Black Saint Billy Harper is wailing 40-something years ago in some other city but tonight he’s filling the air in our bedroom in Charlottesville because earlier today at Melody supreme his record was on the wall and I remembered that time I interviewed him and his voice was so rich and resonant that it put mine to shame and that was already so long ago that I recall only impressions (not the Coltrane tune) and wow! this band is killing.
five decades collapsed in an instant black metaltail hummingbird
I made the mistake of listening to headlines while I washed the dishes tonight. I’d been proud of myself for washing them rather than just getting into bed. By the time I finished I was enraged, my heart pounding in my chest. The antithesis of meditation. It’s the Frodo Baggins of it all: living through times I’d have rather avoided, chest full of a heart that can’t look away. I’m too cowardly for the big things. I let my bosses silence me. I hide behind the age-old fear of getting yelled at. I’m not a Willem van Spronsen. Not an Alexander Berkman. My hands shake as I rinse the last glass, set it rim-side-down on the pile of clean dishes in the drying rack. I turn off the podcast so I can write this poem.
In this post I talked about how I’ve recently taken up sketching, after believing for the better part of five decades that I couldn’t draw at all. Here are a few more recent sketches from this new and exciting adventure.
I’ve always said that I want to be an elderly person without having to live the part of life that leads up to it. Well, I’m 51 now, and so it seems like if I make it to “elderly,” I’m going to be doing it the old fashioned way. But it’s not going to be like I hoped. I don’t often think about what my life will actually look like when I’m old, because I have no savings and I’m not depending on any social safety net to keep me afloat. As far as I can tell, my options are to work till I die, or to work till I can’t then move back into a vehicle and use any Social Security that I might get just to eat, or to throw myself on the mercy of one of my sons. I guess the other option is to die in the Water Wars, but that one is harder to plan for. America!
there’s a mysterious valley behind Lisa I hadn’t noticed it until today I guess I was too distracted by the smile we’re told to look at but there it is – a path and a bridge some mountains fading into mist while Lisa sits there daring us to look past her
We’ll probably never know what he did when he was overseas in a uniform. He kept most of that pretty close to the chest. In fact he kept most things pretty close to the chest. He was a classic man of his era. He served, he worked, he did what was required. I once watched him eat two slices of pizza and wash them down with a full glass of milk. He was, if memory serves, the only person I ever knew who preferred Wonder Bread to all other kinds. I sat at his table one afternoon, having decided to unburden my emotions to this least likely of hearers. When I was done, he told me to get my head out of my ass. He wasn’t wrong.
/ / /
31 March 2025 Charlottesville VA
For my Uncle John, who passed away on March 29, 2025.
I’m in my early 50s, and for all the time I’ve been alive and able to hold a writing instrument, I’ve believed I was bad at visual art. I always wished I could draw, especially when I got to high school and some of my classmates were talented artists. I’d try to draw the occasional cartoon and I was always unhappy with the results.
In later years, I became more serious about poetry, I had a couple poet friends who were also visual artists, and I was envious of the way their notebooks contained both their poems and their images.
I recently started using pencils again to write, and the other night I was on the couch and decided to try to sketch the stereo, which is helpfully rectangular.
I thought it was pretty poor, but Stephanie liked it. So did a few other people who saw it. This gave me a bit of confidence.
At work I grabbed some printer paper and a piece of card stock and made my own sketchbook:
I made another sketch of the stereo. Then I tried to sketch my less rectangular car, Marshmallow:
The proportions are clearly wrong but I still like it. This evening I tried a third sketch:
I did a bit of shading because I’m hella fancy.
And look, I’m no great artist or anything, but I quite literally spent 45+ years believing I didn’t know how to draw at all. I feel like I’ve unlocked a latent mutant ability. It’s exciting!
a carpenter bee inspects the bird feeder across the street, a neighbor mows short grass there’s a woodpecker knocking in a tree behind me the cat jumps up to say hi then bites my hand I saw a video once about a man who finds the last quiet places I haven’t seen him around here
The crossword puzzle book – which, let’s be honest, is already a pretty old place to start – has a clue asking for the name of Fred Astaire’s sister. As I pencil in ADELE, I get that cozy feeling that comes from a warm fire on a snowy day with an old movie playing. There’s something oddly comforting about knowing Fred’s sister’s name, as there is about knowing Fred himself. I was born in the era of record players housed in credenzas, grew up in the era of cassette tapes and then CDs, and watched my kids come of age at a time when every song ever recorded is available at the touch of a pretend button. But now it’s Sunday afternoon, I’m listening to Horowitz on vinyl, penciling in the name of Fred Astaire’s sister, and happy to be spanning the ages with my wonder still intact.
“I got me an Altoids can and one of these pencil sharpeners here German pencil sharpeners M&R and these are great, little $8, heavy, brass pencil sharpener and I would carry these daily that’s a lot then I finally wised up and went with the mechanical pencil here.”
Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.
*
One can begin so many things with a new person! – even begin to be a better man.
*
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like the hearing of grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
*
Young Mr Ladislaw was not at all deep himself in German writers; but very little achievement is required in order to pity another man’s shortcomings.
*
To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion – a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.
*
‘The theatre of all my actions is fallen,’ said an antique personage when his chief friend was dead; and they are fortunate who get a theatre where the audience demands their best.
*
“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?”
I finished Middlemarch this morning. Here’s the final paragraph (I don’t think this is a spoiler, but if you’re spoilerphobic you can just skip to my thoughts afterward):
Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
I can’t say whether this last paragraph carries the same weight without the 840 pages before it, but it made me cry. I think a lot about whether I’m having any effect on the world around me, and whether my actions will remembered or even noticed. This paragraph suggests that we influence people around us in ways we often can’t see, and the association of those effects with our name is much less important than the pure fact that they happen. To do the work of living well – meaning to be a positive force in whatever part of the world we happen to inhabit – is the point. It is all that is worth aspiring to.
I eat buttered toast and think of my aunt who is actually my cousin, who almost certainly wouldn’t know me if she saw me today, not because I’ve changed – though I have – but because her mind has exchanged the present for the hazy glow of the past, where we all sit around the dining room table while the future stretches out forever, golden.
Hammer in the warp stopper. Over the years of use this will prevent the object from bowing under the weight of the world. Make sure it has just enough grog to give it tooth. It’s not necessary to know what that means as long as you’re careful to do it. At 12,500 feet below sea level your lungs will collapse, so stay out of the deep end. The two white women want to take a cruise. The two black men have no place to hang out.
