Pause

The time has come to say good night, My how time does fly. We’ve had a laugh, perhaps a tear, and now we hear good-bye.

I really hate to say good night, for times like these are few. I wish you love and happiness, In everything you do.

The time has come to say good night, I hope I’ve made a friend. And so we’ll say “May God bless you,” Until we meet again.

-Red Skelton

Watching it snow a little outside on a gray Corning morning, light, thick flakes blowing sideways from left to right, north to south, with a few contrarians arcing back in a clockwise drift back toward town. It's as warm as it's going to get today, but I've already decided that for my mental health I'm going to walk down the hill to Wegman's and buy a couple things after enduring my one conference call for the day in a little while. I'll bundle up.

It occurred to me very early this morning, watching the outline of P asleep against the soft light from the streetlights outside, an outline I never once take for granted given how difficult it was to get here, that it's time to pause this public writing exercise. Why?

Well, for starters, no one reads it except a few folks concerned with my deteriorating mental health here on the couch. Three views yesterday. That was it. This is a voice that won't really be missed.

And I find myself constantly worried that I might say something offensive, and have started tailoring my words to the folks I figured were reading all this. I hid, I hedged, I tempered. And still, I'd hear from someone every few days, offended or alarmed by something I said. I realize I need to get a thicker skin, but I was saddened and a little ashamed by everyone I hurt.

Of course, being reminded to rein it in is not necessarily bad. Whenever I would find myself with a full head of steam, and slipping into a Jeremiad about whatever political delusion was gripping my neighbors at the moment, I needed to step back and consider that I was displaying the same sort of certitude as those I was mocking. It is not only unbecoming, but also unpersuasive:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/03/opinion/progressives-conservatives-think-again.html

And as a lawyer, I'm supposed to know something about persuasion. My years of practice have been a multi-decade effort at choking back, and perhaps eventually extinguishing, the sarcasm that's bubbled up since I was the skinny kid from out-of-town whose only real line of defense was a sharp tongue. Unbecoming doesn't begin to describe it, and it certainly changes no one's mind.

Plus, blogging is like serving up intellectual cake batter, spilling out a stream of consciousness about the day's events without that critical time in the oven of reflection. When I go back and re-read earlier stuff, I often find my view of things has been tempered by the days and weeks that separate me from those words. Why dish out that half-baked analysis here?

So, no more of this for a while. Sorry, to the three of you who are reading.

Which is not to say I'll quit writing altogether. I may just dump these little essays in the drafts folder. They have in fact done some good--I'm pretty much completely off Facebook, and content myself with the occasional "like" when a lifelong acquaintance posts a photo of a grandchild. No use getting wrapped up in what passes for debate there--if this is cake batter, that's pretty much just eating the Betty Crocker powder out of the box. No one benefits. Best to be silent.

I started writing with some regularity, and with gaps that sometimes lasted for months, around 2003 or 2004. It was therapy for me, pulling out a big blue ledger book and drinking coffee in the predawn darkness, trying to purge the demons that were my source of unhappiness at the time. It didn't work, because even with an audience of one I couldn't face the unvarnished truth about why I felt as I did.

I eventually fixed all that over an agonizing year or two, and with P in my life I don't find myself writing out of unhappiness so much as a pandemic-driven loneliness, and a need to see and read my own words as I try, with limited success, to understand a stretch marked by hurricanes and pandemics and a brand of political insanity I could not have imagined when I first sat down to write all those years ago. It is a disorienting time, but this little exercise helps me make sense of the space I occupy at this moment. That is about the best one can do.

So I'll keep writing, but only to myself. If you ever want to visit, I'm not going anywhere--just drop me a line, and I'll do my level best to respond.

Slane is sitting in the window, fascinated by the flakes whipping past the glass, seeming to long for a frolic out in the yard as during his brief tenure as a farm cat. Maybe we'll all get there again, and he can scamper back up his live oak, through the tufts of resurrection firm, while P and I soak in the truck bed pool, John Prine playing in the background, a glass of wine in hand, in love with a person and a moment in time we both knew was fleeting. Suddenly feeling a longing of my own.

Next year in Jerusalem, friends.