The onslaught of the constant beginning of the end

I'm at a point typing these words where I don't even know what to say to start it all off. I'm not sure what I've said in this venue, but the times we live in make it certain that no one else does, either. 

There's a sense in my mind that things are already over and we're waiting for gravity to pull us all down the drain. This sense must be scrutinized because it may not be true. Can anything be true if everything is just a story? 

My mother's mind has been declining for a very long time now. It's hard to pinpoint when, but something in her stopped working a long time ago. She's not the type of person to complain or seek help or tell anyone her problems. 

My father's mind is slowly declining as well, and he lets everyone know every single step of the way. The entire time I've known him, he informs my mother or any family around him what his physical ailments are. 

I don't know who I am at this moment as I type these words. I've spent the past several months preparing them for a move from my childhood house to their retirement home. Now I'm helping prepare them for a move out of my childhood state and up to another place. I'll spare the details at this time except that I know this is the end of a chapter. 

I don't know how many more chapters I have because I've always defined much of my life in terms of my relationship to my parents. I stayed in Virginia to be close to them, and now they're going away.

I'm estranged from two of the three children I fathered, and I have severe doubts I'll ever see them again. I won't go over that again now, but I'm no longer hopeful I will have anything to do with them. To assert what I want would be seen as an attack, when all I want is to be able to speak with them and be in their lives and encourage them.

And now I won't have any family in Virginia, and I don't know if I will stay here. I had really hoped my dad would have laid down roots for others. I had hoped to buy the childhood home. I had hoped I might get to talk to my American children about their grandparents' health, but I am excluded from that story. 

So as I type this, I am not sure what will happen. I feel fundamentally tired and rundown and bewildered and useless and sad and depressed and torn apart. I've put myself back together again so many times, but how much longer can I do that? 

In a moment I'll go to the car outside the retirement community on a busy road that cuts through a former field in a new town center. I've slept her for much of the last month and haven't written out all of the milestones in any significant way. 

That will come as I have so much to write, and I have found it hard to write in a place where the bulletins come so frequently, in a house where a month ago we struggled so much and some of us hoped that maybe my mother's declining health was caused by something else other than being taken from her home. 

I think about the time I have left and how much I want to accomplish before my end comes and how I don't want that end to come prematurely. I want to speak to my two American children again, and tell them how much I love them and how much I miss them, but to do so will be seen as an attack. 

I don't want to attack anyone. I just want to live my life and be useful and try to connect people and to try to do something to stop this feeling that we're circling around a drain, humanity's potential wiped out due to the selfishness of those at the top. 

I think about how much I want to write a song that someone might like to hear, and then realize maybe no one ever will and that one day I'll just fade away into nothingness, increasingly drowned out by the babble all around us. 

And yet I come to the end of this entry and find myself calmed a little by what I've taken a few moments to do. 

The thoughts that are suddenly fading and maybe they should

I didn't really have much of a life that I've temporarily left behind and so maybe I have a future I don't even know yet? I seem to remember I've built my life around work to hide my inability to make connections with people.

So now I'm in this strange fuzzy time where I don't remember what a normal day was like and maybe this is how it will always be, remembering a past that I can't remember and probably wasn't worth documenting but yet all the papers are there anyway.

Was any of this real? Is this all a dream? What happens when the poles switch suddenly, and can that be scheduled?

Thought of the day, thought down

At times, the river forks and you're stick in the middle as the water flows. You're not in danger as you've learned to not panic in the raging torrent. But you sit and wait to avoid making another choice because so far the ones made have brought you further and further from the shore.

Then you realize it's a metaphor and you can always create a lifeline. You can close your eyes, imagine instead you're in the sky searching for a peaceful cloud in a storm.

But if you're incapable of imagining a positive way out, you won't find it and you'll eventually drown or expire due to hitting so many branches you threw in the water yourself.

Test post!

This is perhaps the least positive update I've had to give, but I feel I need to explain some changes that are necessary to get through the next little while. One of my parents needs care and the health care system does not appear to have any solutions for us. This may change in the near future. That means I will need to be present with them, indefinitely.

This means they are now my first priority, with Town Crier Productions a close second. Thankfully in late May I took a look at the entire business and am ready to implement a few changes.

First, I've resigned from C-Ville Weekly. I have to write four more columns, but I will be challenging that or paying them back. I agreed to write the column last December but said I may need to evaluate. At the moment, this is the first thing to cut because I had to turn in a story yesterday morning at a time when we were in a major crisis. I do not have any ability to take a week off, and that is not fair. So I quit. I very much enjoy writing them, but I do not have the bandwidth at this time.

Second, I'm cutting back on my work on cvillepedia. I've helped steward the site for a few years thanks to the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society and receive a small stipend. I'll assist with the transition to JMRL, but I have to do triage on my work time. I'll get back to it, and look forward to helping train people how to make edits to share information.

Third, I am going to temporarily stop producing each Charlottesville Community Engagement as a podcast. Usually the production adds about an extra hour to each installment, and that's an hour I do not have at the moment. This part hurts, but I'll have to adjust. And, it's likely I'll post individual segments on Charlottesville Podcasting Network.

The good news is that I'm going to have time to devote to everything else, including hiring someone to assist me as I think about expansion. This situation will at some point have some sort of a resolution, but that could be months.

There will be a Week Ahead tomorrow, as well as several Fifth District Community Engagement editions this week. Eventually I'll find out how to work around my parents.

Thankfully I have enough support from Patreon supporters, sponsors, and Substack subscribers to be able to take the time off I need to provide the care. This was completely unexpected and I am getting used to the fact that the health care system is failing so many people. Our story is not the only one.

I've made this post public to send out to everyone as a general explanation so I devote any space I have to content.

Any questions?

Documenting the moment

I'm numb. I have tickets to see a show I'd like to see but it's in Richmond. I need to be able to be back in Lynchburg at a moment's notice. My mother is not doing well and has been deteriorating since she got to the Summit less than three months ago. 

I was down there for five days last week. I've not written it all down but I probably have to put it all together. I also have a lot of work to do. 

I don't want to do any of it. But I will begin to get to it because I've built an engine to get the work done. This involves turning my brain off a little bit, but I think I can do that if I just float a little down the river. 

There's no content in this one but I have to use this blog to capture my thoughts rather than put them out on social media. Sometimes I confuse my need to write things out with a need to share what I'm doing with anyone who might care. 

I do the former to help myself think.

I do the latter to help myself feel less alone.

Both are important but I need to be more careful about what I write in public. 

So I'll try to transfer here. And I may add more things retroactively given that this may end up being my public archive anyway. I do all of the writing in the hope of being remembered one day.

As my mother's health continues to worsen, I feel I'm also going to have to write out more of her life in order to help her story be told. I feel I've let her down by not doing more of that in the future. 

It's all about documenting the moment. That's why I'm alive. 

The bird that sings just to sing

It’s been a rough day. Details don’t matter as I try to center myself. I got outside. I remember over thirty years ago where the place where I am sitting was undeveloped farmland. I used to walk the train tracks at night.

Now there is a major highway through the field. I am sitting on land kept in open space.

I stopped to sit here because I can hear a mockingbird. So far I haven’t heard one back home this spring. I don’t know why they sing all night, endlessly singing the songs of other species.

The moon isn’t quite full and our singer tries out calls I have never heard. Sitting here these past ten minutes I have heard at least thirty distinct calls while vehicles race by on the highway about 200 feet behind me.

If you forgive the anthropomorphism, there is so much joy in the mockingbird’s call. I don’t need to know the reason. I just find myself recharged as I think about tomorrow and the next day.

*

Now I'm here on a couch that used to be in a different house. I've gone back to listen to something I recorded back in October 2013. I've recorded hundreds of hours of material over the years of me singing songs, improvising them in the moment.

I don't entirely know why I do this, but it's a way I process information. I feel like there's something so much of me that wants to be expressed but I have no idea how to share any of it in a straight-forward manner.

So I hit record and then begin to play and sing. When I am in very stressful moments, I remember back to what I sang.

When I sing, I become a different version of me. The content of the lyrics is always my life, lots of inside references. In my mind, it all makes sense. Like anyone reading this, I am a full person with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

And all of the parts in between.

I think about who I am about how I hide so much of all of this. I think about how my desire to make music for an audience has somehow transformed into producing as much work as I do with the newsletter.

But listening back to me nine and a half years ago, I hear the improvised lyrics and every single time they take on new meaning.

I wish I could be brave enough to share this, but this is mine. I am fortunate to have had a weird series of events happen that enabled me to have the skills to capture myself in a sonic journal in which I get to be me.

A version of me.

My journalistic work is another version of me.

My time with my elderly parents and my increasing involvement with the basic functions of their life is another.

Sometimes it's all just about living. I can't live anyone else's life for them, but I'll share the stories from mine.

Why does the mockingbird sing?

There never needs to be an answer.

Just more tapestries.

My increasing awareness that there is much about how we live that needs to be fixed,