Some long and meditative thoughts in the middle of the night in Daydreaming on the Porch

Back in pre-Internet says, there were only three broadcast networks from which people got their nightly TV news, and the daily newspapers in most of the larger cities. I remember highly anticipating delivery of both the morning “Times-Picayune” and the afternoon “States-Item” in New Orleans when I was a nerdy teenager. It’s a wonder I didn’t deliver the papers on my bike. In the Sixties, I was avidly pursuing pastimes that none of my peers even knew existed. For example, stamp collecting. I think my brother must have wondered what planet I was from. I might have even occasionally read my father’s Harper’s Magazine, which, by the way, is probably the most interesting of all magazines today, from the times I’ve dipped into my print editions.

But I wasn’t overwhelmed by news as I am now, plus a thousand and one other distractions. I put all the distractions aside for a short while most nights and sit out in the balcony around 4 am or so. As is the case most nights, I never take my phone with me. I sit and rock and look at the few stars I can see in the unfathomable night sky, and try to think the deepest thoughts as I’m mulling things over, constantly projecting on my inner-vision screen endless little snippets and vignettes of my life. I was just thinking that without the phone in my hand, I feel a bit blank and depressed, realizing that all I do out there is have little mini life-reviews, thinking to myself, “This is really it. Life as I once knew it when I was working and caregiving, and living 36-hour days not too terribly long ago, is gone, and engagement with the world gone with it.” There are no children and grands to Face-Time with or enjoyably keep up with. There’s just me and the opaque night sky. It’s not even satisfyingly inky black as it would be in the country covered with twinkling stars.

My life has basically been lived and I’m having trouble deciphering the “secrets of the universe”from among the multitude of podcasts, articles, YouTube videos, Web sites and communication gateways all over this vast Internet. Not to mention the increasingly pressing need to start reading the books I have carefully bought over the past ten years, which I feel sure will open up the cosmos — inner and outer — and allow me to more fully tap into the Universal Consciousness. These possibilities are all highly anticipatory and both fun and stimulating to think about. Getting fully involved reading and researching and informing myself about even a fraction of what’s out there is the hard part. But it will happen.

But where is the time? My life in one sense is just beginning anew in another dimension here in the city where I’ve lived for 30 years, and yet I find that I want to drag myself over the coals of past horrible decisions and work experiences, however brief, and actually and almost literally live in the past rather than the mentally and intellectually overwhelming present. Mentally, not emotionally. In old age I realize I have weathered enough storms to keep me comfortably numb, except when I read the horrible news every day.

Then there are all the manifest worries about aging, decrepitude and dying. Aches and pains of old age? Yes, they’ve started. I just bookmarked a “Frontline” documentary based on Atul Gwande’s book, “Being Mortal.” Another book beside my bed is practically begging to be read. Its title: “That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour.”

It’s about time to go out on the balcony and look up at the overcast night sky, so different from last night when a bright, near-full moon peeked in and out of clouds. All I want to do, though, is start watching a new movie on my iPad and try not to think about the looming possibility of post-election chaos and civil war. Not to mention the slow-moving, global-warming train wreck up ahead in the near future, as any sentient being can plainly see is very likely to occur. I feel I am trapped inside this summer, as being outside in the afternoon for only a short while, even a few minutes in this hellish July heat and humidity, induces visions of heat exhaustion or even heat stroke during this summer of our national discontent. Thank God for the night and the peace and quiet of 4 am to settle into the final lap of Internet fiddling and canoodling until I go to bed.

I stay up so late because it’s the pattern of nocturnal wakefulness and creative pursuits and meditative thinking that I have perfected over the last 30 years. I don’t have any good friends I can sit down with and have long talks or hang out with in an in-person friendship way. I don’t know what it’s like to have company because I’ve never have any. My “company” for the past 25 years has been a passing parade of virtual friends, with several becoming very good friends, but only virtually, which for me has worked well, and yet is sort of like a void as well. . No frozen dinners to fix for visitors or solving the eternal problem of where to put books stacked everywhere. Books, read and unread, mostly looked through and cherished, are my friends.

My return to meetings of a writing group every two weeks has somewhat lifted me out of a four-year period of solitude and virtual life in cyberspace, and into the world of flesh and blood, in-person people. At least for the time being. I am enjoying it, but it’s not something I have to have in my life. Or maybe it is. I’m conflicted. My little stories don’t seem to resonate that much with the other attendees. Maybe I’m too unusual, too eccentric, too odd? I don’t know. This doesn’t make me feel bad, and I am not at all surprised by this. I rarely if ever have the opportunity to discuss the writing I’ve done over the past 25 years with anyone. There was one notable exception when last fall I had an opportunity to talk in-depth about myself and my long-time journal writings/essays with two visiting academics and researchers from Europe. They have included some of what I’ve written, as well as materiel from extensive interviews, in a large research project they and others are doing. It has been an immensely gratifying and self-validating experience.

A small number of people read my writing. I’m content with that. I told someone the other day that if only one or two people actually read any particular online essay that I post, I am happy and grateful. Writing and photography are my life in retirement now. I’m at the point where I mostly write for myself, whereas in years past it was for an audience online, however small.

Four years, Including the recent Covid-19 pandemic, is a long time to be a near-hermit, weekly supper visits to my brother’s place not withstanding. Those visits to a house on the beach our family has enjoyed since the 1960s are the highlights of my week. I get recharged and realize there are other people out there. I love playing with their two dogs. I laugh a lot, have a delicious home-cooked meal (my only one of the week), take walks our sit out on the beach after dark, buffeted by strong but gentle sea breezes. I look up a night sky that has more stars to gaze at than when I’m in the city.

I can manage well by myself, but it can get pretty lonely not talking to anyone for days on end. I should go out to the beach more often but it’s a 20-mile round trip. That’s the irony. I enjoy the times when I am a social being around loved ones and friends, and it happens just often enough for me not to succumb to real loneliness depression, apart from my usual aloneness.

Communicating online is all I do, but gosh, being in the company of others makes me come alive in a whole other way. I’m not trying to be self-pitying here. I’m just being a realist, and now at my age I accept myself the way I am. I’ll still follow objectively foolish dreams and indulge in little fantasies, but who doesn’t? I seem to be dealt heavy doses of karma or something about once a week in the form of weird, scary and disturbing dreams, actually nightmares, like last night’s bizarre sequences of acts in a play that I couldn’t shake or forget for hours. I won’t even hint at what it was about.

My thoughts out on the balcony at 4 am get deeper, and the constant life reviews continue out there, with a small fan blowing and the stars obscured.

Honestly, without my writing and photography, I’d feel rather bereft and empty. I enjoy writing more than reading. People constantly disappoint and disillusion, but they probably say the same about me. Deep down they live in their own little walled-off bubbles, alone, whether they admit it or not, and so do I. Why not change all that? Because I have no desire or inclination to do so. Earlier in life? Yes. But at 73? No.