Worn down

Some days I wake up just flat out beat, today was one of them. I think it was the news yesterday that Joe Romweber died. It's not that Joe and I were close, in fact I hadn't seen him in more the 30 years, but it brings back memories of other people that have died from the old Chapel Hill music scene, first and foremost Akin but then also Tim Brower, and then others.

It is hard not to have been thrown into an elegiac mood by all the death and fear that has surrounded us in the last year. And now, at a moment of great promise as the vaccine circulates, but when the data day to day suggest that the battle is far from won, that vaccine hesitancy -- supported by conscious efforts on the part of anti-vaxxers -- combined with ill-informed complacency, ensure yet more to death and potentially complicate everyone's emergence from the tunnel of COVID.

And then there's this Jackson Browne performance I came across after a post Mary's brother George made of Browne doing a song inspired a little micro-renaissance here at my desk. Somehow Browne captures it all here, the wistful loss of and longing for youth, manifest even in the slight cracking of his voice as he himself approaches 70.

For me, Jackson Browne is always connected to my friend Dwight, the best man at my wedding, who got really pissed off at me some years ago and disappeared back down to Brazil. Not that it was all about me. I was just one of a long line of people that Dwight had fallen out with, for reasons absolutely not worth going into here. But this returns me to the question of emotional exhaustion. I miss the guy and want to reach out to him but know that to do so risks stirring up a psychodrama that I can perhaps ill afford myself, with clients to tend, kids to shepherd, and just my own damned self to get into bed each night and out of it each morning.