Hugh's Blog

The Levis

I just want to go on record that, despite what the kids at school called me, we were not “white trash”. We were “poor-but-proud”. As near as I can tell, the main difference between the two categories had to do with the fact that we owned land. In any event, when I was a child we had very little money.

Up through the fourth grade that wasn’t all that big a deal. After all, all of my friends were in the same boat. In the small, church-based segregation academy I attended until the end of the fourth grade, I was very unaware of fashion. We just wore jeans and shirts – nobody wore Levis. Well, except that one kid. But anyway.

But in the fifth grade, the closing of that school meant I had to go to the consolidated public elementary school. No one at East Tate Elementary wore jeans from the dollar store. All their jeans had names on them – Lee, Levis, Wrangler. And the shoes…no longer could you just wear plain old sneakers. Now there was Nike, and Puma, and Adidas, and Kangaroos (they had a pocket!). And all of those things cost money.

Money we did not have.

I begged my mom to buy me a pair of Levis.

“Just one pair,” I would say. “I will wash them every night.”

But no. Every August we would buy five pairs of cheap jeans that were that horrible, very uncool dark indigo blue color. And we would buy them a size too big, so I could grow into them because we both knew there would be no buying new ones until next August.

But I continued to beg and ask.

One particular Saturday, Mom had been out hitting yard sales and thrift stores, and she came home with a glint in her eye. Held aloft in her hands was a pair of button fly Levi Jeans. Sure, they were slightly faded, but that only added to the appeal.

Monday, I put them on, proud of my new station in life. I strutted when I got off that school bus!

I made it till the second recess, after 4th period. That was when one beloved Child of God informed me that, unlike his Levi jeans, mine had a white patch on the right rear pocket. In other words, they were “girl” jeans.

Oh no. Dear God, no.

As I write this 40 years later I still feel the anguish and shame that went through me as he and his friends stood around me, pointing and chanting. “Girl’s jeans, girl’s jeans. Hugh’s wearing girl jeans. ”

They called me names I had never heard before that called my sexuality into question – words I would look up in the dictionary that night when I got home. I was in fifth grade – what I knew about sexuality was confined to the neighbor’s dog that had gotten to our hound when she was in heat.

I raced into the bathroom, where I hid the rest of recess. I untucked my shirt, hoping to cover the offending label. But my hiding it made it worse, and for the rest of the day, the kids rode me without mercy. Through the remaining classes, people looked at me and giggled, pointing at me. And if I got up to sharpen my pencil, displaying the offensive tag, the laughter was so loud the teacher had to tell everyone to be quiet.

When I got home that day, after the longest bus ride ever, I hid those jeans in the bottom of my closet so I would not accidentally wear them ever again.

It was only a few days before Mom noticed they were out of the rotation. She tormented me to no end that I just “had” to have a pair of Levis, and there she went, spending her hard-earned money on Levis, and did I wear them? No sir, I did not.

In the cold, rational light of 2022, I wish that 10-year-old Hugh had been stronger. I wish someone had told him that clothes were not gendered. I wish the teachers had stood up for him.

But, as Dad used to say, if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.

I have talked to other people who grew up poor, and they sometimes say things like, “We didn’t know we were poor.” By the time I was 10, I knew we were poor. The kids at the public school never tired of telling me.

But I knew that Mom had bought me those jeans because she loved me. I knew that she hunted the places we could afford to find them and that the money she spent on them was money that should have gone to groceries, or stuff for the baby, or any number of things. I knew that her buying me those jeans was my mom’s way of saying “You matter to me. Your happiness matters to me. You are worth the trouble I am going to to try to make this thing you want, happen. ” And because I knew all of that, there was no way on God’s green earth I was going to tell her she bought the wrong thing and caused me ridicule.

That was the last time she bought me a name-brand anything. I would not wear a pair of Levis again until I was 16 and working after school at the grocery store and could buy them myself.

And I have still never told her why I quit wearing that pair of jeans. I would have rather had her think me ungrateful than for her to feel shame or to know she caused me to suffer. Ten-year-old me did not want her to think her love for me was, in any way, flawed.

And I still don’t.

Stimulus Pause Response

As motels go, it wasn’t horrible. It was the $50 a night option on Priceline, with a 7.9 guest satisfaction rating. It was a national chain. The water was hot, the room clean, and the water pressure was lovely. As someone who used to travel a great deal, I can assure you I’ve paid much more for much less.

But almost from the beginning, things began to go wrong. Someone was meeting us there, and he arrived a few minutes before we did. He tried to use the lobby bathroom, but it was locked, for guest use only, and was told he could go use the bathroom at the gas station across the busy highway.

All the lights were off in the lobby, with just one light on over the registration desk. The vending machine, the ice machine, the “business center” computer desk – all had large “Out of Order” signs.

The website had promised a “deluxe continental breakfast”, which in practice consisted of sugary yogurt, a selection of 4 small blueberry muffins, and some of the smallest Red Delicious apples I have ever seen, an apple whose name is half accurate in description and which has the distinction of being exactly no one’s favorite apple variety. Whatever continent it is where they eat breakfast this way, I want to die having not visited there.

The desk clerk was rude and curt. The housekeeping staff did not clean our room, and when we asked, we were told that because of COVID shortages, they no longer provided daily service – which makes sense, and wouldn’t have been a big deal, had someone told us. Instead, we came back to the room after a long day, ready to take a shower and had no clean towels, and were out of toilet paper. There were multiple clerks who worked various shifts, and none of them had English as their primary language, and they each blamed whatever the current misunderstanding was on the lack of English skills of the other clerk.

The morning we were to check out, I had gone to the front desk to ask for clean towels, and was told I had to bring my dirty ones to the front desk to turn in before they would give me clean ones, so they would know I wasn’t stealing the towels. It was frustrating, going up and down the stairs, over and over, each time being told you hadn’t done it right, or to get called a thief.

None of it was horrible – but each offense built on the previous one. While Renee was in the shower, I decided to leave an honest, if frank, review. The last time we had been in town, we had stayed at the motel next door and had an amazing experience. I thought people should know.

I opened up my computer and opened a text file to compose the review. I was scathing. Frank. Brutal. I poured my three days of micro-frustrations into this review. The longer I typed, recounting the various frustrations, the more heated I got. I decided I was going to wait until I got home to post it – I didn’t want to leave a bad review before we checked out, in case there was some sort of retaliation they could take.

We were checked out and on to have lunch with a friend before heading home when my phone rang. It was the hotel owner. His accent made understanding him difficult.

“Are you checked out? Are you done,” he asked?

I assured him I was and braced myself for whatever he was about to tell me had gone wrong. Instead, he just told me that we had left Renee’s camera bag, which conservatively contained $1000 worth of photography gear, in the room, but not to worry, because he would put it behind the desk and we could come by and pick it up any time.

Well, crap. How do you leave a bad review for a guy who saved you a thousand dollars? For a guy who was looking out for you? For a guy who went above and beyond?

We swung back by the motel on the way out of town, retrieved the bag, and hit the road. That night, when we got home, I deleted the poisonous review I had not yet posted, and for not the first time, remembered words I had read long ago in an article by the psychologist Rollo May:

Freedom is the individual’s capacity to know that he is the determined one, to pause between stimulus and response and thus to throw his weight, however slight it may be, on the side of one particular response among several possible ones.

To pause between stimulus and response, and to choose one response among several possible ones.

Imagine if I had posted the review while she was in the shower. Imagine how horrible I would feel knowing I had trashed this man’s hotel and livelihood – this man who looked out for my family and would save our stuff.

Virtually every time I have done something I later regretted, taken action I would wish I could undo, said words I could never pull back, it was because I did not take sufficient notice of the power of the pause between stimulus and response, and thus chose my response poorly.

When you step on a dog’s tail, the dog may lash out, instinctively, and bite you. There is stimulus, and then response. But as humans, we have the privilege of being able to insert a pause between the stimulus and the response.

And in that pause, we can find both power and freedom.

I Have No Idea What I’m Doing

Every Monday morning, I send out a newsletter. I have done this for more than seven years now. At this point, it’s just something I do, and I suspect that if everyone unsubscribed, I would probably still do it.

And amazingly, people read it. I know that sounds like I’m fishing for compliments, but I mean it – that people read anything I write amazes me constantly. That other people spend folding money to make sure I have the freedom to do that writing is staggering to me.

Last week, I started a survey of my newsletter readers – a thing I’ve never done before. There are some demographic and informational questions I have wondered about – how old are my readers (mostly between 35 and 65, it seems) and when do they read my newsletter that I publish on Monday mornings (almost perfectly evenly split between “as soon as it hits my inbox” and “I save it for later when I can savor it”), but mostly I wanted the more subjective comments to questions like, “What do you like about this newsletter” and “How would you describe what this newsletter is about?”

From a marketing perspective, these are mostly useless. Knowing that an anonymous reader (I didn’t tie responded to email addresses, so people would be more honest) thinks that I need to do more of what I’m doing, or that another anonymous reader thinks that I am a “breath of fresh air” won’t help me get more readers, but it does reassure me that at least some people get value from what I’m trying to do.

But what I love about reader responses is what they tell me about myself. As I’ve said elsewhere, I believe writing to be a partnership between the reader and the writer. A friend who is a movie critic once told me that it’s the job of the critic to tell the artist what they are doing – that it’s actually the critic (or audience), for example, that decides whether a movie is sad, or inspiring.

So when I get responses to my question “Is there anything you would like me to know?” with things like “I love reading your newsletter because it calms my anxiety” or “You are like a Southern Bob Ross” or “I love how calm you are in the face of the tragedies all around us, without ignoring that they are happening”, it tells me something I would have never guessed on my own about what people get from my writing.

Because I don’t really feel calm, or even like I am trying to be calming. I mean, there are a couple of people who ostensibly have things in common with me who are sorta famous on the internet who are very viral, and who are always angry and post click-bait posts designed to provoke a reaction and make you angry at other people. I decided a long time ago that I don’t want readers that badly. So, it is not so much that I’m trying to be calming as much as I’m just trying to not be an asshole.

But knowing that people perceive the project I’m working on to not just be about beauty but also as calming and restorative is useful feedback and lets me know that I am doing things I didn’t know I was doing.

Just like how, when a friend says, “I don’t think you know you are doing it, but you chew with your mouth open, and it’s pretty gross”, you can stop. And once I know I’m doing a thing, and that people like it, I can do more of it.

I’ve been writing nearly daily on this blog for more than four months now – almost 99,000 words since the beginning of November, and during that time, I’ve sorted into a rhythm of sorts. I know that posts about self-care get shared in ways that nothing else I write does, and I know that posts about food are loved and heavily commented on, and I know that people respond well to my posts that are heavy on memories and nostalgia. But I’m not sure yet if the blog has figured out yet what it’s doing.

I mean, I know what I think I’m doing, but like the newsletter example shows – what I think I‘m doing and what people see you as doing can be different things. So, expect an anonymous reader survey soon, because I’d love to know what you think I’m doing.

In Praise of Cabbage

Often when reading a novel, I will find that if the author wants to indicate the smell of poverty, they will mention the smell of cooked cabbage. Like, “The stairway in the tenement smelled of used diapers, cooked cabbage, and despair.”

That’s no reflection on the cabbage, however, as cabbage is no respecter of persons, is filled with vitamins, and will keep in your fridge (or in your cellar) for damn near forever. No, in addition to all the virtues of cabbage, it is also usually inexpensive, which makes it the butt of jokes rather than be celebrated for the heroic vegetable it is, serving to fill in around the edges when the more respected fare is hard to come by.

As a young boy, I ate my share of cooked cabbage, but sadly, I never had any cooked cabbage that tasted good until I was grown. My people tended to, when in doubt, just boil a thing until it surrendered when some things benefit most by gentle encouragement instead of a full-on assault. They would make up for this by pouring the potlikker in the bottom of the pot – the vitamin laden broth left after the cabbage had been eaten – over cornbread, which was always the best part of the meal, the cabbage having been cooked until it dissolved, like the dreams we had of a meal with texture.

But done right, stewed cabbage is a delight, and there is virtually no likker to be had because we didn’t soak away all the vitamins. If it’s a weeknight and you don’t know what to use for a side dish, this is perfect. It takes about 25 minutes, from start to back, and if you add some bacon, you can make it a main dish instead. I think it’s even good enough to serve as a side at a celebration, like Thanksgiving.

If stewed cabbage is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

What you will need for this are a head of white (as opposed to red) cabbage, a big skillet, three tablespoons of some cooking fat – bacon grease is traditional, but butter is OK too, and I like to mix them both, half and half, each bringing qualities of which the other is shy – some salt, some sugar, and some water.

Turn the heat on medium under your skillet, and put your fat in it to melt. I’m going to assume you paid attention and are using one and a half tablespoons each of both butter and bacon grease, but you do you. Unless you doing you involves olive oil, in which case, just … no. There are things for which olive oil is wonderful, but this is not one of them.

While your fat’s melting, quarter your head of cabbage, cut out the stem, and then cut the rest of it into “steaks”, top to bottom (like, from pole to pole of the cabbage head) about an inch and a half thick. Then cut the steaks into chunks about 2×2, and then put the chunks in the hot fat. Don’t shred your cabbage – this ain’t slaw. You want chunks. It may fall apart a bit, which is fine, but don’t encourage it any. I mean, you fall apart, and we do you the kindness of not mentioning it, so return the favor here.

Sprinkle a tablespoon of sugar and a teaspoon of salt over the top of the cabbage chunks. You want to give the cabbage a minute or two in the hot fat, so the leaves will begin to brown and caramelize – take your spatula and move it about a bit to keep it from sticking. When you see edges beginning to brown slightly, add a cup of water (slowly), and then allow the water to cook down over medium heat until the water is mostly gone, the house smells amazing, and the cabbage is tender when you stab it, but the chunks are still mostly intact – which on my stove takes about 20 minutes.

Some of you will want to cook this longer. I understand this, but you’re wrong. It won’t be improved by turning it into mush. I am in favor, however, of starting this dish by frying up three slices of bacon, then dicing the cooked bacon into bits, and using that bacon grease plus another tablespoon or two of butter as the fat and then proceed from there, using the bacon bits as a garnish when you are done.

Some of you will think this can be improved by reducing the fat down to only one tablespoon, making it less fattening. It may be less fattening that way, but it won’t taste better. And in all honesty, two tablespoons of butter has 200 calories, which when divided by the four serving this makes, means you saved 50 calories a serving, but managed to turn something delicious into something your kids will make fun of you for making.

Two Years.

In about two weeks, it will be the anniversary of the last time I did anything that involved other people that didn’t include worrying about COVID. It was a funeral for a friend’s dad, and while we had heard stories of COVID, it felt sort of like SARS did – like a thing that had happened to some people, but that didn’t really affect anyone I actually know. After the funeral, we stood around in the parking lot, no worries about distance or masking, and talked about toilet paper shortages that were already happening, and how ridiculous it all seemed.

It was a simpler, more innocent time.

The Boy was a week away from his last normal week of school, before the spring break that would actually end his school year months ahead of schedule. We had house guests, who stayed with us a week – the last normal week for any of us.

And then a year of pure hell would happen.

The 12 months after March of 2020 were ridiculously hard. I don’t think I realized at the time just how hard. I’m good in a crisis, am able to strip away inessentials and focus on the problem at hand, so I let a lot of things go during that time – things like self-care and routine – and couldn’t do a lot of things that were important to me, like eat with friends and be in the larger world, while scrambling in order to take care of people. I’m pretty sure the combination of having people who depend on me and people who read my writing kept me alive that year.

But it was still a horrible year. This morning, I saw that I had posted this on Facebook a year ago today:

A global pandemic.

Political uncertainty.

Foster children.

Dad’s death.

Depression.

Trying to scramble to pivot and keep our income afloat in the midst of extreme economic uncertainty.

The death of at least 8 people I personally know from COVID.

The extreme stress of being worried about bringing an almost certainly fatal disease home to my wife who has no immune system.

Insomnia.

Spending thousands on car repairs, only to have to scrap it and buy another car after all.

Watching paid speaking and consulting gigs reschedule, then reschedule again, and then cancel.

Losing grants and donations as donors’ and grantors’ priorities shift because of the changing realities.

Isolation.

A winter storm that brought my city to its knees, and left it there.

It’s been a horrible 12 months for my mental health. I know I am not alone with this, but for 12 months I have had legitimate reasons why I am not operating at my best, and I am just tired of it. I want to be back at full strength. I want to feel productive again. I am at about 40% of pre-pandemic capacity, and some days that 40% is a stretch goal.

I told someone the other day that this whole last year has felt like a really bad normal year, but while wearing a weight vest. Everything is harder, more expensive, lasts longer, and is more exhausting than normal.

I don’t have anything inspirational to say here. It’s hard. It just is.

I learned a long time ago that it sometimes helps to say out loud how hard it is, and to say it where others can hear it.

That way, if it’s hard right now for the folks who hear it, then they will at least know they are not alone.

Yeah. That guy was in really bad shape.

I remember how low I felt at this point last year. Spring is always my favorite time of the year, but spring last year felt like an endless winter. Everything was dead, and felt dead, and looked dead.

Over the year that followed, I would personally know another six people who would die from this damn virus, as the nation lost hundreds of thousands more. Delta and Omicron would destroy all the plans we had of a year where we could return to “normal”, despite the literal miracle of the vaccines. Our political situation, while more superficially calm, has gone from “aftermath of insurrection” to “brink of nuclear war”.

And yet.

Over the last year, I would write well more than 100,000 words. I would start a new blog, and a new newsletter that would quickly grow to half the size of a newsletter I have written for seven years. I would develop new sources of income. I would begin a daily practice of both writing and moving, and would learn to pay attention to my diet in a healthy way for the first time in my life. As a result, both my blood pressure and glucose levels would decrease to healthier levels, and I would lose a hair over 50 pounds.

Growing up in the evangelical end of the church, we were taught to expect change to happen instantaneously. The Apostle Paul, on the road to Damascus, had this watershed moment, where he was struck by an overwhelming force, and as a result, had no choice but to change his life’s direction.

It’s never been like that for me. Change for me has always been quiet, slow, and nearly invisible, but striking in retrospect. So I’m grateful for the times that Past Me has admitted it was hard, the times he told the truth about what he was going through, the times he bore witness to the pain and grief, if for no other reason than to leave a signpost so Current Me could look back and mark the truly miraculous ways things have changed for the better.

My depression is more under control these days. I spend about 10% of my time on deliberate practices to keep it managed: I control my diet, prioritize movement, pursue connection, and write like my life depends on it.

It’s two years later. People are still dying. We are on the brink of nuclear war. And the daffodils are blooming in my yard.

Big Un

When he was sixteen, the world lost its mind, and he lied about his age to go in the Army. I don’t know, at this great distance, what led to that decision – he died before I knew to ask such questions, and he was never much for talking about his inner-life, anyway, so no one I ever could ask did know.

It was the second decade of the last century, and the whole world was at war, and this sixteen-year-old boy, always large for his age, would end up as a pilot, flying planes that had open cockpits and required scarfs and goggles and he would do things nobody should ever have to do and would see things nobody in his hometown had ever dreamed about.

Later, after the war was over, he would return to the States, travel with an air show for a while as a barnstormer, and eventually settle down in North Texas, marry my great grandmother, and have some kids. My mother’s father was his son, and he thought the sun rose and set on me.

He was a large man, about 6’5”, barrel-chested and thick. He wore bib overalls and work shirts and had hands the size of canned hams. He was larger than life in so many ways, not just his size, and he captured all my attention, with his cows and border collies and his 1946 pickup that had lost both third gear and reverse, so driving it took some planning.

He was my Great-Grandfather, but that was a mouthful for a young feller like me, so I called him Big un.

We didn’t really have money for vacations as a child, so we visited family instead, and every Summer, around the Fourth of July, we would make the eight-hour trip to North Texas and stay with my Mom’s Dad and see that side of the family.

On this particular summer day in 1976, my great-grandmother and I had been blackberry picking. We sprayed ourselves down with stuff to scare away the chiggers, and we took empty coffee cans and walked through the pasture to the fence row where the wild blackberries were rampant, and we filled our cans and our mouths and black juice ran down my face and all the while she told me things I cannot remember, but the thing I do remember is how safe and loved I felt, and how lucky I must be to belong to people that owned both cows and blackberry bushes.

I no longer recall (if I ever knew) where she went, but she told Big Un that when she returned, she was going to make a blackberry cobbler with those berries for dessert.

She was not gone more than a handful of minutes when he called me into the kitchen. They lived in a tiny North Texas farmhouse, with a utilitarian kitchen with cracked linoleum on the floor, a 1950’s era Formica and stainless steel table, and an electric icebox in the corner that now contained, among other things, a 1 pound coffee can full of blackberries so full of goodness they were about to burst.

Big Un put me at the table and put down two mismatched bowls, the porcelain glazing cracked and crazed from years of use, and mine had a faded rose on the bottom of the bowl. The coffee can of blackberries was retrieved from the icebox, and with his huge, rough scarred hands he poured the blackberries from the can into my bowl and then his. The berries were of various sizes, the way wild berries always are, filling both our bowls to the edge and then he poured the fresh cream we had gotten from his own cows that very morning over the top, the cream running over the berries, filling in the cracks and crevices until the berries looked very much like small blue-black islands in a sea of creamy white.

We sat there, he and I, in a 4-room house in North Texas, 70 or so years and a Formica table between us, quietly eating the purloined blackberries. When she came back, there would be hell to pay, and no cobbler to eat, but for now, we were content to merely be together, eating our berries and absolutely certain in the knowledge that no king had never had it so good.

Deserved Maintenance

Some years ago, I was talking to the person who was my spiritual director at the time. I was in the midst of unrecognized (by me, anyway) burnout, and she was encouraging me to take some time away. We had found a retreat that sounded lovely to me, but there was so much work to be done, so much need in the world, and the idea of my hitting pause on that merely because I needed time away seemed so wrong to me.

I told her that. I also told her that it seemed so self-centered, this idea of claiming time for myself, of putting my own needs first.

“I grew up surrounded by men who worked hard for very little money. It wasn’t joyful work. It was hot and sweaty, and they thought a lot more about survival than they did rejuvenation. Nobody would have recommended they take a week of retreat at a monastery. They didn’t get sabbaticals. Hell, they barely got vacation. If anybody deserved time for self-care, it was them!”

We were sitting in her sunroom, on her heavily wooded suburban lot. Her little furry dog lay on the floor at my feet, and my tea was on the coffee table, untouched and rapidly cooling. Outside, birds flitted from limb to limb as my words hung in the air.

She sat there, legs crossed, a cup of tea in her hands, elbows on the arm of the chair, chin down, staring into the cup of tea as if it contained answers. Maybe it did.

She looked up at me, took a sip of tea, and said, “You’re right. They did deserve it. And can you imagine how different their life could have been if they had gotten it?”

Damn.

As I try to rebuild a life after burnout, in the midst of a pandemic, and while dealing with depression, it sometimes seems like self-care is a full-time job. I swim almost every day, which takes anywhere from 30-45 minutes. On the days I don’t swim, I walk, which takes 45 minutes. I do my morning pages, which can take from a half-hour to an hour, depending on how the words come. I have a deliberate morning routine and evening routine. I monitor my food. I try to keep boundaries up between work and not work, and I try hard to prioritize family time and time away.

And it can all feel a little self-indulgent at times. Like I’m at the center of the universe, and so if I reply to a simple, non-urgent request on Friday at 4:50 PM that I will take care of it Monday, despite that it wouldn’t take 20 minutes to do, it can feel a bit like I’m being a jerk. More than once, the person asking me for that favor has made it clear that is how they interpreted it, too.

But that’s ridiculous. If I asked if you wanted to go hiking with me on Monday, and you said you couldn’t because you had to work, I wouldn’t be offended. But that’s because it is socially acceptable to spend ⅓ of your life working on someone else’s projects in exchange for money to pay your bills to maintain your house, and not socially acceptable to say that you have promised your wife that Friday night is just for her in order to maintain your marriage.

But all of the things a human needs cannot be purchased with the money that we trade, if we are lucky, that ⅓ of our life for. We also need community and health and connection and peace of mind and rest – all things that can’t be bought with money, but instead can only be acquired by deliberate practice.

So, if we have normalized eight hours, at a minimum, a day earning the money which only takes care of a portion of our needs, what is a fair amount of time to trade for everything else? If eight hours is a reasonable time to spend getting the money, what is a reasonable amount of time to spend on maintenance? If I spend 15 minutes of my day in a morning routine that gives me clarity and focus, is that a wise investment of my time? If I trade 45 minutes of movement for lower blood pressure and healthy glucose levels, is that worth it? If 30 minutes of winding down mean that the 7 hours of sleep I get is restful and rejuvenating, shouldn’t I do it?

We make those calculations all the time, and we always bid against ourselves. But we never ask those questions about work.

People seldom miss work because they need the money. However, they often miss sleep, as if they didn’t need the rest. They eat crap food, while in a rush, often in their car, as if they didn’t need the nourishment and energy that comes from good food. They keep the eight hours of work as inviolate but willingly give up their date night with their partner, or an hour of sleep, or supper with their kids, because they are “busy”.

Your work provides the income you need to live your life – but it shouldn’t “be” your life. You deserve so much more than that.

“It is not enough to be industrious; so are the ants. What are you industrious about?” Thoreau asked us all those years ago, and today, most of us still don’t have a good answer.

The partnership

I carry a notebook around with me, and I jot down things I want to remember to write about. But it’s a small notebook, and I have 50-year-old eyes, and so sometimes in the name of expediency, I lose either legibility or intelligibility and sometimes both.

Like the entry that I wrote a few weeks ago in bed, late at night. Here it is, in its entirety: Paul McCartney, song (talk to Renee) / partnership between reader and writer.

Now, this time, I happen to completely understand what I was getting at. For Christmas, I got Renee, who is a huge Beatles fan, this two-volume book of Paul McCartney lyrics and commentary, called, fittingly enough, The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present. It’s huge.

And one night we were lying in bed, reading our respective books, when she told me that she had just learned an interesting thing about a particular song – that while the lyrics were powerful and moving to us both, it turns out that when he wrote them, it was meant as a fun song, almost whimsical.

I bet you are wondering what song it was. I am too because while I wrote down the event, I made no mention of the song because I would surely remember it.

I do not remember it. My brief note was a bit too brief.

But I wrote it down because it so perfectly encapsulates the partnership that exists between the writer and the reader.

In 1994, I was dating a woman who was my superior in practically every way. She made more money than I did, she was older than I was, and she was smarter than I was. And when we broke up, which was, in hindsight, inevitable, I took it rough. Really rough, in the way only a 22-year-old could.

I went on a three-day drunk. I drunk-called her house at all hours. I showed up outside her house and the police got called – not by her, but by the neighbor who took umbrage to my declarations of my love in her front yard at 3 in the morning.

Eventually, I came to terms with the breakup, but like 22-year-olds everywhere that go through tragic breakups, I found solace in music.

At the time, there was a popular country music song called Little Rock, by Tom Douglas, sung by Collin Ray. In it, the protagonist is starting his life over in Little Rock after destroying his relationship and is now trying to rebuild his new life while mourning the loss of the life he had.

A sample of the lyrics:

Well, I know I disappeared a time or two,

And along the way, I lost me and you.

I needed a new town for my new start

Selling VCR’s in Arkansas at a Wal-Mart.

I haven’t had a drink in nineteen days.

My eyes are clear and bright without that haze.

I like the preacher from the Church of Christ.

Sorry that I cried when I talked to you last night.

I think I’m on a roll here in Little Rock.

I’m solid as a stone, baby, wait and see.

I’ve got just one small problem here in Little Rock,

Without you, baby I’m not me.

Now, you might look at those lyrics here in the cold light of day in the year of our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Two and say to yourself that they are trite and sentimental. And I would agree with you. But 22-year-old me in 1994 drank at least a few cases of beer while sobbing and listening to that song on repeat, for weeks and weeks. I wore out that cassette tape; playing that song, then hitting rewind and playing it again. One thing you can say for MP3 players – listening to sad breakup music is easier than it was back in the day.

I already knew the song, of course. It had been out a while. But when I went through that breakup, it perfectly captured the struggle, the mourning, the lament, and the hope of it all.

When Tom Douglas wrote that song, he had no idea who I was. He had probably never set foot in Southaven, Mississippi, the scene of the yard incident. But he didn’t have to. He wrote the words, but I supplied the meaning. We were in partnership, Mr. Douglass and I.

It doesn’t matter if he had ever been through a breakup. It doesn’t matter if he had ever dated anyone, ever. I supplied every bit of meaning that I put on that song. And while I hear that song today and it reminds me of that time, I recognize that, objectively, it’s not a great song.

But it didn’t matter.

I try hard to write in an accessible way – people who know me say they can hear my voice when they read my writing, which is 100% what I’m shooting for. And I’m fortunate that I have a really interactive group of readers. Not a day goes by when I don’t get an email or Facebook message from someone who read something I wrote, and often they will tell me the story of how something I wrote – sometimes something I wrote years ago – really spoke to them.

And sometimes, they see things in my writing that perplex me, because I didn’t put them there. Luckily for me, they tend to be good things, by and large, but still. But I guarantee you I saw things in the song Little Rock that neither the singer nor the songwriter put there. In the partnership between the writer and I, he supplied the worlds, and I supplied the meaning.

Now, I have to confess that as a writer, there are times this frustrates me. I will spend a great deal of time crafting an essay about, say, birds, and then I see where someone shared it on Facebook, and they talk about how it’s a testimonial to the enduring power of the human spirit.

I really thought it was about birds. But if they needed to hear about the enduring power of the human spirit right then, I’m willing to let them have it. After all, I just bring the words – they supply the meaning.

The Pursuit of Beauty

On February 20th of 2015, I was exhausted.

My wife was struggling to survive, and there was no guarantee she would end up on the list to get the transplant she desperately needed. I was struggling with the burnout that would eventually kick my ass, and a person I had worked hard to help get sober had died of an overdose.

When I was starting out in that work, a mentor told me that if I knew I was going to walk across the desert tomorrow, I should be gorging myself with water tonight. Likewise, he said, if I know that tomorrow I will be surrounded by ugliness, I should strive to gorge myself with beauty to prepare for it. Over time, he insisted I hang out at museums, read good books, watch good films, read poetry, and play in my garden. All in the relentless pursuit of beauty as a prophylactic against the ugliness I would encounter along the way.

But somewhere along that path, I had gotten busy, and those words seemed far away. I needed to be reminded of what was lovely, what was good, and that even in the midst of unspeakable tragedy and pain, there was beauty that could lift us above our mean circumstances and guide us home.

My particular form of ADHD, as I have said before, needs structure, but has trouble creating it, so latching onto existing structures is always helpful. And here we were, in February of 2015, just a few days before Lent.

I sent an email to 35 people who I loved and admired. The subject line was, Hugh’s Newsletter Situation, and the email said, in part:

Here is the deal: I am going to send you an email every Monday during Lent (roughly the next six weeks). I will link to five beautiful things I liked that week – perhaps a picture I liked, perhaps a funny story, perhaps something of profound wisdom. In addition, if I read a book that blew me away, I will mention that, and provide a link to it, too. And if it is a week when something is happening I think you should know about, I will let you know in the email.

And that’s it. No lengthy prose, no huge commitments. Just five things that struck me as beautiful, books I read that were wonderful, and things I think you should know.

If this works (meaning I keep my commitment to you) then I might keep it up – or I might not. I get bored easily.

It was simple: For six weeks, I needed to look for five beautiful things every week – not just random things, but things worth sharing. I figured that committing to share them with others would keep me honest. I’m far more afraid of letting you down than I am of letting me down.

Here we are now, seven years later, and I’m still sending them out every Monday morning. (You can sign up here). Now it goes out to several thousand people, and it’s a bit more polished and I’m older and have more aches and less hair. But my wife got her heart transplant and I came back from burnout and now live an entirely different life in another state entirely.

But what hasn’t changed is my belief in beauty as a prophylactic against the ugliness of the world, and searching for it like my life depends on it. Because I am more and more convinced that it does.

Re: Facebook

I want to preface this by noting that the irony that Facebook is the largest driver of traffic for my blog is not lost on me. Neither is it lost on me that I have many relationships with people I love dearly that I no longer have contact information for other than Facebook Messenger. And I also want to point out that there is a strong likelihood that you won’t see this post, as posts that are critical of that platform tend to not get seen there.

Social media is fine if you want a place to see pictures of your brother’s kids. It’s fine as a place to find like-minded people (which explains most of the FB groups I belong to) or to learn new skills (which explains the rest of them). But it is always important to remember that the reason social media exists is not to entertain you – it is to make the social media company money. That’s it. The whole reason Facebook exists is to make money, and you don’t factor into their calculations at all. They don’t care that you don’t like the new design. Or the way your timeline shows the same four people, over and over.

It’s become commonplace to blame the algorithms for the lack of diversity and echo chambers, but these algorithms are not Holy Writ, handed down from Mt. Olympus (or Mt. Sinai, if that’s your thing). Rather, they are the result of intentional business decisions, designed to – you guessed it, make the social media company money. If they make you angry – Facebook makes money. If they show you something you disagree with and you go on a ranty – Facebook makes money. If you link to something that makes you happy, they now know more about you, and they can then make more money.

We are not Facebook’s customer: We are their product.

If you are relatively conscious, I have not said anything at all unknown to you. We all trade access for privacy, and while we fuss, most of us stick around. We are in an abusive relationship with this site, and their sins are well known. I’ve talked about this before, but I wanted to elaborate a bit: Facebook is a horrible place to depend on, because it is space you do not own, but only rent, and you rent it from an abusive landlord and you have no protections as a tenant, and you have no lease.

If tomorrow Facebook decided to change the rules, you would have no choice but to take it. Many small businesses got wiped out in the mid-teens when Facebook began charging Business Pages to get views – businesses that had invested years in cultivating a following on Facebook and getting traffic and followers. Overnight, the rules changed.

Or if you have views Facebook decides to restrict. Any post I share that talks heavily about the pandemic will get far fewer views than normal. It just doesn’t get on as many timelines. Who decided that? Facebook.

So, like anyone who rents space, I am ever conscious that I don’t control this space, and I don’t want to make business decisions that depend on this space.

I am a writer. I mean, it’s part of how I make my living. And while I recognize that a lot of people read my writing via Facebook, I am refusing to depend on it. Because I see people all the time who tell me they don’t see my posts on here.

But you know who never says that? Email subscribers.

Email virtually always gets delivered. Email is 100% open. If I left Facebook, I lose all my Facebook friends. I couldn’t port them over to, say, Twitter. But If I quit using Mailchimp and began using ConvertKit to send my emails, it would be seamless. Subscribers would most likely not even know it happened. Because I own my email list – but I’m just renting the Facebook list.

Virtually every creator I know worries about how Facebook gatekeepers our content. I’m making more and more business decisions that take me towards openness, and away from closed platforms.

I find myself growing more and more frustrated with Social Media platforms. I get angry when I’m on there for any length of time, and the lack of civility and reflection frustrates me. Most days I am on there for only a few minutes to check in or to post something, and then I’m out – which would be great, except for the other days, when I find myself doomscrolling and getting angrier and angrier. I have taken all Social apps off my phone, and have blockers on my browsers so I don’t get on during certain hours while I’m trying to write.

Another thing I don’t like is how it discourages civility. For example, I had two interactions today with people who read my stuff and who disagreed with me: One by email and one on Facebook. The email response was thoughtful and measured, and I responded with a thoughtful and measured reply. The Facebook interaction was a frustrating dumpster fire, and then after I put over an hour in interacting with it, he deleted his post, erasing all the work I did.

As long as it makes sense to keep sharing my blog posts in clear text on my Facebook feed, I will do so as a courtesy to my readers there, as part of my POSSE (Post Own Site, Share Everywhere) strategy. But one day, I fear the juice will no longer be worth the squeeze, and that will change.

So, in preparation for that day, please know that you can also read this blog on the website at HumidityandHope.com, or you can get a weekly email from me with a link to that week’s posts, or you can go to this page and find links to follow me on Twitter or Tumbler or even my blog’s Facebook page where the links are auto-posted or find out how to sign up to get the whole text of the post in your email inbox within minutes of my posting it.

But however and wherever you do it, I’m grateful for your readership, your sharing, and your engagement.