I think I understand people a little better in the past two weeks.

Amidst the chaos, confusion, and gnashing of teeth of everyday living, I understand people who want to escape into…anything else. Heavy social media curation. Bingeing movies and shows.

I used to be “how could you put that energy into that kind of stuff while all of THIS is going on?” and just now come to realize that “all of this” will still be going on. After the doom scrolling, and the show is over, or the vices have run out…the present reality is still there. It cannot be fully escaped.

But for 30 minutes or an hour or on a lazy Saturday, that reality can be ignored, and that’s what lets you keep your sanity. To be drawn into fictional lives, to acquit yourself of the mundane, unimportant, bothersome parts of societal relations with others similarly affected…is the only escape some people have.

That said, I am not a fan of the “sports radio” treatment of current events. I am not a fan of the constant rehashing, analysis, and “long time listener, first time caller” interactions from Everyman On The Street. I understand that reactions are an industry unto themselves now, but it’s not an industry I want to invest any time in, no matter what the reaction is or what we’re reacting to.

I think what sums this up can be equaled to a kind of conflict stress. Every day, we are bombarded with YOU WON YOU LOST THINGS SUCK YOU ARE UGLY YOUR NEIGHBORS ARE SKETCHY GET MONEY WATCH THE GAME WATCH THOSE PEOPLE by a ideological media for who this is all a game of clicks and numbers, and who am I to blame anyone for trying to sit out of that as long as they can?

I was outside having a smoke with my wife when I remembered a fond memory of Sundays when I was a kid. Let me tell you..

We would start early with Sunday School. To my mom’s credit, she hated being in church all day, and Sunday School was 9-10:30. She thought it important that I get a little God in my life; plus, she didn’t really like the minister, who was our example of What Not To Be As A Man Of God. So we’d go, leaving Dad at home, and get our God on, and come back.

If there wasn’t a football game to attend, we’d go shopping. We’d take a trip out to Cerritos to Fedco, which was a goverment-employee membership store about 40 minutes away. On the way there, we would turn on KLON 88.1 from Cal State Long Beach, as they played jazz and blues on Sundays. We’d go and get groceries, and.I would be turned loose in the book section as my parents shopped.

We’d leave there and maybe go to Cerritos Mall, or maybe Lakewood Mall for a while, and then back home with KLON playing their music. I’d be in the backseat as we would talk. We’d have great conversations, and I remember feeling…free. Happy. Content.

We’d get home, and Mom would cook early dinner, and we’d eat around 3. Any amount of goodness would away; Mom was, and still is, a master in the kitchen.

Afterwards, I’d help clean up, and they would adjourn to watch TV. I would turn on the little radio in my room and tune in to three radio programs that evening. The first was a spoken word program, kind of like the Moth, where people would tell stories. Secondly would be the Dr Demento Show, where he would play all and any mater of comedic songs and radio bits.

Thirdly, the 24 hour radio news channel would, for an hour, play two 30-minute episodes of old time radio shows. Those shows would vary, but I probably got my love for audio engineering from that show. The Cisco Kid. Green Hornet. The Jack Benny Show. Buck Rogers. I would sit only bed and draw or read, aware that Monday lay on the other side of sleep, but in those days, Monday just meant school, not a soul-crushing job or mandatory interaction with middle management.

As I got older, my bedtime was relaxed, but early on, bedtime was 8pm, and sometimes, I would smuggle my clock radio under the covers, turn the volume down REALLY low, press the speaker against my ear, and listen.

I wonder what it would take to get that peace back, of a routine that centers me, calms me.

Sitting outside with my wife listening to jazz is doing a good job of it now, though.

Sit and think with a drink about how I’m gonna win.

I may have waxed poetic about this space before in this space, but allow me this indulgence..

Flash back to 2020, and I was sent home at the beginning of Covid, as the world paused.My wife and I had a small porch in the back, but the area was small. We nestled next to our grill as we sat outside and read and talked. We both realized that outdoors was a great place to be, as we began to get used to this new reality of working from home.

So we contracted to expand our back porch. Construction took two days, and after it was done, we had gone from a small area to something more expansive, something we could fit chairs and a couch and an umbrella. We spent that summer outside when we could, in between Zoom meetings and me running into the office, being an Essential Worker.

We call it the best investment we’ve made, and we have spent many evenings outside, sipping drinks of various alcoholic content and indulging in cigars. I bought a small speaker and now things were on and popping. Since then, we’ve had friends over and made a ton of great memories. A lot of great conversations. More than a few musical premieres – the Kendrick diss records were first played out here to our delight – and we hid under the umbrella for more than a few light rain showers.

It is also a great introspective spot, to read and think. And tonight, while enjoying my cigar and reading an issue of the Bitter Southerner, I took time to think on two articles in Issue #7, published earlier this year.

In one article was the story of documentary photographer Paul Kwilecki, who spent his life in a rural Georgia county and took pictures of its 623 square mile area; its people, its woods, its buildings. His images are considered. vital to understanding not only that place, but the rural South. He’s not a household name, and he’s an ancestor now, but there is renewed interest in his photographs and his writings. He attained a bit of commercial success, so he didn’t die penniless or anything, but he was a known introvert who lived very much inside his head. I identified with that.

In another article with cover subject André 3000, written before the release of his flute album New Blue Sun, he says the things us fans have heard a million times about the work. How he’s exploring, how he’s excited to do something new. The interviewer asks him about his legacy, and if this impacts his p[lace in the hip-hop pantheon. And he says a thing that resonated so hard with me.

“A lineage lets me know I’m human. My life meant something. My trying times, my fucked-up times in this world has meant something. I wasn’t just here.”

Kwilecki was a man who spent 60+ years documenting his hometown and its environs, and is largely unknown outside the region and in a very specific genre of photography. But he existed, and contributed. He wasn’t just here; he MADE things. He left a legacy. He did great work worthy of study, and it sounds like he was satisfied with that.

We all know Dre 3K; also an introvert, but his music reached every corner of the globe. Two very different men, different impact, but both men created a legacy. Both men were not “just here”.

And every day, I’m trying to do the same. Leave a legacy, if not of work, but a cadre of people who can tell others that I was here. That I did, or said, or was something that lives on after me.

Don’t be “just here”.