I Always Like It When the Snow Melts

Not AI! This is a real picture I took.

Snow

It snowed recently. I live in a part of the country where snow is a rarity. (The Deep South.) We got up around seven, and my son went to work. Right when he walked out the door, the flakes started to fall. An hour later, the entire neighborhood was covered in a hushed white blanket. The snow lingered for three days and only today did it finally melt.

I remember when I went back to school to get my degree in English Literature. One of my favorite classes was American Transcendentalism: Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau…especially Thoreau. I liked the idea of there being an outside and a beyond. (My words.) The outside is the world of chaos that we all experience: wars everywhere, illness, car crashes, bankruptcies. That world. The one you get fed so much on social media. And then there’s the world beyond—beauty, transcendence, perfection, life, understanding, and health, and freedom, and…God. You can think of God however you want, but I think it’s pretty clear that he, she, it, them, they, hide(s) his, her, its, their, face(s)…Did I get that right? I think I missed one.

Snow is the opposite of transcendentalism. For a while, after the neighborhood was blanketed, everything settled into a soft, cold, indistinguishable perfection. My neighbors who had all those yard signs out before the last election, telling the rest of us how to think, shaming the rest of us who thought differently, making damn sure we all knew how they thought…their yards were just as pure and white as anyone else’s. And my yard, without its signs and tokens, and perhaps even my thoughts (with their signs and tokens) were blanketed, too. And for a while, at least a day and a half, we were all perhaps marching in the same direction. No, that’s not right. We weren’t marching at all—everything was iced over. We were at rest. We were inside drinking hot drinks. We marveled at the beauty and cleansing power of the world we all live in and share.

Then, of course, the snow melted, and the imperfections, differences, and petty squabbles resurfaced. God had come down with the snow, but now nothing is right with the world again.

Thoreau

“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen.”

I’m in my late sixties, and I seek simplicity.

I’m cleaning up our house right now. It’s going to take a while. You know, doing the Danish Death Spiral thing.

The last thing I want to do is to leave my kids a mess.

I was left a mess, although it was a beautiful mess.

My dad lived in the same house virtually all his life. Upon his death, I inherited the house, and my family and I lived there for ten years. I grew up in that house, and it was wonderful…and heartbreaking…living there a second time.

I sold the house and moved on, but we inherited a huge mess.

My grandfather was a hoarder. He left the house and all its contents to my dad. Even upon my dad’s death, the attic and basement were crammed with stuff, most of which was so old it had become collectible. (Maybe that’s a joke I could use about my age… “I’m so old I’ve become collectible”! Kinda like when Mark Twain said that some German words are so long they have perspective.)

My grandfather had a great eye, though! I’ll write about all the stuff in detail sometime. But suffice it to say that sorting through all that took years.

My wife’s not a hoarder, but she loves objects. For her, objects are imbued with sentiment and emotion. We have pieces of old pottery that so-and-so gave her fifty years ago or scraps of cloth embroidered by her grandmother. The embroidery is gone; only a pinch of the cloth remains. The pottery is horrid. It looks like a gallstone that came out of the ass of an ancient Aztec…that is, if gallstones come out that way, which I suspect they don’t. But just go with me here. Or maybe she’s got a postcard someone sent her when she was five, which must be kept ad infinitum.

Look, I get it! (Actually, I don’t, but for the sake of argument, let’s suppose I do.) Who loved you even a little bit way back when, that stuff’s important. It’s just that my wife and I store these sentiments and memories differently. Mine’s in my heart. Hers is equally in her heart but also in the basement.

Only Fans

I guess this website came to my attention a year or so ago. A business associate of mine, a female, told me about it. She’s in the process of creating AI-Only Fans girls. Yeah,…sick…but probably wildly profitable.

The first word out of my mouth when she explained it all to me was… “Why”?

“Lee, guys today aren’t like they used to be. They’d rather pay an Only Fans girl.”

I felt like a little kid not understanding a simple concept. “But why?”

“Lee, you’re like guys used to be!”

Yeah, right! On the getting along with girls thing, I was as awkward as they come. (Still am.) Yet, here I am, married forty-plus years with two kids.

Over four billion women on the planet, statistically most of them pretty young. Exclude the children (although some cultures apparently don’t, I’ve learned recently), and you’re probably left with a billion or so real females (not wannabes). A freaking billion. Dude! Just go out and find yourself a girlfriend! It ain’t that hard! Look, just don’t act like a jerk and ask. That’s what I did, and look at me!

Kipple

Kipple is a word used by Philip K. Dick in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (That’s the story the movie Blade Runner was based on.)

You know all that junk I (and others) have in the basement? That’s kipple. Otherwise known as stuff.

Stuff gets in the way.

It especially gets in the way of living authentically.

I’m not saying you have to reduce your worldly possessions to what goes into a backpack. Although, that might be a really great idea. I am saying that you might want to prioritize an authentic relationship with the world you live in, especially the people in it. And most especially, nature.

I believe that was what Thoreau was doing that year he lived on Walden Pond. Trying to sweep away the distractions of modern-day life. That was in 1845, by the way. You wouldn’t think there would be that many distractions back then, would you? Apparently, there were. My God, just think how bad it must be now!

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