I’m tired and restless. This was that soft-life nightmare-scenario year where both stocks and bonds declined in value. Who was going to see that coming?
It’s like how we usually get invited by our friend to add music to a “Best of Year” playlist, which goes on queue at her year-end New Year’s Eve bash. Except this year, nothing, no mention of it. She’s got the entire musical landscape covered?
It’s December, morning of, there’s frost on everything. Trees, cars, telephone wires, even the birds and the running water have a bit of rime on their wing and wave.
So I call her.
“It was getting a little old,” she says. “I just wanted to play my music this year.”
“I had good music gathered up,” I say.
“I’m sure you did,” she says. “In fact, I could feel it gathering, building like a wall. That was kind of the problem.”
I suppose, out there, there are squirrels that hide too many nuts. What they end up with more than anything else are holes in the ground, all over the place, in people’s yards and in the parks. Those holes must be useful to some organism, sooner or later, but not to the squirrel, and not to me.
I had decisions to make. Go to cash? Go to the party? Any scenario I played out in my head felt like a defeat. What if I had my own party, sort of like answering a question with a question? Not a New Year’s Party, I’m not looking for a duel. How about the next holiday, what would that be, MLK Day? Would that be inappropriate?
Maybe it’s a bad idea, something I’m doing out of emotion, kind of like buying a stock when it’s down only because it’s down. Don’t you have to wait until it stops going down, and only buy it then? And by then isn’t it too late? Hasn’t the smart money already acted, making you the dumb money, the sucker at the table, wondering when, if ever, your song is finally going to play?
The Writing of John B. Randall 