with her daily, and that she just didn’t think of him “that way” — it was that they had literally never even met. Long before the world of parasocial relationships existed, there was the world of admiring from a distance, or in his case, an extremely warped version of it. And he had a lot to lose.

In the language of that day and time, it might have been seen as being in the family of “mid-life crises”: this time in a man (or woman’s) life when they might risk everything they had trying to recapture something like lost youth. And while the object of his obsession was younger, she wasn’t so young as was often the case. It was more that she just “was”: different than anyone he’d ever known — wild, free, unpredictable. She was like the ocean, and he couldn’t take his eyes or thoughts off of her for long.

One of the experiences many of my female friends have had is suddenly being presented with strong feelings of attraction from men that they had no inkling were there. It is usually the feelings, not the men, that they didn’t know were there. She (who I only barely knew, but was on a first name speaking basis with) literally had never met my friend, didn’t know his name, had no idea he’d become obsessed with her, and would have been shocked to have heard the depth of his feelings.

Which, fortunately, she never did. Because, unrelated to all this, she got a job in another city, and moved away.

But before that his wife, tired of his lack of presence at home for her and their children, had started the process of divorce. So he ended up with no one.

He and I discussed the subject exactly once. He told me that his wife wanted out of the marriage, and that he was letting her go. That there was someone who had been on his mind every day for months, and that he had a plan: he was going to ask her to lunch, they were going to hit if off, and whole new worlds were going to open up to him. When I asked him who it was, and he told me, I told him that I knew her, and asked him how far along their friendship/relationship was.

“We haven’t actually spoken… yet.”

“What? Isn’t this kind of crazy?”

“Yes, it is, I know. But sometimes you see someone, and you just… know. You just know, you know?”

I said something to the effect that I did NOT know, and that I was surprised to hear things were this bad between he and his wife. He told me that, as a single man (which I was at the time) I would not understand how hard being married was.

“You get married because she makes you feel like a hero, but over time, all that goes away, and she just makes you feel worse about yourself.”

I watched the rest of the tale unfold from a distance. I ran into his wife at the grocery store about a month later. She asked me if I had heard they had gotten divorced. I said I had. Then she gave me a few details on things that had happened since he and I had spoken.

“I finally asked him, the day before the divorce was final, if there was another woman. He said there was. It turned out later that she didn’t know she was some kind of other woman, because they’d never met and she’s since moved away. He wanted to come back, which I nixed real fast. I cheered him up, though: I told him maybe he and she could be pen-pals, get to know each other.”

I said I had not heard that she had moved.

“At any rate, that’s not my concern anymore; I’m moving on with my life. I have children to think about, and they didn’t ask for any of this. I don’t need to be bitter; I need to be better… for them.”

how do you learn the seasons? 
is it just what you see, 
or is taught and demonstrated 
illustratively? 

can you still smell the wood-smoke, 
can you feel the fire again?  
does autumn live large in your heart 
from what you learned back then? 

It is good to express gratitude. It’s even better when the people you are grateful to are still around to hear it.

Sadly, much of the gratitude I feel towards the teachers I had growing up went unexpressed while I was actually in school. Although it is possible that the spontaneous excitement we as kids felt towards things could have been taken as gratitude by teachers, even if not verbalized as such.

I sure hope so.

One of the things I am grateful for in regards to my own elementary school teachers was class decorations. These tended to change with the seasons, and were designed to teach us about spring, summer, fall, and winter. I still associate red, orange and yellow colors with fall, even though I grew up in Florida where very few trees had leaves that changed with the seasons. This was largely from class decor and pictures in books, like this one:

Part of growing up is pretending not to enjoy things, because those things are associated with being younger. People throw over hobbies they love, music they love, and even people they love for what might be called “social pressure” reasons. I am not saying this is right or wrong, I am just observing that it “is”. Much of the process of growing up is mysterious and I’m not really sure I know how I feel about it.

What I DO know, however, is that I am now at the age where I have nothing to prove about maturity, so I feel comfortable just liking what I like regardless of what anyone else thinks, whether that be in music, or books, or other forms of entertainment, or even classroom decorations. I have a Lego set in this room I am in now that I used to build things with when my grandkids are here — or when they’re not. I use a coloring app on my phone to relax.

I often joke with my wife that the same characteristics about me changed in value over time:

(Me in my twenties) Her: he’s so immature!

(Me in my sixties) A different her: he’s so good with kids!

I basically am a kid in many ways, I understand this. And for that reasons, I’ve decided to use today to give a shout out to all those teachers still out there decorating their classrooms. Everything beautiful is its own reason for existence.

the world was given to us, we were young, 
and standing there upon the shore of future greatness 
(just our due) as waves took shape 
and all the seas applauded us; our names 
where whispered on the wind of highest hope 

the world was given to us, yet we fell, 
in secret rooms, and offices, and homes 
where johnny walker red was our cologne 
and we could not remember why we stood 
that morning on the shore or why we thought 
that we'd be any different

I am not quite the oldest person where I work, but I’m pretty close. I love working with younger people. They are frequently idealistic, and idealism is a wonderful thing, although I have to say, it often makes a better fuel than a compass.

I have a group of friends that I grew up with. We don’t get together as often as we used to. I still see us as being young, but those days passed long ago. I don’t remember us as being particularly hopeful or idealistic when we were younger, although I’m sure we had our share of that. I remember us as mostly being more concerned with mundane things: getting jobs, seeing the world, trying new things, finding love.

I was thinking about idealism after the recent conclusion of the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, who was at one time the world’s richest idealist. It turns out that you can rearrange the letters of “effective altruism” and spell “the ends justifies the means”. I mean, you have to add a few letters, but a few lines of computer code allow you to transfer those over with no one being the wiser.

Listen: idealism is important, and should be nourished and encouraged. However, we should be careful not to deify it.

through hazy eyes she dreams of when 
they drove for miles in the mist 
and sitting on her daddy's lap 
outside some service station where 
she tried a milky way first time 
and yet its all a dream for now 
the mist is only in her sight 
and weeds are growing where 
her daddy sleeps

I’m not naturally a pessimistic person. I’m not really a particularly optimistic person, either. In fact, debates rage as to whether or not I am a person at all. I stubbornly insist that I am, although my reasons are largely personal.

I know I am not A.I., since it would involve having some “I”.

I come from a family who were very matter of fact about the basic outline of life, including the “death” part. This enabled them to genuinely enjoy getting older, since they didn’t see loss-of-youth or vigor as any kind of surprise or evil force to be fought. They believed, rather than dwelling on lost capability, that it was better to just figure out what they still could do that they enjoyed, and then go and do it.

Because change is inevitable, and tends in one direction, it’s better to learn to float on its current than to try and swim against it.

i had a friend back then the lake 
who used to call me of a morn 
which just is not my name but still 
it's good when someone calls you 
even if that someone's just a puddle 
living in a slightly bigger hole 
at any rate 

my friend and i hung out with trees 
who now are kind of balding much like 
me but i digress i think or maybe 
its transgress congress it is 
some gress perhaps gres-gris 
i really don't recall i've gotten old 
i think

do you when you are thinking back 
think back on how you thought back then 
or do you think back on how backward 
all your thinking was or maybe 
you're a forward thinker i am not
i'm more a sideways stumbler 

still i had a friend the lake and we were 
once the best of fluids druids maybe 
i don't know i had ancestors once they mostly died 
and now i've sunk to hanging out with 
ponds and all their pondsy schemes

I spent a lot of time alone in my twenties, and I got pretty good at it. It was the kind of “good at it” where you question your reasons for going on living, but still. We all make sacrifices for our art: my art was loneliness, and I gave everything I had to it.

When I first started this blog, I wrote extensively about that part of my life. Most of the issues discussed at that time were long in my past, but I found it helpful to place it all in perspective.

People say that you should always remember who you are and where you came from. That can be harder to do than it sounds. Sometimes age or circumstance gift us with an aura of wisdom that our actual lives scarcely merit. It’s good to remember — or, at least, it’s good for me to remember — that I had no idea what I was doing and was just kind of wandering from place to place and thing to thing until I lucked upon a job I love, a woman I love even more, and a wonderful and blessed existence.

But it is good to remember that I am still, inside, the kid who, for a time, had a lake as his only friend.

in the earnest evening 
we sang a sacred song 
of golden twilight gleaming 
for those who're laden long. 

we harmonized, and sympathized, 
ancestral lives and lions -- 
for in the earnest evening comes 
our forbears in 

the silence

I grew up in a family of instrumental musicians and singers and became one myself at a very young age. At the rather advanced age I am now, that has pretty much devolved into weekly playing the piano and organ and occasionally writing or arranging music. I can only barely sing, but like most people who can’t really sing, I love doing it… so long as no one can see or hear me.

Recently, I have found myself remembering a lot of obscure songs I heard in my youth and this being age of YouTube, I have been able to find most of them. Sometimes I remember songs almost perfectly, but most of the time, I only really remember bits and pieces.

Old music always reminds me of my parents, who met singing, loved singing, and had us singing together as a family from my earliest memories. I hated singing in public, which they could not comprehend. People who love to perform have a hard time understanding those of us who would just rather not.

There’s something about music that I find to be… ancestral. I’ve always loved ancient music, and maybe that’s why. The poem above is an effort to get at that feeling.

How does music most move you?