A Few Good Dance-hall Tracks To Kick Off Your Spring Break. Enjoy!

Tirades

Someone in the house where I’m staying is throwing a tantrum because I have the same name as his. And he’s still yelling about it...

My favorite president

I vividly remember my only visit to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. I have the photos from it in the house where I found peace and quiet for the first time in my life. 

President Lincoln was said to have suffered from depression, and I can identify with that. It leaves you empty, so you need the closeness of others but don’t want to spread your glass-half-emptiness.

I’ve sought comfort on the Internet ever since the February night when my maternal grandfather died. He had lost an arm in a train accident long before I was born, and I don’t think he ever really got over it. To me he was the quiet yet grumpy Scotch-Irishman who wouldn’t dare let his wife Mary tell him what to do, and she wasn’t smart enough -- or didn’t care enough -- to realize that her insistence in doing things her way NEVER ended with him coming around to her point of view. And yet when he died around Valentine’s Day that year (when I was a junior in high school), they had the sweetest parting moment. He shared a “Be Mine” candy heart with her and then fell asleep forever. I was chatting with friends on AOL at the time. I heard my mother scream and then ran into the kitchen to ask my father’s mother what had happened. They told me, and I sort of matter-of-factly went back to chatting online. I didn’t process it until the next day when I had to excuse myself from Physics class and then proceeded to the bathroom to weep.

Before they closed my grandfater’s casket at the funeral, I tossed in a poem called “Flowers for Ivere” (he was named after the soap, but his poor parents didn’t know how to spell). He was buried in the section of a Memphis, Tennessee, cemetery where all the legendary newspaper men and women were buried. He was one who communicated through the stories he’d show us when he thought we might enjoy reading the news. He would stay up late into the night to read every word of every paper every day. Those were much better times. s

We young people love to criticize the “Boomers” and those even older, but I suspect we are the dumb ones, not the other way around. They could appreciate the little things. They were stubborn, but stubbornness is a necessary evil when you have to go through life armed-man. And he wouldn’t dare let my grandmother help him button his shirt. He could do it himself, thank you very much. (He did, however, enlist me to help upon occasion.) That’s the type of things I miss -- the little intangibles that didn’t matter back then, but now that they’re gone and we’re spending a day reflecting on dead people, I think about those things.

I never got to find out about his family, and I’m afraid I’m about to miss out learning about my father and the things he’s alluded to but doesn’t have the heart to tell me. Some of it I have inferred, but I neither want to ask the questions I’d like to ask nor do I want to hear the answer.

I long to go back to those days that seem almost like dreams, the stories I haven’t shared because I don’t feel it’s my place.

I’ve never been good at public speaking -- I often am silent in public, and that’s interpreted as being stuck up or that I don’t like anyone but myself.

After brain surgery, my perspective on everything changed, but I still feel like that little boy trapped inside his head. I only seem to be able to express myself when I type, because that’s about how fast my brain moves before jumping to another thought process. 

This is the type of stuff I wanted to write in a book so that I could drift away from dwelling on all the negativity of the world. I want to live, but I feel I can do that only if I have a ying to my yang. Music is what makes me happy, so I know that’s where I tend to gravitate. But I don’t know how to leap from my current reality (a messy home in a mostly quiet neighborhood a few blocks from the water in Florida) to where I want to be, which is with someone who has captured my attention. And of course there’s a new wrinkle -- that I have to move back to the city I felt I needed to escape from, which is now flooding just like it did two times when I was barely old enough to remember anything.

The leap is the hardest part, and honestly I think I would have stayed silent forever if I hadn’t nearly died and then woke up to a reality that I’m not allowed to talk about except in these long diatribes that don’t really say anything.

I would like to take a minute to think Mrs. Cunningham. Fluff truly is overrated! And so today on President’s Day I’d like to do something that you’re not supposed to do as a journalist: bury the lead. And while I know the old adage that I shouldn’t put off till tomorrow what I could do today, I still want to hold onto the anonymity for another day. Many people who know me probably know to what I’m alluding, but it’s not a good idea to be a blabber-mouth -- even on an underused social media platform where secrets go to be buried. My family’s neighborhood (to which I soon will have to return sans a miracle) is under a flooding threat, and it’s not my place to share this good news lest I steal his thunder again.

Plus, I’ve got to go pick up my crazy cat from the vet. She’s supposed to be a comfort animal, and she is very pretty, but I miss my dog, who my brother and I affectionately called Mr. Pup Dog. He’s buried under a rose bush in the house where I grew up -- back in the day where you didn’t need TV or anything else to entertain you. You could just ride your bike and be free of it all.

For all of you 39211 brats like me, I’d like to say: Long live “The Dip.” Those days were the best ever!

And P.S. If a certain woman reads this and wants to “be the man,” I leave my light on. ;)

Chess

I played my extremely intelligent niece in chess last year. I went in thinking, “OK, this will be humbling.” So I figured I’d play it cool and try to beat her, as she had actually taken lessons, but about four moves in I realized that I was already the baby stuck in the corner. So, no, Sybil, we know you’re the smartest! And while I may agree to play chess with you again in the future, just know that I know that my heart’s only in the things where I know I can win at the end. ;)

Since the last time I wrote to you, dear Lizzie, I have remembered new things and am learning new things. I have old video relevant to this case, but I have no working cassette player, so I’m making NEW TIME while I read about this -- https://law.justia.com/cases/virginia/supreme-court/1986/830529-1.html -- and listen to sports and fantasy baseball. ;0

The greatest love story of all time more or less began with this song (believe it or not).

Sounds like I need some new shoes

I’ll admit it; I’m a bit scared. But I spend all day thinking about the same person, so I need to follow my heart. I do feel like I’m having to choose between my brother and the woman I’ve fallen in love with, but if you ask me, He wanted me to feel the uncertainty that everyone else feels. … My mixes showcase what I’m really thinking -- unfiltered, because it’s like I have competing voices in my head. The melancholy usually wins out, but music helps restore my faith and hope and has led me to love. I keep wanting to “be the man” and just ask the question that you know I want to ask, but I’m honestly trying to avoid becoming King David, because I have a cousin named David and I once called him a “bitch” in front of my grandmother, and I really would prefer not reliving that moment. That was the day my grandmother’s car was struck by lightning (no lie). It scared the hell out of me but gave me a fright that I can remember and laugh about now. … And now you can laugh with me.

Catch-22s

One thing I don’t like about our overly sensitive society is the limitation of free speech to preserve a Victorian-esque sensibility. The alternative, as we have seen, is not one to emulate, but trying to redirect a bull is like playing that game at those arcades where you had this big bean-bag hammer that you’d use to pop these groundhogs as they popped up everywhere. You’d get a ticket every time you successfully caught one, but then they’d start going so fast you just get all flustered and curse the damn thing.

Appropriate for today. (Not sure of the source of this photo.)