I always thought it would be easier living after the cats were gone. We were always saying that we were not going to do it again. Very smugly taking beautiful things for granted. Even Donna said, we just did not understand how exceptional they were. Lava’s final cries in pain were of death itself, I just know it, and they were the most harrowing sound I have ever heard. It tears me to the core.  Doctor House was right though, there is no dignity in dying, we all do it alone and it’s ugly and horrifically terrible. The only thing we can do is live with dignity. 

Our daily numbness makes us not even do that so well. And in Goodbye, Farewell, Amen, there were light points of this and deep ones too. Even in hardship, we can take the good for granted. Hardship, well yes, it can have lasting effects. And that is on a chemical level. I heard a summary of societal decade disintegration. I know this all means something yet I am losing the drive to put the idea into a summary. Everything is a mad rush to stay steps ahead of the predator. My elaborate propane system, combat finance strategies, and racing the first snowfall, and of course,  paying my rent every day in the tower of song. 

Sadness always brings words. I love words but I do not like the sadness that they ride in on. I think John Lennon said it best in the song I know from 1973. “The years pass by so quickly, one thing I’ve understood, I’m only learning to tell the tree from wood.” It’s like that, you travel so far, only to realize that just maybe you are only just beginning to learn something. What a raw deal that is! Inside fueling the engines there is the rage in the cage, so carefully accessed just like an internal combustion engine. Gives a whole new meaning to Joe Walsh’s words “I’m just looking for clues at the scene of the crime.” 

Taking things for granted is like Paul Simon Slip Slidin Away. “He said a bad day is one in which I lay in bed and think about things that might have been.” And so many ways, that burning of seconds, minutes, hours, days, and years. I know what that regret will be. So here it is Wednesday. Before the Nights in White Satin and before the Late Lament, can you change what “bedsitter people” will think of? Can you change just a little of this? As I saw with Lava in these last lonely cries, the Late Lament does not take its time, it is not a time of peaceful reflection. It is like being hit by a car. The moments after being so awful and so lonely. Rose Tyler figured it out she could not save her dad, all she could do was make him feel just a little less alone when the moment came. That’s all. 

Some days you hit that coffee mark perfectly and other days you think you did but you did not. Harry Callahan asked a detective as he arrived at the diner back in 1984 if coffee can determine a day’s worth. 

All the reflection one can have, there really is only one relevant question, and that is: where do we go from here? Knowing all we know is the total sum of wisdom. What do we do next? Do it now, make it count. In reflection, but looking to draw wisdom from scraped knees and massive falls, I think I might pick an album out each day. It could lead to things to write about. To take my boys sometime in the future on a trip with me to decades before they were even born. “The world’s gone crazy nobody gives a damn anymore and they’re breaking off relationships and leaving on sailing ships for far and distant shores. For them it’s all over, but I’m going to stay. I wouldn’t leave anyway, I know that someday, we’ll find a way, we’ll be okay.” Those words from Ray Davies in 1978 on the Sleepwalker album.  Why did I mention it?  It has been playing in my head since 3:30 this morning.   I totally hear the rain on the rooftop. It has the sounds of autumn to it. If last year has taught me anything, I have learned that you cannot predict what the coming fall and Winter hold. I remember how Rosilee loved my 1982 piece “The Orange Leaf.” She saw the words how I intended them to be seen.  They were so profound to her, with the impact of war.  I sent it to Yankee Magazine back then, they responded with static.  As deep as I thought they might be, of course, they were not.  If you are deep, if you hear the words for what they really are, you know, they must be respected.