I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to all of the disparate people in my life who commented on my last long post or who otherwise reached out to make sure I am OK. Yes, I am OK. I’m an Eeyore by nature and always have been and, for that reason I get caught up in my own head and my own sense of melancholy from time to time. It doesn’t mean anything is seriously wrong and I’m certainly not suicidal or anything of that nature. It usually happens when lots of little things happen which causes my deep well of resilience to temporarily run dry. I can’t say I’m completely over it yet but I feel, with the three day weekend bringing me some rather significant down time for a couple of days, that the clouds are lifting a bit. I have no specific plans for Memorial Day. I’m on call for UAB for the long weekend which precludes my being able to leave the metro area as our beepers now work through our cell phones and there are a lot of dead spots out at the various lakes and things. (It seems a little wrong to wish folk ‘Happy Memorial Day’ but then ‘Solemn Memorial Day’ just doesn’t seem right either… what to do?)
Given my activities of the last few years, it might behoove me to spend Memorial Day thinking about the one and a quarter million Americans killed by the Covid pandemic. The numbers keep ticking up, fortunately fairly slowly at the moment, but no one should think that the disease is over and done. It’s still out there, quietly mutating in the way viruses do and we still don’t have a very good handle on the issues posed by Long Covid. My one major comment on that is that vaccines and boosters seem to do a very good job of preventing Long Covid and it is becoming more and more the purview of those in the antivax movement. Something about horse and water. I am keeping an eye on the movements of the h5n1 strain of bird flu which is creeping around the cattle herds of Texas as, with the right mutations, that could easily become our next pandemic. Fortunately, it appears to be quiescent currently. I really have no interest in writing The Accidental Plague Diaries Volume IV: h5n1.
My heightened melancholy having caused a great deal of introspection over the last week, I think I’ve figured out what’s going on in my little pea brain. I’m in a time of transition and those are the times in my life that I have had the most difficulty keeping myself on track. I do very well when life and life patterns are well defined. Job schedule is this, theater projects are that, life obligations are the other. But once every ten to fifteen years, there’s a pronounced shift that comes as I, like everyone before me who has gone through the life cycle to full maturity, have to say adieu to some old patterns and start adapting to new ones. We’re trained to do this. It’s part of the unwritten curriculum in the American school system. Once every three to five years, you shift schools and have to learn a whole new set of patterns. (I’ve been thinking a lot of school kids recently – my social media is filling up with graduation photos again. But I can’t help but think of a passel of kids from New Town Connecticut who should be graduating High School about now – and as a society we still refuse to do anything about that issue).
My current transition is a little odd. I’ve had two roughly five year periods in life where there has been one disaster after another. The first was from 1997-2002 and the second from 2018-2023. I’m just coming out of that second one and as I am trying to right the ship, here come all of the issues related to the transition from mature adulthood to older adulthood – the move from Ericksonian stage 7 to stage 8 if you buy into that sort of thinking. I have to figure out the practicalities of retirement, determine what my legacy of forty plus years in medicine is and how it can be maintained, completely redo my financial life, make the adjustments necessary to age alone without a by my side helpmeet – it’s a lot. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be all neatly tidied away by the end of the weekend. I have several years to do that.
This is all complicated a bit by the fact that I seem to have developed two other careers. I think what’s going on in my head with the theater work is a realization that I will never again be able to keep up with the 20 somethings in the ensemble. This is the first big cast traditional musical that I’ve done working through the whole process since prior to the pandemic and I’ve aged a lot in the last four or five years. We all have. I’ll continue to do these kind of shows as long as they write the old guy character parts but I’m going to have to do some adjusting of my expectations regarding how I approach the material. And always be mindful that I am now two generations older than the ensemble and therefore just cannot relate to them in the way I once did. Because I started my performing career late, I was forging my bona fides in my early forties alongside a lot of twenty somethings. We were a generation apart but still close enough to relate to each other and many of those people remain among my closest friends. But as a sixty something, I’m just too far removed -I have no idea what they’re talking about half the time. I also worry about being viewed as a little skeevy if I hang around the young uns too much. I’ll probably transition away from big cast musicals unless there’s a part I’m really right for or it’s a property that means something to me personally. I’ve had a lot of success over the last five or six years in smaller cast comedies and dramas and that process is a good deal more equitable in terms of how the company is put together and relates to each other.
Then there’s the writing. I have not yet come up with the way to make the new book slide out of my brain and on to the page in any sort of order as of yet. I have found over the years that if I just continue to let it gestate, it will eventually mature and hatch of its own accord and then there’s no stopping it all coming down and through the fingers and onto the keyboard. This laptop, which I bought in the summer of 2018, is on its last legs and I think I’m going to treat myself to a late birthday present of a replacement. Maybe that will help stimulate things. The idea of turning The Accidental Plague Diaries into a Spalding Gray type monologue has resurfaced this past week. I have someone interested who would be the right collaborator to shape the material, a venue/company that would do a Birmingham production, and connections to do it a few other places regionally. I told my potential collaborator that if we do this and it works, I’ll pay to take it and us to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Life, The Universe, and Everything 