The End of August

One of my favorite Yanni songs, the End of August, is now actually approaching Tom Cat Ridge in real time. This morning I am up at Oh-Ungodly hours (seven a.m.), preparing to work the camps this morning at the Y.

I stuck my head out the back porch deck doorway, to enjoy a quick breath of morning air, something this hard shell Scorpio nocturnal creature rarely, if ever, does... and I could feel the excitement of Autumn beginning to tinge the trees with its cool, embracing bite. God, I love Fall!

Second cup of coffee, and trying to make sense of the morning. Last week I found some old cassette tapes from the late eighties/ early nineties. Tapes of the ECHOES show from NPR, 90.7 in Orlando, of their original New Age programming. Transferred them to CD, and now I am listening to them on the five disc changer. Had not heard them for 20 years, or more... Now, it seems as though I have stepped back in time.

I am almost glad to be turning 50 years old. Since I have realized this, I have released the death grip I had upon Life. It is a really nice feeling, actually.

I look around me, and I see all of these projects I have completed in my time on earth. The volumes of poetry, the novels, the drawings, and the films and movies... Stuff that is just now beginning to see the light of day, thanks to the newfound legitimacy of self publishing, and computer promotion. Some of it is pretty good, actually. But this was the legacy that I thought to leave.

As great a man as Thomas Jefferson was, he left a few inventions, 18,000 plus letters, and a couple of homes, one of them just down the road from me, here... about a day's ride.

If I left everything today, for others to discover, I would be content with what I have gotten done. And that has made me step back, slow down, and begin to take a new approach to the final stages of Life. Where just several weeks ago I was completely focused and driven, and plowing through new projects like they were on fire, now I seem to be easing up, in a most wonderfully soothing way. I have some forty odd films out, right now. These new ones will get there, eventually. What is my real hurry, after all?

I plan to keep my land up here, and live a good deal of my time at the beach, in Florida... Coming back and forth as I get tired of one area, or as the weather gets hateful here, or there... Rent a beach house, and stay as long as I like. Forget owning land down there, where the Northerners have so fed upon everyone with their damnable taxes that only they remain, now, and they are now feeding on each other. But when we lived there, in 2009, for 13 months, we figured out that renting is the new deal...
You can get a place on the beach for next to nothing, any more... so long as you do not try and call it your own property!

The Transplant Florida Yankees can have everything from the sand dunes, west, to the Gulf Coast. Just give me the sand from the high tide line east, to the surf, and we'll get along just fine!