It’s been a good year, really. I should not be this old. Maybe the long list of reasons will turn up here, but for now, I should not be this old, should not be alive, still walk the Earth thanks to many talented medical people and no shortage of happenstance.

Late late year I decided that since I was turning 65 in April 2023, I should throw myself a birthday party, something no one had ever done or would ever do for me. There have always been little birthday dinners or whatever, but I wanted a lot of friends in one place.

One of the continuing disappointments in my life is that, by and large, my friends have been only my friends, have not made friends with each other even when I thought that could happen. (The biggest reason no one could ever throw me a party, after all, was that none of my friends liked me enough to become friends with my friends.) I thought a party might help solve that, but I also thought it was time to find out if anyone would at least come to a major milestone birthday party. Sixty-frickin-five, I dubbed it. The impossible party was going to happen.

Somewhat separately, I also decided that I would renew acquaintance with many of the friends I’ve ghosted over the years. Some of them date back to high school. Others were relatively recent. The span was about 8 years to more than 50. This was a separate effort, but I did invite one or two of these people to the party.

One of my difficulties is that I have imposter syndrome. I believe I don’t deserve the good things in my life, especially when it comes to people, to friendships. And the way my friends haven’t become friends with each other plays into that very strongly. I’ve been faking it, and they know.

But the party worked out. I rented a bar, hired a musician from Austin who had become a friend, and he did a great set, and he and his wife mixed and mingled along with about 25 others. Friends came, and they brought friends! That was nice. Friends flew in from outside Providence, from outside Minneapolis, from outside Boston. People flew in!

Some of those I’d been reconnecting with in email turned out to be folks I wouldn’t invite. A high school friend — who was my first date — was amused by the whole concept of reconnecting, and while we’re still enjoying an email conversation, I read the room and didn’t invite her. Another, in Minneapolis, I reconnected with too soon before the party to invite, but she had no funds for travel anyway.

Still. For a night, imposter syndrome went away! I had filled a room with more than two dozen friends, some of whom were people I hadn’t seen in decades, and everyone was talking and having a good time. Every time I looked around the room, there were groups of people talking and laughing, and I knew it was a good party when I realized I wished I could be a part of every one of those conversations.

A few people made a point of talking to everyone they could, meeting as many as they could, but as far as I know, no one became friends outside the context of friending each other on Facebook, where few of them post regularly anyway.

At work a couple of days later, people whom I hadn’t invited told me they’d heard the party was “off the hook.” Well then.

The warmth got me through a few months. Since the friend in Minneapolis couldn’t afford to visit me, I could visit her, and did in July for six days. Our friendship was cemented wonderfully. We had the best time. I’m going back next week as I write this, mid-October. We are forever only friends; I will never date, never look for romance, again, but although I also have strong bonds with other friends, it isn’t a competition. Bonds take time, and it’s very true that as we resumed a friendship I’d drifted off from three decades earlier, we had, and have, some navigation to do. We have talked honestly and securely and kept the foundation of the friendship in place.

And finally all of this joy took its backlash: Imposter syndrome flared up to teach me a lesson, to remind me: I didn’t deserve any of this. I’m just a week from another trip to Minneapolis, for a full week this time, and there is a story there for another post, but in brief I am strongly considering relocating to Minneapolis when I retire. And here I was, frozen in mope and emotional miasma, letting the self-loathing control me.

You can’t really do anything about it. It isn’t exactly cyclical. But when too much good comes into my life, I will know in my core, in my heart, that I don’t deserve it. Imposter syndrome was my first cancer, filling every cell of my body when I was in grade school, never killing me but never leaving. I am never physically self-destructive, but when it flares up, I test my friendships too much as I ramble on about what a worthless slug I think I am.

And here I was, faced over the last few months with many people who had been good friends once and who were becoming good friends again. I started to trust colleagues, and they started to trust me, and we became friends beyond that office banter level. My email friend in Minneapolis invited me up enthusiastically in the summer and our visit was filled with joy, and I return next week. I flew back to my home town for 36 hours, relived bits of the old life I’d loved so much, but in particular, had brunch with three of my closest high school friends. We were in the restaurant’s patio for three hours, and we hadn’t all been in the same place at the same time since high school graduation. We were so reluctant for it to end that we spent another two hours chatting in a nearby park. I flew out to Rhode Island just a few weeks later, spending six days with a close friend and her husband, going to a music festival and hanging out, catching up, spending time at the animal shelter she volunteers at, sitting on her deck watching hummingbirds.

That isn’t even everything, but it’s a long description of some of the highlights, and finally it caught up with me. I don’t deserve this.

One or two of those bonds do show signs of weakening. I think I can start an honest conversation with each of them to discuss what’s going on, but I will need cooperation from them to try to navigate that. Maybe it was just a moment; there’s nothing wrong with that, until my previous thought that it could be ongoing collides with my imposter syndrome and I decide maybe there wasn’t much friendship there after all because they asked themselves if I was worth being a friend and they decided I wasn’t. That’s to be managed over the next few weeks and months.

Still, 10 days later, I’m reemerging. I’m getting excited about the trip, fortunately, and other friends are making time for me here and there too. It’s a manageable rate. That’s key. I can let the good times roll, but I can’t let them surge, and I can’t try to sustain them for a long time; I just need to back down some.

… and it’s Lyle Lovett.

In Texas Monthly’s roundup of tributes to Jerry Jeff Walker, Lovett said:

Whenever one of your heroes treats you like you belong there with them, it gives you a real boost of confidence.

That’s exactly been it for me. An artist I’ve admired for years, decades, comes over, says hello, puts his hand on my shoulder, says it’s nice to see that I made it there.

His guitarist hollers hi to me from across the bar.

I sit with a friend, watching one of the best songwriters to walk the Earth, and some friends of his join us. All of the friends are talented musicians; one of them is a few years away from becoming a household, one-name word. She invites us to join her and her friends club-hopping and then brings us back to her place to dance the night away. A couple of months later, as she’s touring to promote her new CD, she recognizes me and chats.

A guy who, decades earlier, lost the ability to speak and who uses Magic Slates to scrawl out his conversation warmly clasps my hand and grins when I introduce myself. We’d been on the same listserv, but our conversation continued in private emails, then moved to Facebook, ribbing each other until he was gone.

Away from music, a 1960s provocateur has written a book and has a speaking and signing engagement at the institution that employs me. I elbow everyone else away from the PR assignment, show up plenty early to make sure I get my copy of his most classic book signed; I savor, 35 years later can still picture, how he cradled the book, gently and lovingly, admiring that it was both well used and well cared for, before signing the title page. I thank him and sit down and, when he isn’t tending to a paying customer, we banter and I soak up stories. When we part, his handshake is firm and his eye contact is appreciative.

Back to Austin: On the way back to my friends’ table at a restaurant, I see the restaurant owner, himself a bit of an Austin legend, and stop to say hello, compliment his chow, chat for a moment about his history; I note that I have a videotape of the concert that took place the night his old bar closed, and he says, “Even I don’t have that.” I offer to send him a copy; he regards me for a moment. “C’mon with me,” he says. We leave the restaurant, and go to the building out back, his office and his warehouse, and he loads me up with posters and T-shirts and paraphernalia. I thank him and tell him the tape will be on its way a week or two after I get him, and go back to our tables. My friends look at me, loaded down with souvenirs. “Heck of a pit stop, Bob.”

I continue to lug around the remnants of my past. So many LPs, so many CDs, so many cassettes, so many books, so many hard drives, the last with so many comic books, so many photos, so much music, so many downloads.

I fantasize that retirement will give me the time to organize all this. Finally, all my photos sorted by date in one place! Finally, all my analog music digitized so I can play it at a moment’s notice!

Of course, when you’re living with cancer, diabetes, and coronary health issues, and on drugs that would cost you nearly $15,000 every month without insurance, retirement is an odd concept, perhaps ephemeral.

Beyond that, the notion of saving these little tasks for when I have unlimited time seems to defeat the point of leaving the workplace to enjoy life.

And it begs the question: for whom? Me.

I’m at the center of so many pointless directions my life could take if I survive long enough to waste my time preserving and organizing all the material I’ve allowed to pile up, physically and digitally, in my life, so I can enjoy it once it’s all sorted out.

I’ve lived longer than I ever expected to already and have been grateful for every day. But I’m going to die alone and frightfully bored, and at some point the transition is going to be the most interesting part of it all.

Yet another romantic yet strident photo expresses a popular sentiment on my Facebook wall today:

And, well, who can argue? Wait… is that my cue?

When was this time when none of us cared about where our food came from?

When was this time when people knew the people that grew their food and raised the animals they ate?

When did we stop cooking?

Michael Pollan tells us never to eat anything our grandmothers wouldn’t eat. Well, my grandmother might have been born in 1895, but she sure had a pantry full of cans and cartons, and she loved ’em. She could make a fantastic plate of pancakes or some fine Polish dinners, but when Science Marched On, she Joined In.

During the four months that farmers markets operate in Chicago, I go to my neighborhood market as often as I can. I’m lucky; it runs from 3 to 8 p.m. so I can get there after work and still find a few things. Most of the city’s farmers markets operate from 7 to 11 a.m. or so, and if you’re a working stiff who can shop then, congratulations. Still, my neighborhood has a lot of restaurants, so when I finally get there around 6 or so, some booths have already closed up.

And even though I do buy from most of the farmers who have stuff I want — and it seems they at least understand my effort to support as many of them as I can by buying just a few things from each — and have nice little chats and sometimes even shake hands, I don’t think I’d recognize them if I saw them away from their booths. This notion that, in the past, people knew their suppliers: I think that’s full-on bullshit. Have farms, real production facilities, ever actually been integrated into urban life?

I suspect Sustainable Man up there would shake his head at my mother’s cans of vegetables and little jars of dried herbs and supermarket ground round. But Mom knew when to drag us kids into the station wagon and where to go to find freshly harvested corn or watermelon. And that’s great for those five weeks each year. But, Sustainable Man, sometimes in the dead of winter with the snow falling faster than you can shovel, sometimes you need those tastes, you crave those tastes, because as weak as they are, they’re a reminder of what once was and what someday soon shall be. Mediocre corn chowder in the winter can be so much more satisfying than the best corn chowder in the summer just because how can this possibly be?

(And Mom didn’t know those farmers either. I mean, she probably recognized them and they her from week to week, but I can’t imagine names were ever even exchanged.)

And Sustainable Man isn’t even in this for the profit. I don’t know how he does it, but he sneers at profit, reminds us it’s a bad thing. Maybe for him, farming’s like animal rescue except with slaughterhouses. I don’t know. Li’l Lambchop there sure is unaware of her fate. Me, I hope my market’s farmers aren’t going broke by selling me stuff. There are weeks you can tell they’re stressed out, and there are weeks you can tell they’re pretty happy, and I really hope they like bringing home wads of cash at night and I hope those wads of cash get them through the week and leave them with extra to get them through the winter.

Finally, Sustainable Man, I’d love to Eat Local Grown, although it’s “locally,” but I get to go to farmers markets four months a year, and not every week at that. And maybe my South American blueberries will have your head shaking as surely as my grandmother’s cans and my mother’s little jars do, and maybe they don’t have all of the flavor of those blueberries that show up for three weeks after the two weeks of strawberries at the market, but each one is a little miracle, whether it’s in a pancake in the morning or on a pork chop at night. If I ate local, I’d never have another citrus fruit again. Or a banana; I like bananas. There’s a little deli down the street from me, Sustainable Man, run by a guy who lives nearby, and he carries the 00 Italian flour that makes my pizzas just that little extra bit better. There just aren’t any bags of flour at my neighborhood farmers market at all, not high-protein bread flour and not good old reliable all-purpose flour and certainly not 00 flour, but halfway around the world someone is grinding flour so fine that the increased surface area releases water faster when it hits my pizza stone so I get a crisper crust, and I can buy that two blocks from my apartment. Go on, Sustainable Man: Rip that out of my hands.

So I don’t know where Sustainable Man, Monsanto Man, and I break bread. (Let alone Cargill Man and ConAgra Man, but Sustainable Man doesn’t seem to be as worried about them.) Don’t get me wrong: I have little nice to say to or about Monsanto Man. But Sustainable Man, you seem to be pretty out of touch too. You create a false past and try to make us feel guilty that we don’t live in it. The USDA says that well over 8,000 farmers markets were open last year compared to only 1,755 20 years ago. During my lifetime, my grandmother never lived more than a short walk from a supermarket so she could stock up on the cans and cartons from which she worked magic. Can you tell us about the past you want us to live in again, Sustainable Man? I thought not.

What’s beyond cliché? What’s the term for those phrases so thoughtlessly mentioned that they make mere clichés seem fresh and sparkly?

I suspect that most of my friends consider me a foodie and consider that a compliment. Me, perhaps it’s because I’ve known so many people who were so far beyond any stage I ever reached, I like to think I’m someone who peered into the foodie abyss and edged back. I spent many pleasant days and nights with the tribe, wandering hither and yon (cliché!) for the sake of a meal and a shared experience. And migawd let’s not mention bacon (cliché!). But by and large my interest in food is in eating good food, and the lesson I learned from the tribe was to use good ingredients. Having learned that, for the most part (cliché!) I moved on.

In a handful of cities around the country PBS stations have a local show called “Check, Please!” in which regular people (cliché!) talk about their favorite restaurants. (The show debuted here and was franchised to other cities’ PBS stations.) Whether it’s a foodie show depends, of course, on whether or not you’re a foodie: To the people who like food, enjoy it, but don’t obsess over it, it absolutely is, because here are all of these people talking about their favorite restaurants. But the tribe I hung out with back in the day would snarl over each episode, sneering at the choices and grunting that these great unwashed were wallowing in mediocrity, denying themselves (and the rest of the city) the true pleasures of the city’s most sublime dining options, the ones they’d “discovered” themselves. (Because no restaurant exists to the tribe until one of them has “discovered” it and had the tribe vet it, after which the tribe and the “discoverer” alike discuss how smart they were to “discover” it.)

All that is background for a smaller point that circles back to our introductory sentence here, the notion that there’s something yet more banal than a cliché. Banality, I think, increases as the metaphors stretch, and the one phrase shared by the tribe and the “Check, Please!” reviewers is “to die for.”

Most of us have said this, haven’t we? Well, I haven’t, but maybe you have. On the tribe’s Web site, it’s been said some three thousand and eighty times. (The link is to a Google search of the site for the phrase.) No simple search facility is available for “Check, Please!” so we’ll have to engage in the kind of anecdotal research that prompts me to stare off into space and decide, “A lot.” (A similar search finds six hundred and twenty-three results, but we can’t assume the transcripts are accurate. But with three restaurants discussed on each of the 13 shows each season, that’s a lot of courses to die for.)

Is this the ultimate compliment? Is it a long-story-short (cliché!) way of saying “This is so good I’d choose it for my last meal”? Because that’s the banality. Chicago alone seems to have about 3,700 last meals to choose from according to our self-selected meal selectors.

In the meantime, I note that this was a very long ramble to make a very small point, which, in the blog world, is perhaps the biggest cliché of all.

There’s a new Lensbaby lens! Kinda tilt-shifty! Focus! Aperture! Depth of field! schlorp schlorp lick fingers

So I bought roughly the entire line of Lensbaby products a couple of years ago. Got the Composer unit that lets you shift your point of focus around, got the various low- to high-quality lenses (plastic for deliberately crappy pics; super glassy for the majestic awesomeness that only I can create); got the telephoto attachments and the macro attachments and the goofy aperture disks. (Hearts! Stars! Moons! I can make any landscape look like a bowl of Lucky Charms!)

It’s a fussy system that doesn’t lend itself to spur-of-the-moment shooting, but it’s well thought out and designed. Still, though, with my beloved 105mm Nikkor macro lens, when I come across something I think I can photograph well, I set the aperture to dial in the depth of field I’d like, lean in to compose the shot, take a quick look for distractions in the shot, and snap the shutter. It’s instantaneous and thoughtless.

Lensbaby? Not so much. OK, do I want the sharp edge of the double glass lens, the soft edge of the plastic lens, or the in between edge of the single glass lens? Let’s install that. What aperture would I like? That disc has to be in here somewhere. Got it! Let’s just use the magnetic wand to remove the old aperture disc and then use it to install the new aperture. Hm: Do I want a vivid closeup? Where’d those macro adapters go? How close do I want to get — do I need one, the other, or both? I think I’m all set. Has the light changed? Can I get it back? Aw.

I love to want things. And when I have a genuine interest, I love to experiment with something new. But because it’s so tedious to work out a shot with it, I haven’t even played with Lensbaby much. The three or so outings I taken it on, I’ve found only a very few shots that work for me.

Now, although I took a lot of pictures in 2011, I was pretty unhappy with most of them. A lot of those shots didn’t turn out well. Maybe it’s worth putting my usual glass aside and experimenting with something new, Lensbaby or otherwise. But as cool as the idea of a Lensbaby tilty-shifty lens seems, as much as I see the announcement and think, “Hey! That’s what I was waiting for!” I need to stabilize myself and decide whether the investment was a good or a bad one and commit from there.

Because if I install this on my phone, and then someone steals my phone, this blog will be updated much more regularly.

Today I had the kind of shitty day at work that made me want to quit again. A staffer wrote an article so grossly inaccurate I had to send the woman featured in the article the text and have her guide me through fixing it. She sent me two pages of notes. An accurate chronology, an accurate listing of the financial information involved (with a request not to divulge the deeply personal information the staffer thoughtlessly included), fixes for all the other things the staffer got wrong.

The article was given to me to copyedit yesterday afternoon; it was supposed to be in final review and sent to the printer today. Fortunately production gave up on it early. I’m going to spend way too much time Monday working out how to make the fucking thing publishable.

This isn’t my job and I want to quit.

But I guess I once again won’t.

This is the second time in a few months this has happened. A regular freelancer didn’t verify that a guy he wrote about was eligible to be in the magazine. The article was late, and I certainly played the odds by thinking I didn’t have to check the douchebag’s work, but the slap on his wrist was of the most miserably gentle variety, while I was put literally on double secret probation. (The probation was actually intensified a couple of days after it began. And it was secret.)

And since then, this douchebag has done this three more times. Every time, I’ve told his editor about it, and every time, it’s been rationalized away.

Now we’ve got this miserable staffer so grossly inaccurate in this one-page piece that I’m going to spend my four-day weekend obsessed over how to handle it when I get back on Monday.

This isn’t my job and I want to quit.

I’ve been going over the nature photography I’ve done in the last two years. Wow, I love that narrow depth of field. When I nail it, I nail it. But there are so many photos where it’s just a little too razor-thin. (And plenty where it’s way too thin.)

I think it’s time to nudge up the ISO by a stop so I can then stop down the aperture and bring more of the subject into the photo.

Old man moment: When I was in college, cameras weren’t computerized, so you always saw exactly what you were going to get. There was no need for a DOF preview button. And lenses were wide enough that you could see. Now, electronic lenses force you to compose and then keep hitting the DOF preview button until you like the results. It sucks; you lose a lot of spontaneity, you lose the moment. And when a lens’ biggest aperture is ƒ/4.5, well, it’s almost like it was designed to block more light than it lets in. That’s more than two stops you’re losing over an ƒ/2. I’ve been shooting with this camera for more than two years and I’m still not used to or happy with that. I’m still slowly adapting.

Barack Obama never thrilled me, and I did not vote for him. It always was clear that he was not a progressive; he is a centrist through and through at a time when the country needs a progressive. 

But still one could have held out hope. He said things many Americans wanted to hear and to believe. 

Do actions speak louder than words? As Obama has built his Cabinet he has conducted a Clinton reunion party, showing the country and the world that change you can believe in brings America back to 1995.

If there is a more significant way to say “fuck you” to America, I hope it isn’t Obama that we learn it from.

I did not like the Clinton years. They were not progressive years; they were not centrist years, except at their best, which was rare. Right-wing extremists who screamed about liberals and radicals were just making noise and talking to other right-wing extremists; Clinton, by and large, was to the right of center. It is only that right-wing extremists abused the nation so much during the Reagan and Bush Sr. years that they could present Clinton as any sort of creature of the left.

Clinton’s NAFTA alone drove a stake through Detroit’s heart far more than any Bush Jr. policy. We allow that Detroit begged for NAFTA, begged to be able to shift jobs to cheaper climes of this continent, begged to steal jobs from Americans.

It is not to his credit that Obama seems a little to the left of the Clintons. That shows him a centrist when we need a progressive.