An email to a friend

How are you?  Srsly.  I realized this morning that I don't even know if you're teaching this semester.  I miss our daily badinage and realize why it's stopped.  Sorry.  I hope life in the country is good.  Springtime in the boonies is so flipping gorgeous.

Here's the thing:  I have become one truly fucked up senior citizen.  I've been seeing a therapist in the giant shrink factory in your former neighborhood.  It had been going well.  I've been very good about exploring issues and trying to follow directions/suggestions/et ceteras and was seeing a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel; I'm back to thinking it's probably an on-coming train and I just can't hear it because I'm kind of hard-of-hearing.  I truly don't feel like going.  Not that I don't need it...I just wonder what's the use.

One of my means of escape has been reading.  I'm keeping Dauphin County Library System on its toes tracking down just about every gay novel they have.  Happily, surprisingly, they have many.  Mostly at the East Shore branch.  I've become reasonably adept at figuring out that I don't have to read something that's boring.  "Boring" doesn't necessarily mean there's no sex.  Some published authors just can't tell a good story.  And I'm kind of apprehensive that I've come to enjoy young adult gay fiction.  Suicide Notes and My Most Excellent Year:  A Novel of Love, Mary Poppins and Fenway Park is my favorite of them so far, but they do make me feel like something of a chicken hawk.

I've found a treasure trove of my music.  I was tracking down a ragtime song and Google directed me to the Charles Templeton Collection at Ol' Miss.  There I found a catalogue of more the 12,000 copies of sheet music, dating from the mid-1800s to about 1980.  Since 1922 is the official cutoff date for copyrighted materials (1923 to the present may still be protected, which you don't know until you do a cumbersome search), I've been in hog heaven finding rags, ragtime songs, show tunes and vaudeville numbers.  I've been putting lots of them into the computer.  I've expanded several of them to include my version of dance breaks, writing them with the idea that if I could play, this is how I'd want to do it.  Know of anyone planning a vaudeville show?  I've also thought about a review in the Ain't Misbehavin' mold.  And I understand that all of this is strictly imaginary, but it doesn't matter.  It keeps me off the streets.  Plus, as I said, I am one truly fucked up senior citizen.

I think of you a great deal and with some frequency.  I do hope you're well and that things are good, that you are happily doing whatever makes you happy.  Go get 'em.  Happy day.  Take good care.

d