Meeting His Little Brother

My daughter introduces her two-year-old son to his new little bro yesterday.

What sweet smiles all around...

Gotta head north and see them all soon!

Yesterday I spent completely alone, never having contact with any other person, though I did receive several nice telephone calls and email messages.

My worry these days is about blogging, here and elsewhere. I'm afraid that I have been losing my writing voice, and I can't figure out why that might be true. I've been posting right here for well over three years and three months, once a day on average, though lately the posts are trailing off in frequency and content.

Sometimes all I can do is post photos. No word energy is left.

Maybe the current narrative of my life is simply petering out. There isn't any drama. I got the oil changed in my car. It cost $43 and change.



I've been eating big breakfasts, as if I were a farmer, but I'm not a farmer. I'm in a bacon craving stage.

Other people are on vacation; I never take vacations. How can I take a vacation when I don't even have a job? Being unemployed for 15 of the past 24 months (63% of that time) means that the pace of my life has been permanently transformed.

I read that many unemployed people have given up looking for work. Why look when there isn't any?

Others pile up credit card debt. I don't do that. I buy one package of bacon and get a second for free. That's Safeway for you. I didn't even notice the sale; the checkout guy told me.

Another time, as I exited the supermarket, for some dysfunctional reason, the shoplifting alarm went off.

The security guard didn't even want to check me -- he just waved me through. Why bother checking an old guy shuffling along? He obviously doesn't have the ability to shoplift; it's surprising he even can shop, the shape he is in. (For the record, I have never shoplifted anything in my life. When I was young, friends would do it, and it drove me crazy. To this day, I hate the moral turpitude it represents. Or maybe I've just never been that desperate?)

I daydream a lot. I mistake my surroundings for the tropics. I put on an old pair of khaki shorts and go the door, expecting to see a gentle ocean lapping at my beach. I hear a motorboat slowly working the tideline -- a crab fishermen lifting his traps, no doubt.

I hear the kids laughing in the shallows. I think about pouring myself a tall lemonade with ice.

There's a novel I was writing...the one where I just drift away on a sailboat, never to return...Where did I put it and why can't I write to it anymore?

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