blog – Hugh's Blog

No takebacks.

The late afternoon light streamed through the large windows of the Starbucks. We had not spoken to each other in weeks. We were here to euthanize our relationship.

“How are you?” she asked. She smiled, paused, and then looked down at the table to break eye contact.

“I’m fine.”

I rotate the cup in my hand while it sits on the table. She and I both stare at my hands as the cup spins, silently, to my right.

“Where will you go?” she asks.

“North Carolina. I have some friends there.”

There. I’ve said it. No takebacks.

“What will you do there? Do you have a plan?”

If I were the sort of person who had a plan, I would not be in this Starbucks.

“I do. I will get a part time job somewhere, and work on my writing.”

She laughs. I notice the chip on her eye tooth.

“That’s cute,” she said. “Now I remember why we broke up.”

I feel that in the pit of my stomach, like an injection of ice.

No takebacks.

“I’ll be fine,” I said.

We must learn to love each other or die.

My neighborhood in Jackson, MS is lush and verdant year-round, which is one of the best things about living in the humid subtropics. The birdsong is constant, and the symphony of katydids rises and falls, and has at times arisen so loudly I had to go inside to be heard on the phone.

I walk the same 2.5 miles most days – the dogs along the route know me, and I in turn know the trees where the cedar waxwings can be found, and the pine tree where the hawk that terrifies my chickens lives, and the house where the angry man who voted for our President lives, and the house where the bougie bohemian folk live, and the house where the man who came here to live from the Caribbean decades ago lives, and the house where the prominent Civil Rights activist lives, and I love that my neighborhood is big enough to hold all of them safely.

It has been said that Southerners love individuals and hate classes of people, and I admit to the truth of this, even as I work to overcome the fault in myself. There is something tribal about growing up in a small town, and these are “your people” and the outsiders, however that is defined, are the ones you should be afraid of, even when “your people” are of the same class as the outsiders.

No doubt in the past, this sort of tribalism was valuable as a safety against marauders. But in our current world, where teenagers have friends who live across the globe, and where a tragedy in Europe can have implications in Ohio, its usefulness has run its course. As Auden said, we must learn to love each other, or die.

Program notes

I’m sharing my personal writing in three main places these days.

I have a weekly newsletter where I write a short (~500 word) introductory essay about where I found beauty that week. The newsletter also includes links to five things I found that week I thought were beautiful, as well as links to other things I though were worth sharing, or things I want to lift up. You can sign up for that, or learn more, here.

Every weekend, I send all my paying members (regardless of level of support) an original essay , that is, one that hasn’t been published elsewhere. The topics are wide ranging, but on brand. If you like the sort of thing I write, you will like it. You can learn more about being a member here.

And lastly, there is here, the blog you are reading now.

This blog is a catchall place where I can have artistic freedom to write about whatever the hell I want – anything from birds to gardening to mental health to gumbo to some random poem I liked.

I’m relearning how to blog for fun – this is my playground.

For more information, check out the About page. You can sign up on the Subscribe page to read this in your inbox.

More influential than successful

I had a busy day planned to clean up my very overgrown yard, and spent about three hours doing that, when I was attacked by some sort of stinging insect and took two Benadryl as a result.

This led to a 4 hour nap, and a hangover that is leaving me melancholy with the sense I wasted a day.

There is this piece of dialogue from the movie City Slickers that made me gasp when I first heard it decades ago.

Mitch: Have you ever had that feeling that this is the best I’m ever gonna do, this is the best I’m ever gonna feel… and it ain’t that great?

Station Manager: Happy Birthday.

In the NYT obituary for the comic Jonathan Winters, he was described as “more influential than successful”.

Now in my fifties, well into the second half of my life and work, I think about that line a lot.

More influential than successful.

One day you wake up and you look at all you have done and how much time you have left to do more, and you wonder if you wasted all that time.

A mentor told me once that he rose early because he begrudged the time spent in bed – he only had so much time left.

It feels like I’m running out of time. Did I make a difference? Did any of this matter? Did I sacrifice for the wrong things?

I look around at the state of the country and wonder if I will see the end of this experiment in democracy in my lifetime.

Social media makes this worse, of course. Because the likes and clicks and all that are visible, so you can end up feeling neither influential nor successful.

I love so much about social media – honestly, it’s made my life and career possible. But it is also bad for my mental health. I feel like the food critic who said the restaurant’s food was horrible, and the portions were small.

No pronouncements here, no actions as a result – just a drugged-up middle aged man’s melancholy, asking himself questions while on the couch.

Did any of it matter? Did I waste my shot? Did I make a difference? What do I do with what I have left? Is there any ice cream left in the freezer?

A search engine in a trench coat.

I am not a Luddite. I don’t dislike technology – in fact, almost every dollar I have earned since 2003 or so has been made possible by the Internet, and you glorious people who inhabit it.

I have a Google Pixel phone. A Lenovo ThinkPad. Fiber Internet service. I manage several websites. I have a newsletter that goes out by email to three continents.

I am not afraid of technology.

But I absolutely hate Chat GPT and it’s ilk. It’s not intelligent – it’s a search engine in a trenchcoat, but without the attribution. It’s a job thief. It’s a plagiarism machine.

I was in a meeting the other day, and the need for a communication plan for this organization came up. They’ve needed one for quite a while, but they don’t have a communication person, so since nobody was responsible for it, nobody had done it.

“We don’t have to pay anyone for that,” one of their officers said. “ChatGPT can write one for us in 30 seconds.”

Then, to prove his point, a minute later he dropped the results in the meeting chat.

How successful would such a plan be? How much thought went into it, how much concern for the recipients? How much empathy was involved for the audience? How aligned with the mission of this organization could this robot* possibly be?

And how invested can the organization be in the outcome?

And how many people did not earn a living because of the seconds spent creating a “marketing plan” this way? What is the environmental cost of that computation? What harm to the thinking processes of the person entering it into the robot?

And perhaps most critically to the organization- if it is really that easy, why did nobody do that before?

“My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.”

― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

Not writing.

Type, type type… delete. Type, type type… delete. Type, type type… delete.

For the last hour.

I’ve been working on some negotiations the last few days that have been whipsawing back and forth, and as a result has dramatically affected my mood. As a result, my sleep has been awful.

It’s a heat index of 103 outside.

My wife is ill. She’ll be fine – it’s not dangerous, but right now, it sucks.

Our country is being ran by an insane person, but he is being supported and enabled by very sane people who are manipulating him for their ends.

I’ve been on the road a lot over the last month, and that always hoses my routine. I desperately need a routine to be at my best.

And I sit down to write, and it’s type, type type… delete. Type, type type… delete. Type, type type… delete.

A strange fate

In The Bitter Southerner, Silas House nails the strange fate of being a progressive Southerner (we’ll not quibble over whether Kentucky is the “real” south), where people love you but not people like you., where the people who taught you to love can be less than loving, and where it takes disaster for us to live up to our best ideals.

I also love, love, love this:

The culture of my homeplace taught me to love others without judgment, a tenet that many of the loudest voices in the public arena do not want us to practice because we are more easily controlled when we are divided. I will not let them take my love away any more than I will let them take my joy. I will be no one’s doormat and I will never make myself unsafe but I will give everyone grace, even those who deny it to me and so many others. I will fight back. I will resist, but I will refuse to hate anyone. I will look for the open arms of acceptance, and they will be there, somewhere in the crowd, waiting for me.

Being done.

I was talking to some friends tonight, and told them I was thinking about what it would be like to be done. Then I gave them this example.

I own some cast iron cookware. But it’s to use – I’m not a collector. There are four skillets – sized 6, 8, 10, and 12 inch – on my wall where I store my cast iron cookware. I have a small, medium, and large Dutch oven, some of them enameled. Two corn stick pans, because my corn stick recipe makes two pans worth, and can’t be easily halved. And a cast iron griddle, for when I need to make lots of pancakes or tortillas.

I will probably never purchase another piece of cast iron cookware in my life. Because I don’t need any more. I don’t have use cases for other cast iron cookware. And it won’t wear out – the cast iron cookware I have will last for generations.

Also, there isn’t a viable upgrade path. There are cast iron skillets in the marketplace that cost more than mine, and that have a prettier finish, or longer handles, or whatever, but they are not better at cooking than mine is. There are reasons someone might want to purchase them, but they are not improvements on what I have.

So, since I have all my needs met, and they will last the rest of my life, and there is no real upgrade path, then I’m done buying cast iron. When it comes to my life, there is no way for anyone to make money from me if their job is to sell cast iron. As regards to cast iron cookware, I have opted out of capitalism altogether.

Now I just want to do that with every other part of my life.

Love as an ingredient.

Not far from my house is a restaurant. It’s sort of a deli, and they have sandwiches there, as well as pizza and salads.

I first ate there with my parents, when we moved to Jackson. Dad wanted to share it with us – he had to come to Jackson regularly, and it was one of his favorite places to eat.

More than the food, he liked how they ran the business. He told me a story of one of their employees, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and was soon unable to work. But they kept her on the payroll until she died, so her health insurance remained intact. That story endeared them to Dad. The food was almost secondary.

We still go there, some 7 years later. A couple of times a month, we eat supper there, and I probably have lunch meetings there at least that often. It hots lots of places for me; cost, quality, and of course, that story, and how it affected Dad. That Dad loved that place is also a huge consideration.

The staff is always a delight when we go there. They are smiling, and welcoming, and the service is always fast, and they have never once messed up my order.

A few weeks ago, I stopped by around 2PM to get a late lunch, and there was no one at the counter. And on the counter, beside the registers, was a giant self-serve tablet, like they have at McDonalds. You scroll through a menu, add items to your order, and customize each item by adding pickles, or extra mayo.

I hate these things with a passion. They cannot be clean, with everyone touching them all day. They are not fast – they are actually much slower than telling a person. They are not intuitive – it’s like getting a brand new cell phone whose settings you don’t understand. And often the ones at McDonalds do not work.

This one did not either. Ultimately, after messing with it for at least 5 minutes, an employee came to the counter to rescue me.

I get that it probably saves payroll. But it felt off-brand for this company. Out of character. It was jarring, in the same way it would be jarring to go to a steakhouse and be served surf and turf on paper plates.

And what’s worse, it ruined that story I know about them – the one where they prioritize their employees. Because the decision to replace people with a machine is not the act of love for the employees.

I’ve only been back once. The food tastes different to me now. It’s in my head, I know. But once I had believed they loved their employees. And food always tastes better when love is an ingredient.