A Post About Nothing

"Writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all"

-Charles Bukowski

An absolutely perfect morning in the valley of the Chemung on this last Friday in May.

And after babbling my way through yesterday's post about my one-and-only public musical performance, now some 45 years ago, I find myself with little to say.

Peg's birthday is in May, and she's made a practice of celebrating for the entire month. And yet this May hasn't felt all that celebratory. Maybe it's the cosmic soup of this MAGA moment that robs us of the joy we should experience every now and then. Hard to give an easy smile while your country is being destroyed.

Maybe it's this firehose of merde that is being a lawyer in the state of Florida these days, with endless deadlines and packed dockets and everyone, everyone around you, me, unhappy pretty much all the time. Young lawyers say they wish they had an escape plan, wish they were at the end of the ride like me instead of staring across the abyss at another two or three decades of this. Wishing to be old, to be closer to death, to get out of one's vocation. It says a lot.

Or perhaps it's too much solitude, although P and I still get along famously, against all odds. We're always so busy, so on the go all the time, that there's little cultivation of a circle of friends, little time for family. Our Florida circle, never large outside of church, has withered through neglect and disdain for political choices down to near-zero. Up here we try, and love the little tribe that's formed around us over the last five years, but as P's fond of saying when we venture out to community mixers and end up drinking our body weight because we're so very bored with those around us, "We can't help who we are. We're Southerners."

She's said it a hundred times up here. And she's right. They're all kind and smart and raising or raised nice kids, but they lack that mischief, that sideways wink and half smile that says we all recognize that whatever we're discussing or doing is probably bullshit. Jimmy Buffett was onto something when he tried to describe being of our part of the world as having a "native tongue, from way down South, that sits in the cheek of my Gulf coastal mouth." We're just different.

So on this beautiful day ending a gray and drizzly week, there's the pall of this nagging anxiety, the sense that something's not quite right and a shoe is about to drop, all of which makes it hard to enjoy the moment.

But no day is perfect, and at this age it's a fair bet that things aren't going to get any better than they are right now. So might as well lean into enjoying it all the best we can.

But first, I'll spend the morning deposing two certifiably insane misanthropes, represented by a lawyer who has been a vexation to my spirit and that of pretty much every other lawyer in Bay County for nearly three decades. My reward for slogging through that exercise will be an hour behind a vacuum so the house can be shown tomorrow morning, then up the hill with P to Cliffside for a couple days of telling ourselves we left all that unease in the rearview, when in fact we carry it with us everywhere. Tomorrow night we have tickets to go see Taj Mahal and Keb Mo at Point of the Bluff, overlooking the western neck of Keuka Lake. We love that place, having attended a couple concerts there over the years. Maybe we'll find a little peace.

Isn't that always the wish? Or am I just showing my age?