Life's Chastening Effect

Lately I have been experiencing what my friend Treacy once called "life's chastening effect".  

Nothing specific, just a gradual erosion of spirit and deflation of confidence. I'm still painfully haunted by old ghosts and regrets, tired of going back and forth to Orange County trying to be dutiful, and about to release a book into the world that suddenly just makes me feel vulnerable and silly, which isn't the sort of thing I should be saying out loud, but I'm nothing if not honest.

When I get this way it's best if I simply hide. I even had a clash with a girl in a parking lot booth in Santa Barbara the other day because she wouldn't accept $1.49 for my $1.50 fee. It's amazing how pettiness can make me petty, and then the pettiness turns to anger, and I can understand how we'll never have world peace.

Fortunately, by the time I got to Goleta I could see this was not an issue upon which I should expend further emotion.I probably just need a dog.

You know what else is getting me down? This relentless focus on the 50th anniversary of JFK's assassination. It's depressing and sad to the point of masochism, veering at times to macabre. (Do we really need to look at the bullet holes and bloodied hair?)

Oh, I can relate to commemorative events, the shared sense of shock and loss, the ineffable memories of where and who we were, the way everything suddenly changed.  And I understand the impulse to speculate on what might have been.

But you know what I think all this 50th anniversary spectacle is really about?  It's our own sober awareness that fifty years have passed, and now we know what fifty years feels like.

A lifetime, almost.