My brain is an untidy place. Unlike some, who can quote long passages from books or complete poems, I mostly remember the sense of the thing. I can never say, so and so, writing in such and such, said this, and then offer up the quote. Sometimes I can’t even remember who said something. The books I’ve read are just a list and the information in them, the stories and observations, are accreted to my brain in bits and pieces as though it were a patchwork quilt.

I was visiting with a friend the other day and we were talking about music and listening, the type of listening you have to do to really hear a symphony or a concerto and he made an interesting observation. He thought a great many people simply listened to music just to drown out the silence, because they were afraid of the silence.

I appear to be in that time of life when medicine is now the rule. In the last five years, I’ve had an aneurysm repaired, my back adjusted, skin growths removed, and my head scanned. And that doesn’t count bouts with Covid and sinus infections. Yesterday, they took a picture of my prostate. Who knows what they’ll see. The last one in March, a casual look, during scans to check my stents, was normal. So, anything there hasn’t been there long. Of course, the unknown is always imagined as the worst, but we’ll see.

I have a kitchen trash bin given to the family by my mother-in-law. It’s made of wood and at one point was a handsome piece of furniture, which is an odd thing to say about a trash bin. Most people have their kitchen trash bin hidden behind a door in a cabinet. Not us. Ours sits right out in public in all its wooden splendor. Unfortunately, waste, including food, generates moisture so the inside of the lid looks the worse for wear as does the top where it’s been touched by a generation of hands.

I love to see mothers and children in a bookstore, gathered, laughing, talking. My favorite store favors them. On almost any day I chose to visit there will be children, with mothers, mostly, but sometimes fathers. There are toys and games. The children play at the feet of mothers who stand, talking with one another. It makes the store feel like a living space, and sometimes I stay to drink a bit of coffee and eat a roll, and maybe to start a book I just bought.

I went to see Butch Hancock last night, and I almost hate to admit it, but it was my first time. Of course, there are lots of artists I haven’t seen in person. So, I’m not singling him out. I just wish I’d seen him when the songs were new. It was the same with Jimmie Dale Gilmore. I got to his music late, and I’ve never seen him in person, but when we still bought CDs, I bought a few. I mention Jimmie because I realized last night that Butch wrote one of the songs Jimmie performs that I really like, Just a Wave, Not the Water.

I love the internet in so many ways, but hate it at the same time for so many others. Chiefly, I moan the loss of human contact in the area of giving and receiving instructions. At the moment, I am wrestling with a website trying to fulfill their requirements for them to stop charging me sales tax on goods I’m buying from them to resell. It seems obvious. They’re a print on demand company and the orders are coming from my website.

It’s hard to believe I could take a vacation while in retirement, but that’s exactly how my most recent trip felt, like a vacation. It was getting away from the mundane, the pattern of an ordinary life. While I’m at home, basically, I’m a maintenance man. I clean. I cook. I tend the yard. I tend the pool. I tend my car. I keep things going. It’s pretty much the life I’ve always led. There’s not as many plates to spin, but that’s still my job.

Woke up this morning to a house full of thrown breakers which opens up a range of technical mysteries I am ill prepared to address. I can only assume some strange slug of power came down the line last night as I slept. All the breakers are back in place and nothing seems amiss so it’s unlikely I’ll find a dead raccoon in the attic although I suppose I should walk around and look.

I had a wandering day yesterday. Drove to Luckenbach. Listened to music. Drove to Fredericksburg. Listened to music. At both places I ran into friends. We talked, shared stories, and drank a beverage or two. It was a warm day, but in the shade with a breeze, it felt nice to be outside amongst the living. There was even talk of plans, of things to do, and places to go. It was the sort of day that gave you hope there would be other days like it to come.

Commerce. The bane of all artists. The pit in which they must slog. How to do what you love and make a living. It’s a conundrum. Early in my life, I took my love of words into the world of in-house publications in the oilfield, traveled through the world of book publishing, and eventually ended up editing drilling and completion manuals. It wasn’t Dickens, but it raised three kids and gave my family a good life. Early on, I tried my hand at science fiction on the side and did some magazine freelancing, but eventually they slid away.

I lost a shovel last month which seems a hard thing to do until you lose the shovel and it’s lost and impossible to find. I have no idea what went into the losing of the shovel. We had it. Then we didn’t. I looked everywhere. High and low. It was nowhere to be found. I was perplexed. In the past I would have blamed the kids, and even though my son uses my tools he usually knows where he’s put them. In the case of the shovel, he had no idea where it had gone.

Goodness. It’s cold outside. A nice reminder that February is still winter and even in Texas that means a chill air. Of course, as the temperature dropped yesterday, and I went to the store in a hoodie and a jacket, I still saw men and boys in shorts. And I’m still not sure how that’s comfortable and why men do it. It used to be that only boys wore short pants and men wore long. Now, short pants are ubiquitous, a symbol of freedom, I suppose. But in cold weather it’s a sartorial choice that makes me wonder.

This might turn out to be a pretty good day. I just solved the NY Times mini crossword in 50 seconds. Probably a record for me. If I hadn’t mixed up Monet and Manet it would have been under 50 seconds. Of course, I’m betting there are multitudes who routinely best the puzzle in a lot less than that. Still, it gives me a little buzz.

I’m still in my book with my quantum theories and now I'm in the multiverse phase which implies, almost in comic book fashion, that nothing happens until it's observed and all possible outcomes in all possible combinations exist in their own universes and there’s more to it than that from a physics standpoint because there’s something about a wave not collapsing that I don’t totally get.

As I’m reading my book, Six Impossible Things, by John Gribbin, a tidy little book dealing with subatomic particles and their mysterious duality as particles and waves, I am struck by something. Every physicist mentioned has performed a thought experiment, oftentimes because technology has not advanced to a stage that would let them perform a live experiment, but usually just to prove a point about the mysterious quantum world.

I just read a book, Six Impossible Things, by John Gribbin. It’s a tiny book which is fitting because it deals with the mystery of tiny things, subatomic particles. They can be in two places at once, and act as either a wave or a particle, and there are formulas to prove both. No one to date has successfully explained why the particles behave as they behave, although several have tried and that's the subject of the book.

Here we go. A new day. No turmoil to report. No angst. Only the realization that turning over your life to algorithms is probably a bad idea, unless you know how to make the algorithm work in your favor. I’ve figured it out on most platforms, and some I’ve left entirely. But I still find myself responding mindlessly to the screen, making someone money I’m sure.

Interesting. I started down a writing path this morning, got one paragraph in and decided it wasn’t something I wanted to talk about, probably because it’s likely I’ve talked about it before although it’s difficult to imagine a personal topic I haven’t touched on in the ten years I’ve been writing this blog. Still, I stopped and started over. This is the result. It feels marginally better.

Spent a few chill hours on the golf course yesterday. We got around in under four hours, which is how the game of golf is meant to be played. My score was high because my putting and chipping was it’s usual unglamorous self.