To those who read my blog regularly, an explanation of
why I am no longer averaging at least an entry per week. I’ll call it the alternative use of time, not
to mention the summer is filled with travel and other distractions and upon
returning to our home, an increasing number of health issues which must be
addressed. I used to see one doctor. Now my primary care physician is the
quarterback for a number of specialists.
Aging, it’s not for the faint of heart.
But most of my writing time is currently focused on a
follow up to my book, Waiting for Someone
to Explain It. This second volume is
also very challenging, not to mention time consuming as I try to work on it almost
every day. Still, it will take months,
maybe up to a year, to complete.
When I approach such a project, my first instinct is to write
a draft of an introduction. This helps
me focus on content, organization, and what I actually hope to accomplish. I even have a working title, Explaining it to Someone. Of course as I get deeper into it, everything
I now envision might totally change, title included. But I think by writing this explanation about
the diminished blog output, makes me more committed to trying to get this done.
This does not mean the blog will go quiet as I’ll still
be writing theatre reviews and articles and maybe an occasional review of a
book, but certainly less on personal and political subjects. I’ve come to feel that sharing too much
personal information has indeed become a dangerous habit. I don’t regret writing what I have on that
topic in the past, but in the future I intend to tread carefully.
Likewise, I’m fairly disgusted by politics, the
omnipresence of Trump, our “leaders” lack of action on gun control, healthcare,
just to name two major ones. Probably
when the Presidential primaries heat up, I’ll have something to say.
We have also misused technology for amusement, convenience,
and weaponry and elected leaders who thoughtlessly borrow against the future to
preserve their power in the present.
Culture wars and racial and ethnic conflicts abound, just as they have
since the beginning of time, but now are in hyper mode thanks to the immediacy
of information and disinformation.
As I age, I’m either seeing things more clearly or more
negatively, or maybe they are one and the same.
The misanthropic needle scale seems to be tipping more and more to the
red zone.
At a dinner the other night, I jealously listened to a
friend describe her reading life, blowing through one book after another, and
when asked what I am currently reading it dawned on me that I am no longer
capable of reading for pleasure as I am always looking for answers, trying to
figure life out while I have that brief privilege in time being one of the more
than 100 billion human beings who have had their flickering moments before me.
Waiting for Someone
to Explain It is a collection of
writings culled from my blog lacunaemusing.com, which attempts to fathom the
economic and political morass happening at the beginning of the 21st
century. While I was writing about those
increasingly threatening issues, the blog also became a repository for family
history, something I imagined I was leaving for posterity, and also a place
where I could report on and analyze my cultural life, particularly the
literature, music, and theatre I experienced during the same period.
In a sense, while asking political and economic
questions, those entries focused on my reading and theatre experiences were
providing some of the answers. Why? In “fiction” artists deal with human conflict
and nescience on a granular and abstract level.
What I hope emerges from this new volume is just one person’s reporting
on contemporary theatre and literature, works chosen as they seem to point the
way to understanding the world we live in.
This will not merely be a collection of blog
entries. They are going to be edited and
organized in such a way to serve as a reference work to more than a hundred
plays and literary works.
I hope this is a sufficient explanation of my
“alternative use of time,” the most precious commodity we have, not realizing
it when we are younger.
Meanwhile, enjoy William O Ewing III’s “Lunchtime At The
Car Shop” a painting we saw at a local exhibit months ago which seems
appropriate for this moment….
