Talkin’ ’bout Pop Music

It ain’t “Lies” but it’s The Knickerbockers.

I’ve been thinking about Pop Music a bit the past week or two, prompted by being forced to listen to my wife’s choice of music in our car one day. It’s some “hits of the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s” piece of something-or-other…unless you like that sort of thing, then it’s a wonderful FM station which plays all the greatest songs you know and love. I’ve assiduously avoided listening to radio from the first opportunity I had to not listen to it, sometime in my late teens or early 20’s. I suppose some readers don’t understand what I’m talking about. Through high school we listened to music in two places, basically: cars and our bedrooms. We had AM radio in the cars and vinyl records in our bedrooms. If you really got into it and had deep pockets, you bought a big Wollensak reel-to-reel tape machine, but if you were a wannabe like my brother and me, you bought a cheap little portable recorder and stuck the painfully crappy microphone in front of a tiny transistor radio speaker to record “off the air”.

In small-market Spokane only two radio stations catered to young people and their shocking tastes in music: KNEW (neé KJRB by the time I left high school), and KXLY. All popular music of whatever genre mixed freely on these stations. No FM station played popular music until around the time I entered college when KREM-FM suddenly started an “underground” playlist. Underground radio featured stoned out DJ’s: “Hi, I’m John. Yeah. We’ll be playing some heavy tunes for a while. I hope you like them.” We programmed the buttons on the radio–oh Lord, do I have to explain how car radios worked back then? Those too?–to the two AM stations and became adept at punching the button for whichever one wasn’t playing a song we loathed, which happened frequently. You’ll understand in another paragraph.

But back to that moment a week ago when I listened to many songs I hadn’t heard in years. The one which sticks in my head is “If This Is It” by Huey Lewis and the News. I’m going to hate myself for looking that up and reminding my brain about it: I had a viral ear-worm for days after hearing that song. It’s not that I don’t appreciate Mr Lewis, it’s that I don’t particularly like that specific song. “I Wanna New Drug” has sentiment I can get behind. “The Heart of Rock & Roll” zips along quite nicely. But a slow near-ballad which basically says, “do you see this going where I think it’s going” struck me then and continues to as ridiculously mundane. Maybe you like it. Fine, you’re entitled because we all ask music to deliver different things and if the song delivers, great…for you. I like absolutely stupid songs because of a bass line or because the singer’s voice seems to mock the very words being sung, or because it has a frenetic beat, or a multitude of other reasons. I’m not going to mention two extremely popular groups which demographics say I should love, and I can’t stand them. I lost a friend over that once.

Listening to my wife’s radio station, I had a startling realization. I had been getting pretty egotistic about how broad my musical horizons are. I like country, blues, rock, blues-rock, folk, world/ethnic, jazz of various ilks, classical, a little bit of hip-hop and…pop. My enforced listening session in the car showed me I don’t really like pop per se, I like it very selectively. I protested to myself about all that pop music I liked from my youth. That’s when it hit me: we like all those songs which formed us as we left childhood, negotiated adolescence, and became adults. After that? Not so much. We went in different directions. Some folks I’ve met never went anywhere. They only listen to songs from the oeuvre when they were 10-25.

Today proves my point. Yesterday I finished chores and declared it to be Birthday Week. I’ve decided one day isn’t big enough to handle 70 years. Until Tuesday June 11th, I’m celebrating. Today unfolded at a leisurely pace, pointed toward some music listening, writing, and a Phillies game. I decided to listen to music from the beginning of my listening life, and then realized “the beginning” eludes definition. I settled for the year my pre-teen fan-tasy grew into musical appreciation: 1966. Until then I’d focused on whatever TV and radio served up: The Beatles, early The Rolling Stones, The Monkees. In 1965 my brother and I began buying a few different bands on 45rpm records, and in 1966 I got my first 33rpm LP, The Young Rascals. It coincided with my birthday and the end of the school year. I ran out of the schoolroom never to return to elementary school, and I ran into adolescence with a newfound appreciation for the melding of pop, soul, and rock which had started to occur.

I decided to re-introduce myself to 1966 by looking at the Top 40 lists for the year and selecting songs to listen to from it. Locating a wonderful site called Top 40 Weekly, I selected 1966 to be presented with the Top 40 chart for every single week in 1966! Wow. Here’s the beginning of the first one from January of that year:

Top 40 Weekly’s chart for the beginning of 1966.

This proves my point. (Of course, it’s self-referential, but nevermind.) I look at the first song and start singing the lyrics. I look at the second one and smile and hear Paul singing the title words. Likewise with #3 and #4. I’ll admit #5 threw me for a minute–I’m more familiar with “Catch Us If You Can” by that group, as heard on the Lloyd Thaxton show. Giving it a play, though, it came back to mind. How about #6? Check. And #7? Check. Not until #8 did I say to myself, “punch the button.” I like a few Righteous Brothers songs, but they carried a crooning 50’s style of music into the 60’s, and it didn’t play well. But who can’t smile listening to #9?

Then we hit #10. Lord knows how Eddy Arnold managed to get a charting song out of that number. I felt the revulsion rise up. Today’s form of button-pushing, the skip-track button on the streaming service came into play quickly. The remaining songs? I smiled again at #11; sang the lyrics to #12 with my wife; and wondered how #’s 13 and 14 got on the list. I don’t recall ever hearing them. The Shangri-Las managed to push out a charting song in 1966? You gotta admire that, even if the song was horrible. (I never heard that one either.) Gary Lewis’s song typified his talentless group, but made me remember “This Diamond Ring” so it wasn’t worthless. I couldn’t find #17 on Tidal, and then a relaxed wide smile–the Beatles again. Before there were LP’s in my life, there were 45’s:

Both songs in the top 20 starting January 1966.

I couldn’t find Ramsey Lewis Trio’s version of “Hang On Sloopy” and wonder what the heck a jazz trio could’ve done with The McCoys’ big hit. The Beach Boys were a selective thing for me, and #20 didn’t hit the spot. I continued through the list until I hit #40. It kinda made the whole journey worthwhile: “Lies” by The Knickerbockers. I loved that song; still do. They had another great one as shown at the top of this post.

The final 45 I bought occurred in 1976. I bought it only because I knew I would never like the album, but I wanted the song for posterity’s sake:

“The king is dead but not forgotten…this is a song about Johnny Rotten” –from “My My, Hey Hey” by Neil Young.

Our musical likes have more to do with where we grew up and what we listened to at the time, than anything objectively wonderful about the music. We like what we like, and we don’t what we don’t. Objective criticism fails precisely because it rejects subjectivity. Do I like “bad” songs? You bet. Do I dislike “good” ones? True. Are you totally inexplicable to me because you like “A White Shade Of Pale”? Abso-effing-lutely.

Hello in there: A rambling discourse

Sometimes I feel like a baby spider floating through the air on my gossamer web-string, wondering when this little journey will end, where it will deposit me, and in general, what does the near future hold. I’m in one of those in-between times right now. I would like to tie this up neatly by saying, “Well! I’m approaching my 70th birthday this weekend, and that explains it! Ipso facto, easy-peasy, make no buts about it.” It’s not so. I’ve never lost the summer vacation feeling we all used to get at the end of May as we eagerly anticipated the end of another school year and the beginning of a responsibility-less (or less responsibility) summer. I had barely joined the workforce at the beginning of 1978 then I returned to college in September 1981. From then until 1992 I taught in public schools–summers off! After taking a year off, working the summer of 1993 started my final move, this time to a permanent career in pharmaceutical manufacturing. But…my antsy ways caused me to move cross-country in May 1997, and we moved to a new house in May of 1998, and we moved to New York in May 2001. In May 2003 my job situation changed markedly and by August I started looking for something new. Cutting to the chase: I started many of my dozen or so consultant contracts in May, plus or minus a month. Then there’s our society’s natural predilection to mark the end of May as summer, and the end of our church choir season, and the beginning of really warm weather, and the fact I’ve always loved warm weather, and…and….and…it all seems tied up with my birthday in the beginning of June.

Turtle cannibalism

My wife and I came across an odd sight this morning. The photo below, though taken in poor lighting and into murky water, shows a snapping turtle feeding on something.

Snapping turtle eating….a turtle? Lake Lynn, Raleigh, NC. June 2024.

I’m pretty sure that’s a snapping turtle. I estimated the shell at around 15 inches lengthwise, maybe 18. Snappers average 10-18 inches, so that’s the right ballpark. It took awhile to make out what was going on until I realized it was feeding, and the object of its meal-affection appeared to be an upside down turtle of pretty good size itself. They are omnivores and eat carrion.

Other sights during our walk around Lake Lynn:

One of two geese of this species we see frequently. This one stands one-legged up the slope from the lake near an apartment in the many buildings which ring the lake. Lake Lynn, Raleigh, NC. June 2024.

The Lake Lynn southern parking lot has a small butterfly/pollinator bed including these Bachelor Buttons. Lake Lynn, Raleigh, NC. June 2024.

In the butterfly/pollinator garden Black-eyed Susans predominate. Lake Lynn, Raleigh, NC. June 2024.

Coming home we remarked that our own surprising volunteer Black-eyed Susan plants were starting to look pretty good:

Or maybe this isn’t a Black-eyed Susan…or the others aren’t? June 2024.

Our hydrangea plant continues to weird us out by changing color just a bit every year, getting more and more pink:

Pretty sure I shared one like this last year. The blue stamen/pistils are really something. June 2024.

And this year the main hydrangea bush’s outlier, a new plant coming up beside it and presumably from the same root system, shows a new color scheme altogether, seeming to lean in to the color scheme of its parent:

What I’m brooding on…

These lyrics by John Prine in “Hello In There” haunted me in the 1970s and do so more the older I get. “Happy” Monday to you all.

"Hello In There"

We had an apartment in the city,
Me and Loretta liked living there.
Well, it's been years since the kids had grown,
A life of their own left us alone.
John and Linda live in Omaha,
And Joe is somewhere on the road.
We lost Davy in the Korean war,
And I still don't know what for,
Don't matter anymore.

You know that old trees just grow stronger,
And old rivers grow wilder every day.
Old people just grow lonesome
Waiting for someone to say, "Hello in there. Hello."

Me and Loretta, we don't talk much more,
She sits and stares through the back door screen.
And all the news just repeat itself
Like some forgotten dream that we've both seen.
Someday I'll go and call up Rudy,
We worked together at the factory.
But what could I say if he asks "What's new?"
"Nothing, what's with you? 
Nothing much to do."

You know that old trees just grow stronger,
And old rivers grow wilder every day.
Old people just grow lonesome
Waiting for someone to say, "Hello in there. Hello."

So if you're walking down the street sometime
And spot some hollow ancient eyes,
Please don't just pass 'em by and stare
As if you didn't care, say, "Hello in there. Hello."

pictures & creativity [a non-poem]

I’ve come to believe everyone thinks in pictures, even if they don’t know it. By adulthood some of us go on autopilot, our connection to the pictures, images, emotion-movies cemented so far in the foundation-concrete of our makeup that we know only words anymore.

Creativity demands turning away from the words and toward the pictures. Visual creatives, you live here. Connect your hands to your pictures. We wordsmiths, though, must act as our own interpreters, must turn our backs on the pictures while remembering them, must translate the pictures into words.

At least, that’s how it works for me. When it works for me. (The rest of the time I just wander among the pictures and say to myself, “sure, I’ll remember this for later.”)

Pale but present

First purple coneflower of the season. Not very purple, but just bloomed out today. All flowers are doing well due to mild weather with just the right amount of moisture. May 2024.

Onions

Today, for reasons opaque, I look at onions:

Sweet by any name: Because a ubiquitous marketing campaign has proved once again that Marketing Is Everything, many folk here in the eastern United States don’t realize the Vidalia onions of Georgia aren’t the only sweet onions, and they aren’t the progenitor of (most) of the others. Quoting from Oregon Live, a website for The Oregonian, “The Vidalia sweet onion was first grown, completely by accident, in 1930 by a farmer named Mose Coleman.” In contrast, the Walla Walla sweet onion came into being when Peter Pieri immigrated to the United States from Corsica in the late 1800’s, bringing “a bunch of onion seeds from Corsica” when he did so. Sweet onions aren’t any sweeter than ‘regular’ onions, but they have only half the pyruvic acid of the typical mild onion, the yellow. Sweet onions thus have less bite (by half!). They’re planted in the fall in low-sulfur volcanic soil–hence another celebrated sweet onion, Maui Sweets. Because sweet onions are juicier, i.e., they contain a lot more water, they’re softer which means they have to be picked and processed by hand, and their shelf-life is short.

I’ve never had a Maui sweet onion, but I’ve had both Walla Walla’s (hey, they’re grown only 160 miles from my boyhood home) and Vidalia’s, and I prefer the former. The Vidalia’s just don’t seem as sweet to me. The linked article in the previous paragraph notes the Walla Walla’s hit the palate with sweetness first followed by pungency, whereas the Vidalia do the opposite. Maybe that’s it. All I know, is I know how to caramelize an onion thanks to Vivian Howard’s book This Will Make It Taste Good which emphasizes the lengthy period of time necessary to caramelize them, and the need to overload the skillet to use the moisture in the onions to steam them as they caramelize.

A final onion note (a thoroughly intended pun): here’s a great onion novelty song from 1966, the year I left elementary school. May your tears be of joy or at least may they promise a tasty near-future.

I had to buy it

I shop produce first, even when the store doesn’t shunt me there with its layout. Friday, barely into the nearest Whole Foods, I spotted this heirloom tomato, all 2.25 pounds of it. I wandered the store getting things for the list, but couldn’t shake the idea of thing. I texted my wife and a couple friends about it, and they said, “buy it!” For scale, I can just comfortably get one hand around each half; it takes two hands to hold it. It looks like conjoined twins–I guess it’s offensive now to use the older, more common name. A bit hard–we’ll give it a few days to ripen up and then what? My wife’s vote is for stuffing it. I was thinking a stupendous, feeds-a-family-of-four Caprese salad.

Honor Thyself

Maybe my purpose simply lies in imitating Charlie: hang out at the bar and drink a half gallon dry? May 2024.

I’ve several pieces of writing sitting on the shelf in a to-be-born state. Some even sit at the front edge of the shelf, just waiting to be taken down, polished, exhibited. This beckons now, however. It underpins the others.

I’ve too often settled for what I can do instead of striving for what I want to do. This blog and its recent lack of activity exemplifies that. There exist but a handful of activities which bring me as much pleasure as posting photos, essays, poems, and other pieces of writing here. Why the weekslong gaps?

At the age of 13, as inchoate as any such a creature, I became focused by two things: my Language Arts teacher said (using a bit of poetic license), “Damn, Pilcher, you can write! You should consider being a writer!” The other event occurred in the same year when a partner and I debated some topic which I now forget in front of the entire 8^th grade class, all 300-400 of us. I got a glimmer into my innate bent toward logic and reasoning, both inductive and deductive. Our duo lost the 8th grader vote, but we won the teacher vote, similar to winning the electoral college but losing the popular vote. I considered myself a Writer and a Debater from that point forward. I did not know they were sometimes mutually exclusive.

In high school my teachers redirected my interest in writing. I learned they placed little emphasis on writing creatively, focusing instead on the expository writing of the essay, the critique (book reviews), and the like. Can one function in society where business letters rule the day? (At least they did then. If those teachers could only see today’s society…alas, most are dead.) I therefore looked to the available outlets, enrolled in Journalism, and joined the school paper (an elective class). In my senior year the two points of view in C. P. Snow’s The Two Cultures collided. All that expository writing reached new heights when Senior Humanities brought me the two-hour essay as a substitute for a test. But…the loosening of curricular philosophies brought me the elective of Creative Writing. Suddenly I wanted to go back to the latter. Yet already I had applied to the University of Montana because it had an excellent School of Journalism.

To shorten this up: I did attend the U of M, but enrolled in an experimental education program instead of journalism. I spent one year there. There followed a year of earning money, a two-year stint at a regional college learning to be a recording engineer—no, wait, a radio-TV newsman—no, wait, a weird combo of that with Economics—before I enrolled in journalism (again) at the University of Washington, determined to make my way in that field because, “if I don’t focus on something, I’ll never do anything!” And I did work in newspapering for almost four whole years.

Pause. This supposedly promised to be about how he couldn’t focus his desire to write into the pursuit of WRITING. He settled for what came to hand, taking the path of least resistance, doing what he appeared to be reasonably talented for. Compress the next twelve years: convenience and aptitude led to a ten-year teaching gig. Divorce and early-onset midlife crisis led to One Last Attempt to Be A Creative Writer. It failed in less than a year. (Insert all the comment you want; I/we know our psyche. I/we did what seemed necessary to maintain mental health.) Through a series of events which defy a bad Hollywood script, I wound up analyzing data and writing scientific reports for the world’s largest pharmaceutical manufacturing company at that time. I did well. I spent a quarter century at it, eventually as a consultant, and retired.

WAIT! WTF? I THOUGHT THIS PROMISED SOMETHING ABOUT HONOR AND ALL THAT?

What is honoring thyself? Youth #1 has innate talents for playing baseball, thinks “I really like buying and selling stuff” but goes into baseball because his/her innate talent take them that way. They succeed as expected, then coast for the rest of life realizing passive income from the insane amount of money earned as a ballplayer. They neglect to build a business empire based on that initial desire to be a capitalist. Youth #2 loves baseball despite having mediocre talent at playing it. He/she works every waking moment for years to make this dream come true. They are drafted into professional baseball, succeed despite what their projected ceiling is, and spend the rest of their life in baseball as a coach or a manager or a consultant developing young talent.

Which one honors themselves? The one who leaned into their innate talent? Or the one who ignored who-knows-what talent to pursue a dream? Youth #1 drifted into baseball on talent. Youth #2 ignored talent to pursue a dream which consumed the remainder of their life.

And for the religious among us, which one is pursuing their God-given path? Youth #1 made the most of their innate talent. Not #2.

How can I be nearing 70 years on the planet and still wonder which one of these I am, and what the answer is to that question about honor?

When I volunteer to write a database/listing application for my church choir, am I fulfilling my innate talent, or am I defaulting on my dream? Ditto for ditching teaching to write business reports that pretty much anybody could write. To make it more mundane, when I derive great joy and satisfaction in planning a set of weekly menus, selecting good recipes, and cooking them, am I dodging my greater dream, my greater desire to Be A Writer?

Is Being A Writer just an ephemeral dream, a wisp of wanna in a wind of reality?

Deep down I think I fear that though I have a talent for crafting language, I have nothing to say with it. I need to be explaining something, reacting to something, pontificating upon something. (I’m doing it now.) Avoidance mechanism or recognition of doing what I truly want to do? I fear it’s a bit of both.

I intended to end this with a promise about upending my approach to the day, the week, my life. To declare, “I will write FIRST, I will read FIRST, and only then will I tackle the mundane!” (“Dear, have you emptied the cat boxes yet?”) I cannot do that. I’m sitting here thinking about the monks with writing skills who eschewed them to pray aloud and work the fields. Of soldiers skilled in various practical skills who instead served on the front lines. Of women (and a few men) who gave up promising careers to raise children. What is a Calling and what is a desire?

In the end I come back to this: you have done what you wanted to do at the time. If more high school guidance counselors—do they still have those?—had told this to their junior and senior clients, a lot more of them would have been able to pursue what they were drawn to. I know I would have.

There will be no end to this piece. Not until I reach my death bed and give you the answer, and likely not even then.

Frivolous Friday

The piece I wrote last night isn’t quite ready, my tasks outpaced my time available, and I really want something to be posted. Ergo….

THOSE WHO DAWDLE MUST STAND ON CURB

I guess the two on the curb are crossing guards. May 2024, Raleigh, NC.

One of the best blues-rock live albums of my lifetime: “LIVE” FULL HOUSE by J. Geils Band, released 1972. “Whammer Jammer, lemme hear ya, Dickey!” and Mister Magic Dick on the lickin’ stick takes off with some serious Southside harmonica work. (YouTube also has a 1979 video of the band performing this onstage–worth it for Magic Dick’s bush of hair alone.)

Ideas I will never write (feel free to steal):

I was only hunting moonbeams/But my eyes got in the way
The scariest monsters don’t lurk under your bed. The scariest ones climb into bed with you and pretend to love you.
“He’ll worry all about the bugs on the windshield but not about the car coming at him in his own lane.” Not sure where that is from. Was it me?
Many people will travel the world on a regular basis but will be unfamiliar with the land and culture within a 300-mile radius of where they live.

The oak-leaf hydrangea has recovered from the complete devastation of the squirrels two years ago. Though only one stalk remains, it has leaves on it as big as a small dinner plate, and this lone but lovely bloom cluster. May 2024.

Blog Blockers: #1, Analysis

Guilt motivates, terrifies, handicaps, and depresses us. It informs, too. My guilt about not posting more than weekly here tells me I want to write more, photo more, pour myself into creative pursuits more than I have been. It also informs me other things must carry higher levels of guilt which trump my Creativity Guilt. Taking on a project, though, motivates me. Therefore, I’m tasking myself to write daily/frequently about what’s blocking the blogging.

A partial inventory of our beer fridge. April 28, 2024.

Take a look at that spreadsheet screenshot above. One would think I created it to keep track of the approximately 22 kinds of beer in the beer fridge. Sigh. I wish it were so, and it remains a side benefit of the real reason I created it: that “Beers/unit” (Column O) feeds another sheet in the same workbook which is used to calculate how much I drank yesterday. Every morning for the past decade I make a short entry in my Health Log, maintained in Microsoft Excel. These days it’s simple: record my weight, make sure the meds I took yesterday is complete and accurate, and write 3-6 sentences about my general health mental and emotional. Examples? Life’s slings and arrows manifested as aching hips, arthritis starting to develop in my fingers, whether my collapsing ankles have caused any more ligament damage, and the condition of twitchy back. Lately it gives a couple terse lines about what happened yesterday, a sort of bulleted journal entry. I began adding these more and more in retirement.

More consistently than anything else, this log daily has tracked my ongoing battle to Not Drink So Much. It unflinchingly has recorded for the past decade the exact amount of beer I drink (I don’t drink wine or hard liquor anymore). It has done so with graphs illustrating rate of consumption, with 7-day and 14-day moving averages, with tables that project how much more the next beer will cost me, with histograms–and not one bit of it has made much of a difference in my rate of consumption. I had thought simple awareness would make a difference, much like cigarette smokers are told to record how and when they smoke. Awareness has made no difference whatsoever, even when I have done it in real time, as I’m drinking. The snippet of the calculating worksheet is shown below. Columns D, E, and F are the ones which look to the inventory sheet, multiplying the Beers/unit by the quantity drunk.

How to calculate a medically-defined beer. April 2024.

Columns A and B record odd-quantity beers, which usually occur when ordering at restaurants. I’m not going to go into all the calculations for what a medical beer is; you can see the definition at the top there and do the math yourself. Although I quit (finally) graphing the daily intake, I still list it in the health log entry. And now the beer-rating sheet gets maintained all the time. Filter the quantity on hand to ignore “0” and you can narrow the 400+ beers to a handy beer list to print out for when your wife says, “What’s in the fridge?”

This isn’t a cry for help. It illustrates the premise of the introduction: setting up these interlocking worksheets takes time. There are five other worksheets in this spreadsheet file that I’m not describing. And this is but one application. There’s a monster financial one which I think I could’ve sold back in the day I roamed the country as a self-employed consultant and needed to keep track of hours, rates, contracts, bills, accounts receivable, and how they drove our personal budget and finances. I just updated a Google Sheets app to plan music for our weekly masses and to show our choir what the music will be for a given Sunday–hymn numbers, responsorial psalm number, and the name of the anthem. It’s not a listing tool, like electronic paper. It requires the music director to pick the liturgical name of a given mass (such as the 5th Sunday of Easter) which then causes the application to pick the correct psalm information. The choir list looks to the planner. The printout for the cantor to use is driven from the planning sheet and the liturgy sheet. And etcetera for other things in my life.

In short, I analyze. I might read some political thing about the imbalance of power inherent in the two-US Senators-from-every-state part of the Constitution and go down a rabbit hole to compare the ratios of state populations in 1792 versus 2020 just to see if they’re markedly different or not. (I stopped myself on that one, thank goodness.) I might spend two or three hours to make some points about baseball like I did 18 months ago on this blog. This stuff happens all the time, and….

That’s one reason I don’t get to my writing like I think I want to.

the peony’s promise

Symbolically, this peony represents why I haven’t been posting. It’s two days ago, I’ve got about 30-45 extra minutes in the late afternoon, and I think, “Hey, I better get that peony tied up before it blooms, and for sure before those hard rains hit that are forecast for tonight.” My two peonies will fall right to the ground as soon as they bloom fully. The rain didn’t materialize, but this photo, taken yesterday, shows many blooms are on their way and it’s supposed to rain tomorrow “for sure” and…you get the idea. The idea that I could instead get something posted never entered my mind.

I wrote a very lengthy essay last weekend the first of a series to explain from various points of view explaining what I think is more important than writing. Though sober (a good way to write!), I left it overnight to review in the morning, and decided at that point it just was too personal. My desire to be a writer and accept that a writer needs to write where the words will take him conflicts with my desire to be liked by at least a few people and with my desire to not expose every piece of my soul and psyche.

There won’t be many posts in the near future either, but I keep saying I’m ‘going to do better’ and maybe this time I mean it. Hey, I finally started going back to the gym after a six-month hiatus, didn’t I? And that’s for something I don’t really want to do!