Happy Merry, All!
If you can handle or manage or find it in you. I like the quiet. For a bit anyway.
I’m in New Mexico looking out a window at a row of cottonwood trees. I believe there is a direct interface between them and my neurons. They look similar. Pathways to memories.
I seem to have a different experience every time I come here. The last time I was heavy-hearted and felt the weight of my dad’s illness and my own time slipping away. I saw childhood friends and they were all old. We are all old. Older anyway.
I never really think, ‘where did the time go?’ I know exactly where it went. It gets harder to remember specifics but I have a pretty good sense.
Another Christmas. The land out here remains a constant. Houses change or disappear along with their inhabitants but the consistency of the land is grounding. I’m starting to think about coming back here again. Living here.
The NYC dream seems to be breaking apart. I came very close to getting a place there. The apartment I was in negotiations to buy had too many issues. A vague timeline for getting them done. Too big a project to get into. Maybe if I were forty I could wait two to three years to move into a place after renovations and construction. I’m 60. Who the fuck knows what 63 will be? Where I’ll be. How I’ll be. How all of us will be.
I get to the brink and watch ideas and plans and dreams drift away or break apart.
I got a new album by Ryan Davis and the Roadhouse Band that is kind of great. There’s a couplet in one of the songs.
The past is a joke played on the future by the present.
The future is a joke played on the present by the past.
I like it. I think about it a lot.
I’m fortunate to have options. I am thinking about getting old and where to do it. I am thinking about not working. I think I am a person that can do that. Who knows?
The worry is what would I do. People seem to think if you stop working you die quicker. I don’t know. Being self employed I’ve never really had much of a line between work and life. I seem to be able to occupy myself with stuff. Things to do. I don’t really differentiate much between work stuff and life stuff. There isn't a big difference psychologically and focus-wise for me changing three litter boxes or replacing the latch on my gate or baking a banana bread or interviewing Paul Giamatti or doing stand up. It all happens at roughly the same vibration and existential frequency.
I imagine if I remove a couple things from the rotation I’ll bake more, get more cats, maybe start a handyman business. Though I’m not really pro handy.
I guess I am reflecting. That's what this space between Christmas and New Year's is about. Everything slows down. Not as many incoming emails, texts, commitments. Just dealing with the mental abacus of memory and working out equations for the future. Speculations at the unavoidable brink.
Today we’ve put together a bunch of segments that were originally bonus episodes. It’s me talking about movies with Brendan and Kit. Stuff you’ve never heard if you aren’t part of the WTF Plus community. On Thursday I have a conversation with my old friend Matt B. Davis. He was a comic and now he’s in the obstacle course racing world. He made a doc. Apparently we had some shit to work out. Great talk.
Enjoy!
Boomer, Monkey and LaFonda live!
Love,
Maron
