This oil painting is called “The Unfinished Stag”
You never quite reach the end of the list of things you ought to do. Some lazy days it is hard to even write the words you desperately need to write. I have unfinished business in this life. Not just the need to finish bankruptcy paperwork and finish my transition to poor retired English teacher on a fixed income. Not just the never ending yard work and home maintenance and repair, some of which involves fines from the city for not completing. I still have pictures to paint, cartoons to draw, and stories to tell. That last part of me is probably the most important unfinished business, because it represents the legacy I will leave behind. I know I am only a nobody novelist who has some mediocre art talent. But it is the immortal part of me never-the-less.
This is an unfinished illustration that ties into my vast pile of unfinished science fiction dreams.
I did just finish a book. I reread Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven.
Here’s my Goodreads Review; Five Stars
Fiction as great art doesn’t get any more magical and soul-restoring than this book, perhaps the best that Mitch Albom ever wrote, and that’s saying a lot. The last line of this book is worth all the reading you’ve ever done in your life. You must read this book BEFORE you meet your five.
But you read to the end of a book like this, and you realize, you will never be truly finished with it. For as long as you live you will be drawn back to it, remembering the story, remembering the feelings it evoked, the chances you will have to recommend it to others, and the way it informs the way you live your own life. There is no way to ever finish a book like that… or like To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, or Lord of the Flies by William Golding, or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. I could do a whole book about books I will never be finished with.
This too is an unfinished painting. The black at the bottom was supposed to be something else, but I left it black and liked it that way. at least until I cropped it and cut the Dust Man’s legs off at the knees.
And so I have so much unfinished business to take care of, I really didn’t come up with a good idea for this essay. So what will I write about today? I guess I will just have to leave it… unfinished.
Catch a Falling Star 
Theme Songs for Living Life
You know how in movies and on TV they play a soundtrack behind the action of the show? And how, sometimes, if the movie or TV show is any good, it enhances and underscores whatever is happening to the main theme of story and the action that expresses it on the screen? Yeah, that. A complex idea that lies just under the surface of consciousness, a something that somebody sometime thought up that actually works and can work quite well. But why does it work?
Put as simply as I can say an idea that is so layered and complex, it is because that is how real life works. Yeah, there is music in the background of every life. It plays almost unnoticed until that point where you suddenly realize how it defines your very soul.
Through childhood and junior high and high school, I used to joke with my two sisters that every song that came on the radio was my favorite song, my theme song. Every new Beatles’ song, or Paul Revere and the Raiders’ song, or Elton John musical fantasy was the song that defined my entire life. Yes, I really was that fickle. But I was also responding to a sense that who I was had to change into something new as often as you heard a new song on the radio or bought a new record album. (Yes, I know some of you have no idea what that is, but I am a child of the 60’s and 70’s, and I make no excuse for that. So deal with it.)
I hope you have listened to some of the YouTube song-thingies I have added to this post. They are not picked at random. They are some of the key theme songs of my goofy, pointless, and fantastical life.
The Astroboy opening theme is here to represent my early childhood. When I had the courage of the irrepressible imagination of childhood. I soared with Astroboy through every black-and-white episode I could get hold of in the 60’s. At times it met getting out of bed early to catch it at 6:00 am, just after Channel 3 came on the air in the morning. At times it meant rushing home as soon as school let out because it came on only half an hour after the last bell, and the school was on the north end of Rowan, while home was as far south as the town went.
I really used to believe that I would grow up to lead a heroic life and make a name for myself that would inspire others to greatness too. We are uncommonly stupidly when we are children, and we need simplistic theme songs to wake us up to life gradually.
The Eagles provided the theme songs of my high school and college young manhood. Trying out life, at times boldly, and at most times timidly, I had to “Take It to the Limit” as often as I could manage. It turned out that due to irrepressible social awkwardness, my greatest presses against the walls of my existence were all academic in nature. We learn by doing… and failing… and trying again. The songs become more complex as they weave themselves into the background of your life story.
As a young teacher, shy and soft-spoken, it was impressed on me that discipline was about controlling behavior which you had to do by being stern and unyielding, good at rule-setting and handing down punishments. But with my goofy temperament and non-threatening clown face, I soon learned that that road only led to misery and heartache for both me and, more importantly, the students. In the 80’s I learned that you had to follow Bobby McFerrin’s philosophy of “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”. I learned that you don’t teach someone lasting lessons by pushing them from behind with paddles and switches, but by leading them forward with jokes and obvious joy in the lessons you are teaching.
Now that I have grown old and awful in the winter of my life, the songs that express my personal themes are classical music and complex with snowflakian symmetry and stark, cold beauty. I would talk about a few more particulars, but I am now well past 500 words, and if you don’t have the idea yet, I’m sorry, you are probably never going to hear that music yourself. But don’t worry… be happy.
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