I think I understand people a little better in the past two weeks.

Amidst the chaos, confusion, and gnashing of teeth of everyday living, I understand people who want to escape into…anything else. Heavy social media curation. Bingeing movies and shows.

I used to be “how could you put that energy into that kind of stuff while all of THIS is going on?” and just now come to realize that “all of this” will still be going on. After the doom scrolling, and the show is over, or the vices have run out…the present reality is still there. It cannot be fully escaped.

But for 30 minutes or an hour or on a lazy Saturday, that reality can be ignored, and that’s what lets you keep your sanity. To be drawn into fictional lives, to acquit yourself of the mundane, unimportant, bothersome parts of societal relations with others similarly affected…is the only escape some people have.

That said, I am not a fan of the “sports radio” treatment of current events. I am not a fan of the constant rehashing, analysis, and “long time listener, first time caller” interactions from Everyman On The Street. I understand that reactions are an industry unto themselves now, but it’s not an industry I want to invest any time in, no matter what the reaction is or what we’re reacting to.

I think what sums this up can be equaled to a kind of conflict stress. Every day, we are bombarded with YOU WON YOU LOST THINGS SUCK YOU ARE UGLY YOUR NEIGHBORS ARE SKETCHY GET MONEY WATCH THE GAME WATCH THOSE PEOPLE by a ideological media for who this is all a game of clicks and numbers, and who am I to blame anyone for trying to sit out of that as long as they can?

I was outside having a smoke with my wife when I remembered a fond memory of Sundays when I was a kid. Let me tell you..

We would start early with Sunday School. To my mom’s credit, she hated being in church all day, and Sunday School was 9-10:30. She thought it important that I get a little God in my life; plus, she didn’t really like the minister, who was our example of What Not To Be As A Man Of God. So we’d go, leaving Dad at home, and get our God on, and come back.

If there wasn’t a football game to attend, we’d go shopping. We’d take a trip out to Cerritos to Fedco, which was a goverment-employee membership store about 40 minutes away. On the way there, we would turn on KLON 88.1 from Cal State Long Beach, as they played jazz and blues on Sundays. We’d go and get groceries, and.I would be turned loose in the book section as my parents shopped.

We’d leave there and maybe go to Cerritos Mall, or maybe Lakewood Mall for a while, and then back home with KLON playing their music. I’d be in the backseat as we would talk. We’d have great conversations, and I remember feeling…free. Happy. Content.

We’d get home, and Mom would cook early dinner, and we’d eat around 3. Any amount of goodness would away; Mom was, and still is, a master in the kitchen.

Afterwards, I’d help clean up, and they would adjourn to watch TV. I would turn on the little radio in my room and tune in to three radio programs that evening. The first was a spoken word program, kind of like the Moth, where people would tell stories. Secondly would be the Dr Demento Show, where he would play all and any mater of comedic songs and radio bits.

Thirdly, the 24 hour radio news channel would, for an hour, play two 30-minute episodes of old time radio shows. Those shows would vary, but I probably got my love for audio engineering from that show. The Cisco Kid. Green Hornet. The Jack Benny Show. Buck Rogers. I would sit only bed and draw or read, aware that Monday lay on the other side of sleep, but in those days, Monday just meant school, not a soul-crushing job or mandatory interaction with middle management.

As I got older, my bedtime was relaxed, but early on, bedtime was 8pm, and sometimes, I would smuggle my clock radio under the covers, turn the volume down REALLY low, press the speaker against my ear, and listen.

I wonder what it would take to get that peace back, of a routine that centers me, calms me.

Sitting outside with my wife listening to jazz is doing a good job of it now, though.

Sit and think with a drink about how I’m gonna win.

I may have waxed poetic about this space before in this space, but allow me this indulgence..

Flash back to 2020, and I was sent home at the beginning of Covid, as the world paused.My wife and I had a small porch in the back, but the area was small. We nestled next to our grill as we sat outside and read and talked. We both realized that outdoors was a great place to be, as we began to get used to this new reality of working from home.

So we contracted to expand our back porch. Construction took two days, and after it was done, we had gone from a small area to something more expansive, something we could fit chairs and a couch and an umbrella. We spent that summer outside when we could, in between Zoom meetings and me running into the office, being an Essential Worker.

We call it the best investment we’ve made, and we have spent many evenings outside, sipping drinks of various alcoholic content and indulging in cigars. I bought a small speaker and now things were on and popping. Since then, we’ve had friends over and made a ton of great memories. A lot of great conversations. More than a few musical premieres – the Kendrick diss records were first played out here to our delight – and we hid under the umbrella for more than a few light rain showers.

It is also a great introspective spot, to read and think. And tonight, while enjoying my cigar and reading an issue of the Bitter Southerner, I took time to think on two articles in Issue #7, published earlier this year.

In one article was the story of documentary photographer Paul Kwilecki, who spent his life in a rural Georgia county and took pictures of its 623 square mile area; its people, its woods, its buildings. His images are considered. vital to understanding not only that place, but the rural South. He’s not a household name, and he’s an ancestor now, but there is renewed interest in his photographs and his writings. He attained a bit of commercial success, so he didn’t die penniless or anything, but he was a known introvert who lived very much inside his head. I identified with that.

In another article with cover subject André 3000, written before the release of his flute album New Blue Sun, he says the things us fans have heard a million times about the work. How he’s exploring, how he’s excited to do something new. The interviewer asks him about his legacy, and if this impacts his p[lace in the hip-hop pantheon. And he says a thing that resonated so hard with me.

“A lineage lets me know I’m human. My life meant something. My trying times, my fucked-up times in this world has meant something. I wasn’t just here.”

Kwilecki was a man who spent 60+ years documenting his hometown and its environs, and is largely unknown outside the region and in a very specific genre of photography. But he existed, and contributed. He wasn’t just here; he MADE things. He left a legacy. He did great work worthy of study, and it sounds like he was satisfied with that.

We all know Dre 3K; also an introvert, but his music reached every corner of the globe. Two very different men, different impact, but both men created a legacy. Both men were not “just here”.

And every day, I’m trying to do the same. Leave a legacy, if not of work, but a cadre of people who can tell others that I was here. That I did, or said, or was something that lives on after me.

Don’t be “just here”.

I am only human, so I abhor stressful or uncomfy situations for the most part. I learned early on that I have a tool in the box that lessens the emotional pain that would come before inevitable split or breakup or traumatic experience.

I’ve learned it’s called emotional disconnection. Gradually, you stop caring. Not about the person, but about the situation. You start looking forward to the end. You become deadened to present circumstances and you focus solely on physical survival. Eventually, when things fall apart, then you’re not as invested, not as involved, and it’s easier to extricate.

Anyway, I’ve emotionally divested from my bio dad a while ago. After being hurt so many times by his actions and inaction, I withdrew. I wanted him to live his life, safe and happy and whatnot, but I couldn’t continue to involve myself with a man who made me doubt my own worth. Was I worth love? Was I worth being listened to? Was I even a good son?

And then the dementia kicked in.

And like that, all avenues for resolution closed. I was left to speculate what he meant, a loop of interactions playing where I could only imagine his intentions and motivations. Because the door of answers had closed; at any point during the day, my father would proclaim that he was just a few blocks from his childhood home, that people around him had worked with him or gone to school with him. All things that were not true, but his brain had told him the truth.

At a few points, though, clarity kicked in, and he remembered. When visiting recently, he remembered me. He remembered who my mother was. He remembered my mother’s brother. And just when things were going really well, he turned to the wooded area that surrounds the facility and proclaimed that he had run those woods as a child.

Anyway, he stayed with my sister for a while before she got him into the facility, and she was cleaning up that room, and found a note he had written to himself.

Text reads (in my father’s pretty decent handwriting):

“Think I have missed appointment for my eye dr

Don’t know what to do now.
May God show me a way because I really need it.”

A moment of clarity from a man who hadn’t experienced it in a very long time. A note of sorrow, a feeling of helplessness, torn out of a notebook. A sense of vulnerability, of fear, amidst his brain fog of mixed memories and electrons not connecting anymore, losing more by the second.

I read this, and I cried. I was dedicated to his care, keeping up with my sister as she served as the local caregiver and working through the issue of his business and resources as those he supported moved on from him or waited in the wings for the windfall they were sure was coming as soon as he stopped drawing breath.

He wasn’t the doddering senior I had convinced myself he was, at least not all of the time. Every now and again, he felt fear. He felt unsafe, uncared for, confused. And once again, I felt that I had failed him.

That’s a bad feeling.

In a few weeks, I’m flying back to Southern California where I grew up, and I am nervous.

Why am I nervous? I think it comes down to the fact that I’m there for a finite time, and I want to do all of the things. See my people, eat the food, be outside. Do the things, see the sights, drink the drinks.

What I want to do and what I have time to do may be two different things. I have a list of people I’d love to see, but I’m not sure I’ll see them all. And that sucks; I come 2000 miles to see and hug on certain people, and there is potential that I won’t get to.

I suppose this is completely a first world problem that I’m traveling and have these issues at all. Still a tough pill to swallow.

I swear, this starts off horribly, but there’s a point here.

So, we’re at my father-in-law’s wake (told you this starts off horribly) and the funeral home people offer to have music playing. “Usually, it’s whatever the deceased would like, because people remember the deceased liking the music.” Fine. Thing is, my father in law, “from yard”, or, island-born Jamaican, loved reggae, and…well, maybe you don’t play reggae at a wake. Or maybe you do.

Anyway, my in-laws didn’t want to play reggae. Sensing that they had other things to think about, and every one of them was on the edge, awaiting an unknown number of people coming by and with the patriarch of the family laying in a box mere feet from them, I huddled the funeral home attendants.

“I’m thinking something light, not melancholy, good background music that doesn’t sound too chipper but is still good music. What you got?”

They told me that they had access to Spotify, and could hook that into the speakers in the room. I turned to my in-laws, all in states of distraction. “I got the music, y’all. No reggae, but nothing too loud, nothing distracting. I got it. Y’all do your thing.”

I turned back to the funeral home people. “Spotify? Okay, do the Bill Evans playlist. Put it on repeat, but I doubt it’ll run out. Piano-centered, good music, not too chipper but not sad either. Put it on random, and that will work.” They nodded at me, and seconds later the sounds of a piano solo were on, low and slow. My eldest sister-in-law, trying to be the one in charge, looked at me with amazement.

“What is this? What did you have them play?”

I told her, and she asked incredulously, “how did you know to put this on? How did you know this guy in particular?”

I told her I didn’t want to get into the specifics of my jazz listening history, just that I thought of some parameters and that he would fit them. She walked away to tell my wife “He just KNEW this guy’s music would work. How?” My wife shrugged; she had listened to me talk about jazz enough to know that I kinda knew my shit, but now was not the time to speak accolades. There were people to say hi to, to reminisce with, to try not to cry in front of.

I didn’t do much that day; I was around for my wife when she looked for me, I thanked people for coming, I talked to some people I knew and met a ton I didn’t. But I did a good thing that day, and it all came down to knowing my music.

“You look like a guy I used to know,” my father said as we walked into the memory care home. “Yeah. Look just like you. Big feet, gap in the teeth. Yeah.”

“Hey Pop. I look familiar?” I hugged him and he hugged me back.

“Yeah, you’ll pass.”

While walking into the common area, he introduced me as “the baby of the family.” My ears perk; we figured this might happen, that I’ll be confused with my uncle, his brother, who is his youngest sibling. But as we sat down, we were regaled of tales of running through the woods with the boys, woods that JUST SO HAPPENED to be outside the facility we were sitting in. Because, you see, we were in Arkansas, not suburban Houston. We were just a few blocks from his house, of course.

I told him that someone was taking about him, and when he asked who, I said my mother’s name. He looked at me and grinned. “That almost was your mama.”

Semantics aside, of course (because I’m pretty sure she’s not “almost” my mother), the visit went…how I expected. He claimed to have worked with other residents in the facility and insisted he hadn’t eaten lunch, both things untrue.

We sat with him for a couple of hours, and he dipped in and out of the reality we live in. My sister had warned me beforehand of some of his proclivities, but the one that really got her in her emotions was the fact that you could not tell him goodbye.

When he first got to the memory care facility, my sister would get him settled and say goodbye, and he’d rear up, demanding to be taken home. A door opening was his chance to escape, to get outside and make it home. My father is still in good physical shape for being 83, but the prospect of him escaping has caused him to rear up on attendants and nurses, once shoving one out the way in order to make it to the door.

So, we can’t tell him goodbye.

I get up, tell him I have to use the bathroom, and I’ll be right back. And that was the last I saw of my father that day.

All I can hope for is his care; that he’s safe, content, takes his meds, and is comfortable. We can’t take him back home; he’s almost blind in one eye and forgets to eat. His short term memory is shot, and he can talk with you for long periods of time about really nothing at all. The weather, the memories of him being a kid, of the place he worked for years. And you think, wow, he’s actually okay.

Then…no. And that’s really hard to watch. And you can’t argue with him, because what good does that do?

No Pop, you didn’t work with that lady sitting over there 30 years ago. No Pop, you are not in Arkansas. No Pop, I am not your brother, and my sister is not your sister. No Pop, you ate 20 minutes ago. No Pop, you had eye surgery yesterday. No Pop, you haven’t taken your meds yet, or I watched you just take them. No Pop, you never made it to Paris, or traveled the country, or did what you told us you were going to do the past 40 years.

No, Pop.

But you’re comfy, albeit confused. You’re watched 24/7, even while I’m sure your mind is going a mile a minute.

And this is where we are.

I was invited over to a friend’s place to dig through some records. His father had died of dementia recently, and he had invited a bunch of guys over to dig through the collection, to give us first crack at it.

The collection was vast, and while the paper sleeves weren’t in the best condition, the records were all in pretty decent shape. Definitely playable. The collection had a ton of jazz and R&B, and a lot of big names and a LOT of not-so-well known ones.

There’s something about estate sales, and open houses, that expose a little-examined fact. We are welcoming other people’s stuff into our home. Their keepsakes are our decoration, their playthings our decor. In this case, their music is now mine, and I took a minute to recognize what that meant.

On the surface, it’s just a transfer of ownership. A “this was yours, now it is mine.” But you’d know if, say, you were keeping something associated with a bad memory or something that used to belong to a person you don’t want in your life. On the other side of the coin, you’d welcome a memoir of someone you loved, or someone with whom you made a good memory.

As I go through these records, I will say a prayer of thanks and a note of reverence for those who have come before and those who made this possible.

As I type this, I am exhausted.

This past month has been non-stop with life-changing events, to me personally and to people around me. And to admit my fragility in these times feels wrong in the face of a unique American determinism – “manifest what you want!” – sometimes the truth is just the truth and I actually cannot control much of what’s happening around me.

This helpless feeling does not feel great. The feeling that death is coming, that emotion will run hot, that things are getting worse and worse; it leads to a feeling of malaise, of depression, of a condition not even soft-serve ice cream or a big hug can assuage. And that’s a tall order; sometimes, that’s all you need to temporarily put aside the notion that things are bad because, surely, they’ll get better.

But to be at a point where you can’t enjoy something because of a feeling of existential dread, there’s something wrong. And even though there is a movement to dismiss those feelings as not valid – “It’s all in your head!” – it’s not a feeling that can be shaken easily.

And that’s where I am. Dread and foreboding rules everything around me, and that cloud doesn’t look to be lifting any time soon. And I wish it would; I got shit to do!