I am hopeful that my groove is returning as they say. I heard a train whistle this morning as I was outside putting garbage in the garbage can. It made me think of “Frickin Trains,” a song I wrote.

When I lived in Greeneville Tennessee, at first we lived next door to the church where Dad was the minister. Across the street was another row of houses and behind them was the railroad tracks. Hearing a train whistle was part of life then. It was this memory that helped kick off my writing “Frickin Trains.”

I always wondered why I came up with the word, “frickin.” I don’t use this word. I’m more likely to say “fuckin.” At the time I ascribed this usage to my youngest daughter, Sarah. (Hi Sarah and Matthew!) But as I think about it it probably also came out of the mouth of my son while he lived with us.

I just listened to my mp3 recording of Frickin Trains. While the recording is pretty bad, the song strikes me as pretty good. I couldn’t understand all of the lyrics but I remember that the first verse is about the memory of Greeneville, the second about meeting a desperate young man (boy really) on a bus. He had just got of prison and was on his way home. The third verse is about the call of the trains in the night and the eyes of the dead and reminds me of a sentiment that Mavis Gallen captured in her short story, “Voices Lost in the Snow.”

The main character who is a bit on the autobiographical side for Gallen is talking about her father and his decision to relocate the family from the city to the country in Canada. “He was, I think, attempting to isolate his wife, but by taking her out of the city [by doing so] he exposed her to a danger that, being English, he had never dreamed of: this was the heart-stopping cry of the steam train at night, sweeping across a frozen river, clattering on the ties of a wooden bridge. From our separate rooms, my mother and I heard the unrivalled summons, the long, urgent, uniquely North American beckoning. She would follow and so would I, but separately, years and desires and destinations apart.”

I wrote Frickin Trains years before I read this short story, but when I did read it, it reminded me of the song.

I have begun musing on my own composing. Virginia Woolf observed in her diary that “writing is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial.” I’m not the genius she was but I sort of know what she means, or at least I find something about the observation that fits me. Composing is my “profound pleasure.” Promoting my own work has always not been that interesting to me. Of course, I like to see my work performed. But often I want to be one of the performers. The more concrete the notion of how the piece is to be used the better for me. This sets limits to my ideas that include picturing specific people playing the music I make up.

Having retired from the church, living here in Holland a small provincial town where most of the musicians don’t see me as that relevant, if Rhonda doesn’t ask me to write something I’m not sure at this point I need compose unless I decide that’s it something I would rather do than read, practice, cook, or listen to music. This remains to be seen.

I don’t really have an outlet other than Rhonda asking me to write something or coming up with ideas of my own. Thinking about Frickin Trains reminds me that one thing I could do in retirement would be working with the many compositions I have made. I definitely have in mind organizing them. And I have thought that putting my songs into piano/vocal versions might be fun. If I did this they would probably be more accessible and usable.

And there is always the possibility inspiration will strike.

You can see I am begging to mull around how to spend retirement. Eileen insists that it’s too early to land on much or even do that much concrete thinking about it. My piano trio is waiting for me to contact them again and I probably will do so at least once and have Amy and Dawn over to the house for some playing. But honestly piano trio is not very high on my priorities. It’s as much if not more satisfying to sit and play piano/harpsichord literature by myself.

Some of this is colored by the fact that though I love my musicians, I live in a completely different musical/aesthetical world from them. I am sure there are people out there with whom I share a musical/aesthetical understanding. But I don’t know any of them personally.

More and more although there is historical music I dearly love, I find a lot of classical musical uninteresting. I could say the same about any “genre.” So much contemporary pop music seems dull to me.

I am feeling better. I didn’t realize how much of a struggle it was to maintain myself in the face of not knowing why I was covered with a rash. The diagnosis and subsequent shot and lotion is having an effect not only physically but relieving me enough to get some of my old fervor back.

As I begin writing today’s blog Eileen is at the doctor, either getting her ears fixed or a referral to do so. Hopefully her recent hearing problems are just something they can clean away.

The shot and topical steroid seems to be helping my eczema. It’s possible that my diet has affected my rash adversely. After a little checking online, I wonder if my predilection for tomatoes and citrus fruit is not helping. I am just finishing up the last tomato of tomato season. I am thinking of laying off tomatoes and citrus and see what happens. Of course, that introduces more than one variable but it’s easy enough to do.

I made bread this morning. It makes the house smell great! I finished Kunzru’s White Tears. I almost finished it last night but ended up reading the last twenty pages today before breakfast. Kunzru seems to have a pattern of starting his stories in a plausible attractive prose and then by the end of the book the world has basically gone crazy. I like that.

I read some more in Lewis Raven Wallace’s The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity. As far as I can tell Wallace’s podcast has fallen off the radar. The last episode seems to be done sometime in 2020. I will keep my eye out for them in the future.

In the meantime, I am loving the book. Wallace asks if the antidote to misinformation and disinformation might be curiosity. This makes sense to me. It is probably the incurious who ignore URLs of websites or do not inquire where information comes from. I am increasingly convinced that many people are just not paying close attention to the things that are being screamed online.

I am not saying there is no danger now, because there definitely is danger in the woefully uninformed and educated. My understanding was that Thomas Jefferson proposed that if we educate the public, we will be able to govern ourselves. I guess we are witnessing the inverse of this proposition at this time in the US.

Wallace quotes one of my favorite authors and poets, Kevin Young. “Calling bullshit is easy but it is urgent” Wallace quotes Young as saying. I was very happy to see that Wallace has read Young’s Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News . I had Young sign my copy of this book when we went to hear him read his poetry in GR. Young’s most salient observation which Wallace quotes more than once is in regard to just how hoaxes work. “Unlike a novel, the hoax feigns certainty yet depends on doubt, so much so that it might be said to colonize it.”

Colonize it. Colonialism of thought makes a metaphor of the terrible history of humans taking advantage of each other in the name of superiority of one thing or the other (race, country, gender, and on). Wallace observes, “Doubt is necessary…” but when it causes people to give up, rather than open a new line of inquiry, doubt has become colonized, indeed.”

Earlier in this chapter, Wallace quoted from an article by scholar, Ann Scales in the 1992 UCLA Woman’s Law Review. “Neutrality is dangerous: if one group can take a decidedly non-neutral point of view and get people to buy it on the grounds that it is neutral, the game is over… we depend on subjective interpretation to decide what is neutral, and those subjective decisions about neutrality tend to uphold the perspectives of those defining the terms of the debate. In other words, ‘objectivity’ always protects the status quo, interpreting the powerful as ‘neutral’ because it is those who create the frame.”

Objectivity is a myth used by the powers that be to go after people who have radical ideas that challenge the status quo.