Essay Three in a Series of Meandering Musings about Life, the Arts, What Have You.

"One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the  'impossible,' come true.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, 1945

I should be working on many different things, including applications, revisions, and grading student papers. Yet I find myself at a cross roads, torn between doing the things I love and trying to keep food on the table. I struggle at being an academic, a teacher, a citizen of this mess of a country, while working sixteen hour days. I feel disappointed and broken if I take time to watch a movie or listen to a record. The mounting stress and anxiety bleeds into my work, etching my writing and my scholarship indelibly until the two become inseparable, a misshapen hulk of a thing, trending between monster, art, and commerce.

I know that this will someday end at the inquisition or the tenure track or the writing job unrelated to either. It is hard to see that light at the end of the tunnel. My father is also sick and needs surgery on an abdominal aortic aneurysm, which only adds to this puzzle. It makes me think: are we all this close to death or life? Is my rhetorical question valid or invalid or part of the interminable, unanswered and unanswerable questions I tell my students not to write? For now, I am just holding on. I will return to film and music writing soon. Watch for a format change possibly. Watch for the answers to this dilemma. Watch for something to happen here.


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