crossroads

As I drive along near the fairgrounds one Sunday not far in the past, punching at the radio buttons in a vain search to find music worth listening to, I realize something I've forgotten again. So I turn off the blasted radio and roll down the window. I can hear it, but not well – a sax riff, the beat of a bass, a hum gearing up to the next chorus. It's the last night of the blues festival. I sail through the yellow light into another year's wait.

What's a blog for if not embarrassing confessions?

In eight summers here, half that time living in walking distance to the fairgrounds, I have never gotten to a blues festival. It's weird. Every year I say I want to go and every year I don't.

I seem to hear artists talk all the time about what music filled their houses growing up. Their dads with Sinatra on and their head under the hood of a car, or their parents away and the kids playing the Billie Holiday record over and over again.

What will Isaac say? “I have no idea how I ever came to tour Europe singing opera. Must have been all that talk radio I grew up listening to.”

What kind of artistic environment am I giving my kiddo besides a mom who disappears once in a while to create frustrated half-poems?

Shouldn't art be absorbing what you know and then letting go into possibility and visceral emotion? Sometimes I feel like my “art” is simply about thinking and over thinking. And lately I've been thinking that the problem with this blog isn't that I need to revitalize it, but maybe that I need to put it to rest. Mike says it isn't “Fetal Positions” any more, that it needs a new look and focus.

This is the last official day of my week-long drive to write every day. I did. But I'm not sure to what end. I of course have lots of other stories about my amazing, aggravating, beautiful son who is going to drain every little bit of energy out of me if it's the last thing he does. I've been less able to pull those stories from the pages of my journal in the last months and glean from them any pithy truths or witty verbiage.

If you read this thing, please send a comment and let me know if you do. Now would be the time to check in.