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!

Over the past month or so, so much has happened. I would sit to write, and more things would happen, and I’d have new thoughts, and before I could write them, something ELSE would happen.

It’s been a tiring, emotionally fraught, absolute slog of a month. Death, in many forms. Dementia and the mental decline. So many realizations about the state of our world, and how far it is from the world we actually want. Bad people winning. Good people taking Ls.

I’ve adjusted my worldview quite a bit. Had a ton of good people on my team, loving me and mine. Maybe I’m not meant to influence the world, just the world I’m in. I won’t reach millions but I can make things better for one, four, ten? That may have to do.

Someone I worked with asked me how I was, and I actually told them. Instead of “I’m fine” I gave them the short version of what’s been happening in my life. In-laws, my parents, winter blahs, both barrels.

The look I got!

I’ve written many times about how people don’t seem to grasp that I am more than a tech person; I like to eat, sleep, f-orget about things like anyone else. I do not go home to plug myself into the wall, but I do recharge at home amongst my stuff.

But it seems that I crossed a line by simply denying that everything was fine and I was fine and the day is fine and all my people are fine…when very little is fine.

Be careful asking me things; might get some of my life on ya.

There’s some psychology thangs going on in my head, y’all, and I’m trying to work it out.

Part of this adulting thing is how we deal with the generations; ours, the preceding one, and the ones that will come after us. The decisions we make for each color our world and leave a mark on theirs as well.

As someone who doesn’t have kids, but has a number of nieces and nephews, I know of the responsibility I have to them; being a great uncle is more than just sliding over $20 every few months. I know of the responsibility I have to my generation, the ones I talk in reverent tones about our wild natures, parents who left us to our own devices, and the last vestiges of “good music”. But I was not aware of the breadth and depth of what I owe to my parents, and, by extension, what I may owe to my parents’ generation.

If one is lucky and blessed, you live to get old. I’m not so sure about that now. Doctor visits. pills, the divestment of the American social safety net to reduce life expectancy. It’s all very strange; as much as we say we as a country revere our veterans, our elders, or “essential workers”, the more we seem to actually ignore their needs.

Anyway, I have four elders who I am directly involved with, all with differing needs and states of mental and physical presence. In the attempt to make sure all of them are cared for and live out their days in dignity, we are smacked in the face of how many loopholes and circus hoops one must go through. Forms and applications and decisions made by faceless entities like insurance companies. You just want to make sure the people you love are content and safe, and everything that could possibly infringe on that causes stress, and I’ve been…having some stress lately.

Hell, even writing this was kind of stressful.

But, onwards.

So, my eight week writing class is over, and I have a few thoughts. In whole, I really enjoyed it; the teacher was great, the discussions were good, and I learned a few things.

Allow me to crow a bit: the ten page short story I wrote for the in-class workshop went over very well. I felt that my story was solid, but was really curious how some people would understand and connect with it, and it got RAVE reviews, and I’m beyond happy. Part of creation, to me, is that someone besides me can lookout something I made and say “I like that”. It’s not the end-all be-all, but it certainly helps the psyche and mood that positive reinforcement form people who have no obligation to give it is given.

We were asked to give ourselves goals moving forward, and establish habits and practices, and this really made me think about what I wanted out of writing and what I could do in the short and long term. I was able to figure out where writing is in terms of time and energy. I thought all of these thoughts that I simply wouldn’t have in a vacuum.

I was reminded of the importance of drafts, and resolved to do more of those. To revisit work and tweak and refine; something I do with drawings all the time. To realize that I am miles away from the greats, but I am using the same words they use. I have the same palette and same brushes and same colors; I just have to put them together.

And I’ll probably be doing so here, for a lot of it. Because we’re all kinda exhibitionists, am I right? Showing off? Doing things in public? No? Yeah, me neither.

So, in my writing class, we were given a sentence, and asked to write something in ten minutes that was our impression of something in the romance or noir genre. It was about playing with style, and word choice, and how you deal with cliches because both genres have their cliches, right?

So, the phrase was “She was blond.”

After ten minutes of frantic typing, we stopped, and after a few people shared, she asked “Is it possible to take this sentence fragments and NOT, in some way, focus on the woman’s looks?” One guy had written a romance novel, complete with flowing locks of blond hair. A woman had written a cliched opening of a hardboiled detective drinking bad whiskey at his desk and a dame with gams and blond hair walked in. You get the idea.

I chose, um, a diferent tack. I blame Walter Mosley.

Ms. Guitierrez sat in the same chair she had a couple of months ago when we first met, but now things were different. When the short, squat, silver haired matron had first shown up, she was a ball of fire and anger, as she wanted to hire me to find dirt on her husband, who she was convinced was stepping out on her.

I did what she asked, Took the necessary photos, and paid a few past-due bills with the money she paid me. Adulterous men and their sloppy ways will keep us detectives in the black for a long time to come. But she was back today, wearing black and crying hysterically and blowing her nose with a handkerchief that looked like it had been through many nasal battles and lost them all. I shoved a box of tissue across my desk as she blubbered.

Turns out that “love of her life” hubby had been found lifeless in a trash heap about a week prior, and the cops were claiming underhandedness or don’t-give-a-shit-ness, and weren’t any closer to finding out who did it. So she was back to me.

She left, a few grand lighter, the picture of the new widow; sad and forlorn and lost. Man, remind me to never get involved with these guys out here.

Some time later, my assistant Danny comes up out of breath. I had sent him to get us coffee some time ago, when Ms. Gutierrez had gotten to my office as to give her a sense of privacy. Lucky for us, he not only got coffee, but a box of donuts. As he put those on my desk and collapsed into the still-warm chair Ms. Guitierrez had vacated, I asked him what the delay was.

“Man, Miss G,” he began, grabbing a donut and dunking it in his coffee. “Shit was wild down there. You didn’t hear the commotion up here?” My windows were normally open, but I guess I had forgotten to raise them. “Shit was WILD. I guess a couple of guys jumped this lady down there, and she was letting they asses HAVE IT. Kicking em in the nuts, swinging her old-lady purse like a fuckin’ mace. Whew! They ran off, but they gonna be hurt. Short lady too, didn’t look like she had it in her.”

“Funny,” I sat back, stirring in the sugar to my cup, “I had a lady leave here not long ago. I wonder if she saw it. SHort lady, you say?”

“Yeah. Short, built like a fireplug. Dressed in all black, like she was gonna put somebody in the GROUND today.”

A feeling of dread and wonder came over me. “All black, and short? White haired old lady?”

“Nah,” Danny garbled through a mouthful of coffee and donut. “She was blond.”

You see the train coming. You feel the tremor as tons of steel, or years of loneliness, bear down on you, down tracks traveled before, repeating a history you’re familiar with. Because you are secretly Wile E. Coyote, doomed to be failed by your own brain chemistry and that damned Acme Corporation.

But you stick it out, because you weren’t supposed to be here anyway. You’re a good person, you’ve told yourself. You learned from that history, vowed not to be the same, or stand in the same place.

But, here you are, on those tracks again, waiting to get hit, plastered to the spot, hoping that this time will be different.

The giggles and gales of laughter from downstairs make me smile as I move from my man cave tp the bathroom. She’s entertaining her girlfriends tonight, and they’ve been at it for hours already.

I dare not go downstairs, not because I’ve been told not to, but because I don’t want to be a focus for any length of time. Let them talk freely, of love and family and work, and dreams. Hell, if there’s anything I need to know, my wife will tell me at some point anyway.

But as I listen to her laugh, I’m happy. Because with all of the things she’s think of, being happy is a temporary respite from her usual worry. Adulting has been worrisome recently, and taking one night to forget it all and enjoy the company of people she shares years of friendship with sounds like a great deal to me.

Most of my needs are upstairs with me; I thought to bring some chips up with me, but as my thirst mounts, I have an issue I hadn’t thought of; where am I getting water, if not downstairs? Easy answer: the bathroom sink. I cup my hand under the faucet, remembering the Bible story of how a kind and gentle God killed everyone who “drank like dogs”, and laugh to myself. The large part of my childhood spent outside and having to resort to the metallic tang of water sipped from garden hoses, fearing going inside to refrigerators and the accompanying parental attention.

I return to my space, catching whiffs of conversation and idly wondering how late they’ll be up. I smile any way and close my door.