Looking back on my decade of loss during a global pandemic
Here’s the marching orders I got from Glenn, a fellow writer: “So you don’t want to write. And you say you don’t want to write about COVID-19. Why then don’t you just write about not wanting to write about the coronavirus?”
— Hey! You got peanut butter in my chocolate!
— You got chocolate in my peanut butter!
Of course I’ve been inactive here on Medium since the year began, when I wrote this chirpy piece back in January. I…
Start your new year with an early morning routine that embraces daydreaming, planning, and joyful expectation
Fear is my gutterball.
It probably has been from a very early age.
And I sure as hell have been throwing my share of frames’ worth lately.
I’m coming out of a fog of holiday dread and confusion, worried about the state of the world as well as that of my own friends and family. Aging brings health worries added to economic worries, which become a pile-on of anxiety that would rattle the steadiest of us.
It hurts to admit this, but the frustration has reached the point where I needed to slow down, breathe, focus on the pins in…
“Crusted with cheese, golden at the edges. The waiter placed it carefully in front of me, and I broke through the top layer with my spoon and filled it with warm oniony broth, catching bits of soaking bread. The smell took over the table, a warmingness. And because circumstances rarely match, and one afternoon can be a patchwork of both joy and horror, the taste of the soup washed through me. Warm, kind, focused, whole.”
— Aimee Bender, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Maybe it lies somewhere deep in my French heritage.
At my late father’s knee, he taught…
“‘One thing,’ he said later, ‘it’s quick in space. Death. It’s over like that. You don’t linger. Most of the time you don’t even know it. You’re dead and that’s it.’”
— “The Rocket Man” by Ray Bradbury
THE LAST THING I ever thought I’d do was write about Ray Bradbury again. After all, I met the man just twice: once in the early 1990s, and the last time in 2000. …
“Nothing” is always something. It’s just that sometimes you can’t see it.
“Small” says, “nothing is always nothing.”
“Big” says, “Just you wait and see.”
Expanding, going big. Or shrinking — and feeling small.
“And you can sing this song
On July the Fourth
In the sunny south and the frozen north
It’s a day of loss, it’s your day of birth
Does it take a death to learn what a life is worth?”
— Jackson Browne, “Of Missing Persons”
How as a culture we can become more tolerant and curious about each other?
I’d been expecting the news.
But it still comes as a shock: the death of a friend.
I’d been out the Saturday before Hallowe’en, slumming through my neighborhood thinking about buying a used hat. Winter was coming and I needed something to keep my head warm.
Accumulation. Aggregation.
What are these things?
A collector knows them well. A collector thinks: “What do I have? What am I missing? What would complete my collection?”
I gravitate toward montage artists, collectors, discriminating selectors.
Hoarders, wastrels, bone rag bucket dippers — buh bye. I have no time for that.
So lately I’ve gone full-on protection mode. Head down, waiting for the bark of creativity. I can’t act on it even if the alarm went off, so I have to stay attentive and ready. I rested — A LOT. It felt good to feel rested. I’m fine with that.
But…
“I’d look at this as a wondrous moment to end this mystery.”
— Lou Reed, “Fly Into the Sun”
Hey, Uncle Ray! We finally did it!
We’re finally living your story “The Golden Apples of the Sun” — and just launched a mission toward the sun! (Well, as far as realistically possible. That is, it’s not a manned mission.)
Last weekend, NASA sent the Parker Solar Probe into space on Aug. 12, 2018 at 3:31 a.m. EDT. According to the space administration, its mission is to:
Trace the flow of energy…
It began at 2:30 this morning.
Insomnia. Then thinking.
Then worry.
And I’ve been fighting some persistent lower back pain that started two days ago, after I’d been biking in the heat and slept all night on a sofa where I wasn’t able to spread out.
Physical pain always brings out the darker, deeper, mental kind of pain.
So, a question like: “What if this is a symptom of a larger health problem?” is not something you want to be asking yourself in the dead of night.
I got up to drink a glass of water and take over-the-counter pain…
Michael Maupin
Writer, editor, and media maker. Blogs at Completely in the Dark (www.completelydark.com) and lives in Minneapolis, MN. I notice things.
