Some days are diamonds, some days are rocks – Tom Petty
It’s the fifth of May and there’s snow on my deck. A full foot of it by my estimation. I was driving to the 7-11 in a whiteout blizzard last night for a bag of cookies and premade sandwich, thinking “really? …” But weather is a God thing and you get what you get. If only life could be so reactive. Plans are essential but planning is useless. I’m laying the bullshit on a bit heavy here. Must be this inclement weather getting to me. (Full confession: I had to look up “inclement” and am still not sure if it fits.)
I was reading one of those typically inane Instagram posts yesterday with a list of places in America, and one of them was Tahoe. “Most people,” the person or bot generating the list claimed, “have been to five or fewer of these places.” The point was that they were all supposed to be desirable, special places to go. And Tahoe is, undeniably, a beautiful place. For the past three or four years I’ve been remodeling an old family cabin. It began with the idea that it would be a way to solidify some part of my past; upgrade it and invest in its future. What’s puzzling isn’t the revelation that you can’t invest in the future of your past, but the idea that I might have ever thought it possible. It’s taken a lot of coming up here by myself and just sitting with it to realize I’ve done a decent job anyway. The new windows are nice and I took out a wall between the kitchen and living room. This really opened the place up. But, as Bill Stratton’s bumpersticker continues to resonate, wherever you go there you are.
I got into a rather protracted debate with a friend the other day about what it means to “come full circle.” There’s no way to tell this story without risking being revealed a contemptible racist, but here goes: I was talking about the Netflix adaptation of the Tom Wolfe novel “A Man In Full” and how the black, female director had created a series where the black characters were well conceived and human, and the whites were cardboard cutouts and caricatures. I asserted that we’d come full-circle from the days when the reverse was true and most films depicted blacks as minstrel-esque and subservient. He claimed that, for it to be full-circle, we’d have to be right back in that position. I said no, and that while his scenario might qualify even better, mine still worked because the full-circle element was that we’d started in a place where one group had no sense for the other and come back around to it. Yes, the players had been inverted, but the condition itself had come full-circle. Then he called me a racist and we agreed not to discuss it anymore. That I haven’t identified him and refrained from titling this post “Full Circle” is a small sign of progress.
The above notwithstanding, this adaptation of “A Man In Full” was nothing to write home about to Mammy. (OK .. sue or cancel me, but try and do it before this snow melts.) I did watch a slightly better series earlier in what turned into a big Netflix week. “Baby Reindeer” is a troubling effort relating the true-life tale of a Scottish guy who was hounded mercilessly by a female stalker. The woman in question is fat and loud and hard to take at first, but the story is compelling. It made me think about two seemingly unshakeable facts of life: most of us don’t want to be alone and most of us realize that we all die that way. In fact, the “alone” part is probably what people fear most about dying. It would be easier if you could take someone with you, and not just figuratively speaking. (On a side note, my old man probably came closer than most to accomplishing this with my mother .. but that’s another post.) So in a way, being OK with being alone in life is likely decent preparation for being alone in death. Kind of like being OK with having a foot of snow on one’s deck in May. Which isn’t a clever ending, but rather a cheap way of coming full circle.
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