30 Things I Love Right Now: One Score from Midsummer

(1) Morley Safer. (2) The Rolling Stones, greatest rock-and-roll band of all time. (3) Grand statements, especially when they are true. (4) Shape note singing (aka sacred harp). (5) Tyler Childers. (Loose-orbit to #4 above duly noted.) (6) Multimedia narratives. (7) Breathing life into them, especially. (8) Appropriation. Reclaiming it. (9) Reconciliation. (10) My wife (not in this order, of course). (11) And my son (ibid). (12) How creating things carries one away. A kind of intoxication. It’s its own cognitive distortion, really. They don’t tell you that in school. Says so right here it’s true, though. [Please see #3 above.] (13) Pink lady apples and seriously sharp cheddar cheese. (14) Chocolate truffle torte. (15) Second cup of coffee, listening to gators bark in the reeds from the back porch of an Airbnb. (16) A tall glass of very cold water. (17) Advance copies, sent in the mail by fellow laborers. (18) Dancing in public. Where and when you’re not supposed to dance. Much to your (which is to say: my) favorite seven-year-old’s chagrin. (19) Falsetto. (20) Repetition. (21) Reacquainting myself with hunger. (22) This revelation: my (creative) work is often inaccessible and sentimental. At the same time. Somehow. (23) “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” (Loose-orbit to #22 above duly noted; esp. the part about getting what you need anyway. Sometimes. Somehow.) (24) The future. (25) Horizons. (26) Which is to say: loose orbits of gray-blue/hazy heat in the middle distance. (Loose orbits of gray-blue/hazy heat? Uh, what? Please see #22 above. Not-so-loose orbit.) (27) Consolations and… (28) Desolations. Coming soon to an eponymous web site near you. (29) Thom Yorke. Still. Of course. No surprises there. (30) Those YT videos where young people are stunned at first hearing seminal music from the days of my youth, and they’re like, trying to unpack it and they’re just speechless/amazed, and it’s like, I mean, well. Yeah. We never really thought about it that much. It was just sort of obviously great to us. And yet, of course, the best thing about those videos is the reminder that creativity has a circle of life too. As do all of us (creatives). Nothing lasts forever, nothing new under the sun, nothing to be done.