C I P R I A N I

I have been away for a while. At least from here. With the start of the New Year, I wanted to reacquaint myself with some good habits. Whether or not this is a “good habit” might be arguable, but it beats doom scrolling.

As I signed onto the site, I came across several incomplete entries. Some telling, mostly bizarre. The title of this entry, in fact, was already waiting for me atop a passage from October 12th 2016.  See below:

October 12th, 2016:

A little over a year ago, I began an essay that dealt with television. I discovered my notes from February of last year and they are as follows:

-My goal was to have 100 essays completed by the end of last year

-As a result of Stephen Colbert’s premiere, I found myself trying a CBS all access subscription …

-Killing time watching Family Ties…

-Watching commericials for Netflix, For You Tube …

-Time Machine … Rip Van Winkle 

The last time I looked at the page was 225 days ago and since then the world does not appear to have moved closer to sanity.

From what I remember, things kept happening – as things so often tend to do, both in the news and in my personal life.

But about 194 days ago, I began this:

In Doubt I Trust

I am puzzled by the lack of curiosity of a portion of the American electorate. There is a kneejerk reaction to slivers of events – panic, passion and urgency. And yet there is a colossal lack of investigation.

We are tied in knots by this modern grapevine the internet and some us fail to even check if what “they heard” or what “they said” is true. There are sites all over the internet as easy to find as the trash – FactCheck.org, Snopes and others – where one can simply search if something is true.

And this is where I’m back to….

And now we’re back to January 4th, 2024.

The above is just a fragment of what was on my mind in October of 2016 but somehow, most of it still is, in one way or another. Yes, even the Family Ties episodes – and it was ALL pre-COVID, pre-January 6th. It was nearly eight years ago!

On a lighter note, in November of 2014 apparently I started a piece simply called “Redheads”:

I am told that Redheads will soon die out. I’m told this often because I have two beautiful Redheaded children and a beautiful redheaded wife. I’m told that Redheads will die out almost as often as I’m told they are beautiful. The beautiful part is true, the dying out part is false:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/tomphillips/gingergeddon-is-cancelled#o8xe6i

I am not a scientist and my grasp of scientific principles is tenuous at best, I do subscribe to a philosophy that says…

And that’s the end of November 2014. It bothers me a little now in 2024 as I look back at my stopped-short records and find that whatever philosophy I was subscribing to at the time is lost. I have no idea where I was going with that, but it’s a little crazy to me that the preface to whatever it may have been is nearly a decade old.

These fragments that I’m throwing at you like a jigsaw puzzle become even weirder. This same exercise I’m performing right now in 2024 and was scrapping up against in October of 2016 is that same thing I abandoned in June of 2022. This next incomplete entry was entitled: “Girls Just want to have Fun”:

June 2022

It’s been a minute.

I’ve been holed up inside for the better part of two years – along with the rest of the planet – but there’s really no excuse for my absence. I have been writing quite a bit in other spaces but this blog could be mistaken for abandoned, but like so many things, even if I’m not there, it doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about it.

It occurs to me that if I could harness applying action to all of the things I think about, I’d be far more productive in all areas of life. However, the thoughts aren’t always positive so perhaps that’s the advantageous trade off. What is thinking for if not to consider options before taking action? But again, when the thoughts are simply thoughts and not options – and often not necessarily simple – action isn’t always the clear course – but back to writing.

In practice and content, action is essential. And here I go again. On my own. Like a drifter. Clearly. Or maybe not so clearly.

But there’s a point, I hope. I originally wrote “I promise”, but as I return to this document, I’m in a different mood.

It’s an experiment really – because there’s so much and yet how does one weave it all effectively in one piece? First off, it’s not ALL going to make it. That’s certain. Some stuff is going to get lost – I’m editing as we speak, but what I’m keeping generally are thoughts on process.

Process in my own work, process in life and process in process.

I watched Peter Jackson’s The Beatles Get Back recently and thoughts of process as well as time, memory, friendship and Dad sprang to mind throughout.

So often it comes back to Dad.

Dad. In the morning at the beginning of the day, at the end of the night and randomly in the afternoon. “Not there anymore” is just not correct terminology for my Dad. The feeling is absolutely greater – the thought, the idea of him is larger. And though he can’t be physically grasped anymore, new images or sounds aren’t coming from him – in short, no action, but there is a result. It is me. Or my mom, or brother, or anyone who remembers him that generates the idea of him – a reaction of his action while alive and the thought, the idea of him persists long after his personal, living action has ceased. And his action a result of his father before him and so on and so on…

So I’m struck by what is reality? Whether we talk about the past five years generally or specifically – and either one of the things are a larger part of what kept me away from here so long. Truth told I stepped up to the starting line a couple times but was so overwhelmed by the state of the world, I holed up and retreated back to fiction and private journals. As honest as I try to be here, the private stuff ventures a bit darker and sometimes more depressing and I needn’t burden you with that.

I’ve referred to “you” a couple times already as if “you” are there. I’ve looked at my metrics and I know it’s likely the dark and depressing stuff wouldn’t matter much but I began writing this passage before Russia invaded Ukraine. I’m not kidding – I saved this draft and when I returned, the world was on the edge again.

Or as it always was.

(Hey, it’s me from 2024 – Note, the world kept spinning and in just the past few months there’ve been that many more headlines. Two years from now will come and go like the two and two million before it. Back to 2022…)

Awhile back, (now) I had a conversation with my Uncle, a generation older than me, and asked if there was ever a time where things were “normal”. When he was my son’s age with roughly a decade under his belt, the Vietnam war raged on his TV, death counts tallied nightly by Walter Cronkite. We move into Nixon, with assassinations fresh in everyone’s memory. But the terrible optics of the past did seem to subside for a brief stretch in what was basically my childhood.

Absolutely there were problems – poverty, disease, the same civil liberties were threatened then as they are now. And while the fear of an attack on the continental United States most definitely was there – look no further than the film Red Dawn that landed smack dab in the middle of the 80’s – it didn’t actually happen until 2001. Though I didn’t really realize it at the time, I was an adult by 2001.

Looking back now, it might appear that the 80s were so awesome that it convinced me on some level that I wanted to be a kid forever – or at least never grow up – or on the flip side, the concept of nuclear annhilation was so terrifying that I didn’t want to die. My current psyche is the result of the in-between of Back To The Future and Like A Virgin, the threat of nuclear war and eventually AIDS – not to mention razor blades in Halloween candy and being randomly abducted by some madman in a conversion van with a skier on the side. And bullies. And fitting in. And girls. Girls. Mystified and terrified at the same time. Now that I’m married and have children of my own, I’m mystified and terrified about seemingly the same things, just from a different perspective.

And in the middle of all of this, I find myself. And when I say I find myself, I don’t mean I’ve “found” me yet, I just see where I am.

It’s disappointing to say the least when one gets to know oneself better only to discover one is not as great as they thought they were. I had a much higher opinion of myself when I was younger. I thought I was a relatively decent piano player, writer, and thought I was fairly intelligent. Yet these pages tell an objectively different story – though it might be difficult to discern the piano playing from this blog, take my word for it, in the grand scheme, I’m below average. A couple tunes here and there and I kind muddle through ok, but the lack of practice is grossly apparent.

• (Hi again – Jay from 2024 here. While I’m still no Glenn Gould, I started taking piano lessons in 2023. I’m still not great, and I need a hell of a lot of practice, but I’m better than the guy in the above paragraph.)

Back to 2022:

One only has so much time, and at a certain age, much has been squandered. How much time left is unknown and not guaranteed.

Yes, make the best of your time, but there’s an anxiety that comes from feeling the sands run out, amplified when those around you start to get their tickets punched. This isn’t practice, it’s game time. All the time. Illusions of living forever faded away long before 9/11, the existential pangs began for me in the early 80s, a haunting dissonance of my halcyon days.

Maybe it’s the Russians or the whackos on our own soil opening random fire or just writing at night, but when I set out to work on this passage, I was mainly looking to focus on how awesome Cyndi Lauper is and somehow it got sidetracked into being about how disappointed I am in myself – Maybe it’s not so much “about that”, but that too is on my mind. Constantly.

I still haven’t even begun to talk about why Cyndi Lauper is awesome.

I watched Sixteen Candles for the first time in awhile the other night. And I felt a little guilty for liking it. Though the content is more problematic than your basic Cosby Show rerun – there’s a similar pang. Now I didn’t make the racist or misogynistic jokes in that movie myself – but I sure as hell enjoyed them when I was a kid. What’s that say about me?

I was ignorant. *(Jay 2024: Or just a little acorn.)

I worry about my kids for different reasons...

And that’s where I stopped on May 18th.

*(And this may be confusing, but that’s June 22, 2022 me above. Apparently I had began that entry long before June 2022. But this is what was on my mind in June 2022:)

Six days later there was another school shooting in America. There was a shooting four days before May 18th. There were shootings everyday. There are shootings everyday…

Everyday.

*And it sickens me to say this, and I didn’t do it on purpose. Sadly, there was another shooting again today, four days into 2024.

Back to 2022:

Some of my own depression and anxiety comes from imagining things that haven’t happened yet, but other times it comes from thinking about all of the people in a certain terrible scenario and imagining myself in that scenario – but the prickly part is imagining all the parties involved – the parents, the children, the police and even the culprit. It’s trying to figure it out – the unknowable is a riddle I’ve been trying to solve since I was a kid and often I think maybe I’m working too hard on it – and certainly not working intelligently. Maybe I do know the answers to a lot of questions and I just don’t like the answers so I go in circles trying to rationalize an absence of reason. Nothing is written for anyone and baby steps don’t end in infancy.

We are a nation of children. *(Jay ’24: or acorns)

Look at how we behave. But is the world at large any different? In some cases it would appear they act a bit more like adults.

We are miraculous though, aren’t we? This cocktail of anxiousness, poverty and competition that surrounds us all, day in and day out. And most of us get up every morning like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day and keep doing it over and over again. Granted, each person has their own unique station, but we all have our daily grind, don’t we?

And again, is that something everyone is doing on some level? And some people take it out other people, and some people keep it to themselves – some people don’t do very much damage and some damage irreparably…

Back to now:

And that’s where I stopped. I don’t know if it’s as dizzying to you, but it is certainly is weird to me to read stuff written a long time ago detailing things that were bugging me and much of it still does. And though it was written a few years ago, the broad strokes have been on my mind for decades – life, death, Family Ties and Cyndi Lauper. You can’t touch a thought but you can feel it. And they’re not passing. Some thoughts flicker, some stick. Obviously the fruition of the thought – Cyndi thinking about “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”. A simple enough thought, but then pen to paper, fingers to piano, technicians and musicians in a recording studio, thought becomes tangible. There is no end to this passage. This is not as tightly constructed as a pop song. This is a collection of thoughts, quasi-organized. It’s shouting into the darkness. Though I don’t like to think of myself shouting. But I think of the void, the abyss. And I have to remind myself that the void, the abyss, the end, if there is such a thing, none of us ever see. We either keep going or stop without knowing. And somehow, some of our thoughts remain.

And that’s probably one of the biggest reasons I’m here now.

Oh, I did find one other entry. That one doesn’t have its head searching its own ass as much. I think I just forgot to click the publish button. I will post that after this one.

Stay safe everyone. And Happy New Year.