Balance

I’m reading Bag of Bones by Stephen King just now. I’m about halfway through and already dreading the moment when I fall off the end of it. It’s literary and intelligent and engaging – a ‘good read,’ as they say. It’s so good that I found myself this Sunday morning lingering over it when I should have been working on my own writing projects. Hard to strike that balance between my own writing (the dance) and reading (the one who brought me). Especially when the reading is this much fun.

That’s not the only area of my life requiring balance just now. My day job is taking up a lot of my mental resources and I love my work but I’m also very aware of the need to get the writing off the ground if I’m going to make anything of it in ‘retirement.’ And I come home each night of late with my brain fairly well wrung out. What you gonna do?

We’ve begun the process of prepping the house to go on the market. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with this place from the beginning. We bought a trasher and gradually rebuilt it over the years. I admit I’ve sometimes resented the family and other time I’ve lost these last two decades-plus as we tore into walls, built new ones, reworked plumbing and electrical, the works. The thing is, now that the time is at hand – we’ll probably sell in the spring of next year – I feel like I’m deserting an old friend. Every nook and cranny from the rooftop to the sub-basement is familiar to me. Much of it built or rebuilt by me or Mary or both. We raised our daughters in this house, hosted family, argued, loved and sat around. A couple dozen Christmases, six Cookiethons, birthdays, new pets, dying pets… It’s been home to our family and now it will serve us one last time by relinquishing it’s equity to our cause. But I can’t help the feeling of deserting an old friend.

I’m in the process of relocating my writing space, having donated the old one back to the common cause as the guest room it was originally meant to be. Relocating forces one to look at stuff. And stuff, I have. Lots and lots and lots of stuff.

Maybe I’ll strike a balance by just ignoring the stuff and continuing my writing. 

Summer solstice

Today is the summer solstice which means that where I live, we will have a minute shy of sixteen hours of sunlight. Exactly six months from now, we’ll have only eight hours and one minute.

I love living here. I love the trees and water and mountains and rivers and four seasons and the seasonal changes in length of sunlit days.

I continue to be tied up with other writing but I promise as soon as the website is up (soon, I swear) I’ll be back among the living. Meanwhile, I hope you are one and all enjoying your days as I am mine.

Michael

The haps

Not much going on these days.

Copy editing the book while it's out to a fresh group of readers. 'Copy editing' being a polite way of saying hunting down typos, missed words, redundancies, continuity errors. Rewriting compound sentences, of which there are entirely too many. You know, all the fun stuff.

Helping Mary renovate  the last unimproved room in the house, just in time to put it on the market. And by 'helping' I mean, of course, doing her bidding.

Working on setting up the website that will replace this little blog.

Listening to lute music while typing this. Don't know why you should care about that but every now and then I really enjoy a dose of John Dowland.

And as always, looking out over the green of our backyard and realizing once again how fortunate I am to have made my life here. Alas, time to move on. Not tonight but soon enough.

Dreading my doctor's appointment this week at which this wonderful, caring woman will tell me in her pleasant but firm way that I am fat. Damn! Really?

Marveling at the fact that I somehow convinced Mary to set up housekeeping with me and have managed for thirty years not to drive her away.

Wondering why there's a clothespin on my desk next to my backup drive.

Not much happening in the abode except life. Always, life.

Stepping over the line

A famous comedian is in the news for holding up an effigy head of D. Trump covered in blood. For this she is being castigated not only by Trumpets but also by many moderates. And she deserves to be.

A commentator is in hot water for using the term ‘house n----r’ during an interview. He deserves all the blistering he gets.

We – and the ‘we’ to which I refer is all of us who are horrified at the current presidency and the insane comet tail of unpleasantness that follows – need to be better than this. Michelle was right: let them go low; we need to continue to go high.

The comedian should have known better. Her career has been made on the edge, barely skirting the boundaries of good taste and fair play in order to get a laugh. I understand that and I get that good satire is necessarily edgy. But if I have to explain here why what she did was over the line, then perhaps we’re no better than Billy Bush.  

I would hope we can agree that the gleeful display of severed heads is the province of terrorists. Beyond that, while the orangutan in the Oval should be able to take his lumps, and richly deserves them, can’t we agree that there are certain lines we don’t cross?  The comedian, missing the message as former supporters and employers back away from her, tearfully attempts to portray herself as the victim. She is not.

The commentator, hearing negative reaction from his live audience made a quick aside identifying it as a joke. And when the reactions heated up over the next hours, he issued a week apology for ‘using that word.’ I agree with the folks who are calling for his firing. Your time’s up, goodbye.

There are lines we don’t cross if we want to be who we claim to be. Holding up the head was not merely a bad choice in an unguarded moment. It took time to plan and prepare for that shot. Time to think about what that imagery would conjure. Time to say, ‘No, that’s not us.’ Apparently, no one in her camp had the good sense to stop and think.

And for a professional talker to use the n-word on air, even in the flow of repartee, is equally unforgivable. Did he think that his position as a national television commentator makes him immune to the constraints we would apply in a local school board meeting?

These two people – and others we could mention but these are the two in the news just now – are intelligent people. They are both professional communicators who cannot claim they don’t understand context, semantic burden, emotional weight, restraint.

In both cases, they deserve all the vilification we can muster. Because they both knew where the line was, and they chose to step across it. Because in a war for the soul of America, they gave our worst enemies some very ugly ammunition.

Lesson for today: If you stand on the edge, better be sure of your footing.