"you can check out any time you like..."

 "but you can never leave"...it certainly was a surreal feeling last night at Madison Square Garden...my first concert in the age of Covid...and first time seeing the Eagles...after so many years of their music strumming in my head...pleasant earworms...and while listening last night...I realized just how easily the music and words could transport me...way back...I could digress...talk about the men sitting behind me discussing everything they thought they knew about the Eagles...loudly...with a steady stream of misinformation...or about the woman screaming in the ladies room for the attendant...apparently she had seen the largest roach known to mankind in her stall...welcome to NY lady...but instead I will tell you about Deacon Frey...that would be the late Glenn Frey's son...who with Vince Gill has stepped in...trying to fill a space left when Glenn tragically passed too soon...instead creating something new and quite lovely...and when Deacon stepped to the microphone for my favorite song, "Peaceful Easy Feeling"...all the anger inside...bubbling since Covid strangled life as we knew it...seemed to fade...Deacon, living testament that art is created as a mirror of life as the artist perceives it...intimate and universal...and can be reborn with new artists...from generation to generation...and so...well, at least for today...before I look at the headlines...deadlines...frown lines...I'll treasure the lyrics..."don't let the sound of your own wheels make you crazy"...

the heat is on...

excuse me while I schvitz...another heatwave...wildfires across the globe of epic proportion...tempers on both sides of the vaccine war...political careers aflame...how to cool off...not the ocean waters of Long Island...Jaws-back with a vengeance...such is the summer of 2021...the second year in this decade of our world afire...so how to avoid the rabbit hole of despair...we skirt it every day...and when I reach for the pen or keyboard...and feel nothing...I know I am dangerously close to becoming Alice floating away...I started this blog nine years ago...and much has happened...and not happened...kind of like "breaking news" having a lovechild with "Seinfeld"...and there have been attacks of writer's block...the thoughts don't always coalesce...even if the feelings do...but lately the heat...or life as we know it...is sapping my creative mojo...and this raises my ire...and so this half-assed blogpost...it's my mojo on the offensive...trying to reclaim inner strength...energy...and resistance to all that is swirling around us...that which can fry our health...and that which incinerates our spirit...so I try...a poem here...a letter to the editor there...and pushing this blog uphill...one post at a time...through twenty-first century hell...there's always a little heaven when this writer hits "publish"...