So I was taking my walk a while back, returning from dropping off my car at the dealership to have the backup camera software updated due to a recall (they say write what you know, but I’m definitely not writing about that). And, as is my wont, I was reading a book as I walked.

My wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, reviews books on Tweeter, and the other day she reviewed a novel, which she’d checked out of the library, entitled “Didn’t Nobody Give a Shit What Happened to Carlotta”. What struck me about this book – which I did not read because it’s a novel which has Deep Thoughts, and I’m only interested in Shallow Thoughts, because I’m old and impatient and lazy – was its embrace of profanity in the title, which I can assure you, he says in an aggrieved tone, would never have appeared in the library when I was a boy. The times, as they say, have changed.

“Sitzfleisch” is the German word for, well, sitting on your ass – long enough, in fact, to get something done. It means persistence, discipline, stick-to-itiveness, and it’s something that I do not have.

Our fridge died the other day. It wasn’t particularly dramatic – there was no overwrought moaning, a promise to see us in heaven, etc. – just a tiny puddle of water that indicated that the compressor was no longer really compressing and it was time to send it out to the farm with the other dribbling refrigerators for a nice, long rest.

We’d gotten 20 years of loyal service out of that fridge, and people tell me we were lucky. But in my world, refrigerators last a lot longer than that. Why, back in my ancestral home in Cleveland, my grandmother’s upstairs apartment was grandmother-free for decades, yet her refrigerator sailed on – it was still running when my father passed away, more than fifty – fifty! – years after we bought it. And when my wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, sold her aunt’s house the year we got married, there was a fifty-year-old fridge puttering happily along in the kitchen.

About fifteen months ago, I wrote a column called “The Pace of Life”, in which I celebrated, perversely, the quietude of the pandemic, as experienced with my adorable personal fiend, She Who Must Be Taunted:

Those of you who know me well are aware that I am someone who, when offered the opportunity to compete for something, will make a point of not doing so for fear that I will lose. I do not like to lose. I know, I know, usually the person who says that is some gravel-chewing cousin of General Patton who spits football metaphors in various directions, or the Monty Python knight for whom the loss of all four limbs is only a flesh wound. But in the face of defeat, you can do lots of things, and my choice is to give up.

Last year, as you’ll recall from my various newsletters, I participated in February Album Writing Month. It was an attempt to actually invest in my songwriting chops for once, in the same way that one invests in Bitcoin, namely, with an unwarranted amount of enthusiasm and a notable underestimation of risk. Don’t get me wrong; I wrote some very good songs (as you’ll know, if you listened to last month’s album download). But it was a lot.

At this point, I can finally tell you what happened with February Album Writing Month, seeing that now it’s March, no, April, no, May, no, almost next year. What I was hoping to be able to do is drop the album, the February album, the one I wrote, hint, hint, right after February, and a good part of me was waiting until I was done to send out my next newsletter, which was pretty dumb, because procrastination: somehow this last month, no, two, no, several months seem to have gotten away from me. Sort of like the 2020 Coronavirus Tour, which at this rate will make it back to Boston sometime during the Malia Obama administration. But, unlike the Malia Obama administration, the FAWM album is actually here.

My wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, and I have been doing some spring cleaning and rearranging, and the other day I took the opportunity to organize my music closet. And, of course, like every one of my songwriting colleagues, I have a backlog of duplicated CDs which, let’s say, have yet to find their way into the the hands of their intended owners. Of course, most of them were duplicated back in the day when CDs were a Thing, rather than just another thing, but it’s still the fruit of my musical loins, and besides, CDs are a bitch to recycle. 

They say life is a marathon, not a sprint. I do not know who this “they” is – perhaps Big Marathon – and I do not know what they have against sprints, but it seems not quite right. It feels to me like life is more like the Indianapolis 500 – every year or so you find yourself back where you started, and every so often, there’s a pit stop, and the last fifteen months have been the longest pit stop in recent memory. There are apparently these videos out on the Intertubes of fantastic pit stop crews changing all four tires in, like, three seconds, and all I can say is that the folks who have been changing society’s tires recently are not them.