Life – At the End of the Day

Telling Stories About Nothing

I recently watched a video from music and production guru Rick Beato where he discusses the strange course of his life over 62 years and how much it changed in the later years of his life and career. Here’s the video if you’re interested:

One of the more interesting takeaways is the idea that one of his most valuable skill sets at this point in his career is probably his ability to tell stories. He does it a lot. Stories of his life and career and collaborators… he talks about songs and musical constructs like they’re friends or old business partners.

I pondered this for a bit, and I realized that it really is central to his appeal. I enjoy his channel and return and again and again; even when I’m only tangentially interested in the content of a video, I’ll tune in.

Now I’ve long understood how personality drives entertainment. My first career was in radio, and the bulk of it involved putting people on the air and providing them the tools and support they needed for success. In that environment it’s impossible to miss the fact that the only real difference between one radio show or another, most of the time, was in the personalit(ies) that drove the program. As a podcaster over the years I’ve relied on the same mechanism – I’m not saying a whole of things that listeners can’t find elsewhere, but I say it in my own way.

I tell stories.

As the years have slipped by, however, I’ve become more and more disillusioned with the stories I tell. As an interviewer, I always prided myself on being able to find “true” moments in a conversation, particularly by disrupting a person’s ability to rely on rehearsed and regurgitated answers. Not excessively, of course; you’re not going to get a lot of interviews if you routinely make people uncomfortable. But now I find that so many of my stories are the same. They’re starting to feel rehearsed and uninspired.

Is that because I’m not creating new experiences worth talking about? Is it because my perspective on life and my hobbies and interests no longer evolves with enough grit to create new context?

Does getting older mean having less to say?

How often have you visited with an elder just to hear them share the same story you’ve heard before. I think we often dismiss this as their inability to remember that you’ve already heard it. But what if it’s just that we have a habit of telling ourselves and the people around us stories all our lives, and that as we get older the stories become more inflexible? We literally have less to say?

Unless we continue to push ourselves to have new experiences.

The real obstacle there is that getting older invariably means having less energy to devote to the exploration. Rick mentions in the video above that he started his YouTube channel in 2016. He would have been 54 at the time, launching into a new adventure with very little idea what he was getting into. And that he’s so glad he did it then, because he doesn’t know that he’d have the energy to pull it off if he started at 62.

I turned 49 recently. Sometimes I still feel young – particularly if I’m not calling attention to aches and pains with any sort of locomotion – and sometimes quite the opposite. I still love so many of the things that I do: writing and running RPGs, writing songs, working on my next novel. You know… telling stories. It gets harder and harder. I still read a lot, absorb TV and movies, and listen to music and podcasts… to get inspiration. To learn from those stories. Trying to perfect the craft of telling a story.

But how important is the art of storytelling if you have nothing new to say?

I don’t have an answer. Yet. Here’s a picture of my cat.

Maslow’s Beard

I find myself wondering if Maslow ever grew a beard.

In 1943, noted psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote a groundbreaking paper humbly entitled A Theory of Human Motivation. (I’d link it here, but it’s not an overstatement to insinuate that the original paper could easily cure insomnia, and there are so many places online where you can review the important bits.) In this paper, Maslow explores his now infamous Hierarchy of Needs, easily graphed as a pyramid. Like so.

Essentially, Maslow postulated that a healthy human has various needs that can be arranged in a simple hierarchy, and that foundational needs must be met before a person can effectively explore items at higher levels. It’s notable, in fact, that every level of the pyramid below the top are what Maslow referred to as “deficiency needs,” indicating that meeting these needs does not in itself create a strong sense of accomplishment (arguable, obviously) but that their omission inevitably creates anxiety and distress (less arguable). Clever, right?

Over the past several years, I have noticed some unexpected trends in my life. When the Pandemic hit and many of us were forced out of the workplace, some turned isolation into opportunity: going back to school, picking up a new project or hobby, learning more about sourdough than anyone really needs to know, and so forth. I was no exception… I determined during this time that I would further my education and set out to earn a Master’s degree. That was rewarding, though by the time I was finishing up my courses I was once again struggling to balance a full-time job, school, homeschooling my youngest, and engaging with my hobbies, interests, and other business ventures.

During the Pandemic, I had time. Way too much time. And I assumed that I would parlay that into other achievements. Shadow of the Spire was published in 2018, and now six years later I still don’t have a completed draft of the sequel. I started penning songs for a new album, but lacked the momentum to get them produced. I started new podcasts and assumed I’d be crafting all sorts of cool content for my community… and I quickly started falling behind and my podcast schedule fell apart in my hands like broken pieces of pottery.

These projects and ambitions have waxed and waned over the last four years, and its easy to track that trend and put it into perspective. Because even when I have time to focus on things that presumably drive me, the energy, inspiration, and conviction just aren’t there. And that trend coincides neatly with another trackable phenomenon…

We’ve been through some difficult terrain in recent years. The Pandemic left us adrift for a while. Our savings gone, our retirement expended. Friends relying on us for any assistance we could provide. My mother passed, and we pulled up stakes a couple times trying to reorient our lives. Whenever our circumstances created undue stress on our lives – financially, socially, medically, what have you – my initiative became a casualty. It’s so clear in hindsight, but in the midst of the muck it was just impossible to see the picture very clearly. Frustration ensued.

I can see now that even partial solutions were ineffective. We could navigate a financial crisis with no realistic expectation that the same shit wasn’t just around the proverbial corner. Health issues inevitably crop up as you get older, particularly when navigating so much stress. We would make plans to orient our lives toward specific goals and repeatedly find ourselves failing at even the simplest benchmarks.

So anyway… I find it interesting that the difference between a well-groomed beard and a wild-eyed madman with a shrub on his chin is often just a couple days of not really caring very much. And as I get ready for my next job interview, the beard becomes an enormously important point of focus. I have several tools and implements at my disposal – combs, clippers, blades, salve, oil, special shampoo, et cetera – and it all explodes into action when the time is right. I’m hiding a double chin, but never hiding the real me, right? Sure, everything else needs to be in order as well, but people really do look at your face.

So many psychologists from the olden days never wore beards. I suddenly wonder if they could really be trusted to understand my problems, you know?

More Than a Metaphor

Last week my family made the fateful journey back to the Great Plains. It is difficult not to feel like we’re retreating from the mountain home we had come to love, taking a huge step backward in life to the confines of our stormy homeland. And stormy it is – in Colorado Springs, while the occasionally snowfall meanders by, we are no longer accustomed to the moody bouts of rain and stormclouds that hover above the Kansas skyline. Where we landed in Manhattan it has now been raining for nearly 48 hours. Not storming for the most part, just persistent dribbling that comes and goes and leaves everything basically damp.

While Kansas boasts some lovely vistas and incredibly beautiful sunsets – and a night of rolling thunder across the prairie can be a comfort and sometimes electrifying (pun intended) – this gloom in particular seems to punctuate our move with an almost sinister intent. The drizzle coalescing on the window pane seems hell bent on sapping our will. And while the morrow may bring some modicum of sunlight, I know that we shall not see it this day.

We are moved. At this moment, my desk is one of the few places in the house that isn’t crowded by boxes waiting for their turn in The Unpackening. I have never loved moving – beyond the occasional bit of excitement in the adventure of landing in a new house and figuring out how to arrange your day-to-day life inside its rigid confines – and as I get older it becomes more and more challenging. We had to hire help this time to load and unload the truck, and the unload only managed about 75% of the inventory before I simply ran out of money. They did that much in 2 hours; it took us around 24 hours to vacate the remainder.

It’s sobering, to say the least.

But we are moved, our belongings safely ensconced at our new residence. We’ve set up shop a stone’s throw (well, if you’re a hill giant, at least) from our dear friends (read as “chosen family”) Jason and Julie, so at least we’ve had a safe haven amidst the madness. (Though they have a 9-week-old Pyrenees puppy, so safe may be a bit of an exaggeration…) And we know that the gloom will pass.

After all, this is Kansas; don’t like the weather? Just wait a minute.

Echoes

One month ago today, I heaved a big sigh of relief. After a difficult season of somewhat abbreviated paychecks, family health issues, a great time at the Wichita convention that cost us a chunk out of pocket to attend… our finances were finally moving the right direction. While we were heading into the holidays with a very limited budget, bills were being paid and we had a little breathing room. When Christmas weekend rolled around, my wife Jonikka and made the trek back to Kansas to spend the holiday with friends and family. We lingered for a time, ringing in the new year with camaraderie and a sense of relative contentment.

When we were on our way home on January 4th, we received the call. My wife’s contract with her employer – which should have given us another six months of rebuilding and finally being able to put money away – had been terminated. We were officially adrift, fluid enough to make it through the end of the month.

As often happens in our lives – so much so that it’s virtually a meme in our family – disaster accompanied opportunity. Just a few hours before receiving the call, a close friend had heard us waxing on about how much further my wife’s salary would stretch if we moved back to Kansas, and my sister-in-law had proposed that a new medication on the market might very well be the solution to Jonikka’s lower-altitude health concerns. Said friend offered to procure us a home, paying a rent that is only a fraction of our current commitment in Colorado Springs.

So with hearts a bit heavy, we prepare to bid farewell to our mountain home, with every intention of returning some day soon. The boxes are already starting to pile up around me as a write this, capturing the contents of our apartment with efficient cardboard sterility. We have two weeks to pack and clean, load our belongings into our cars and a massive uHaul, and make the voyage back to Kansas. Our coffers are dwindling. The cost of the move is staggering. Jonikka continues to look for work as I do my best to bring in a comparatively paltry sum. Our debts, while not insurmountable, are burdensome, and supporting a family of four beyond the next few weeks with our current resources is, in a word, unrealistic.

Invariably, things will work out. We have a seriously uncanny way of emerging from hardship with surprisingly few scars. That doesn’t make the interim any easier, of course, and while I want to be hopeful… well, it bleeds the energy right out of you.

A month ago, when I was heaving that sigh, I was staring at the arbitrary start of the new year with aspiration and a bit of hope. 2024 would be the year I finished the next book. I had plans for my podcasts and my Patreon supporters, and I was thinking about heading to Kickstarter with another gaming project. I was lining out ways to address the damage to our credit in the wake of the Pandemic, and we were starting to talk about buying a car and working toward a house.

That phone call was a serious kick in the teeth.

But we have each other. We have amazing friends and family that have helped where they can. We have games that bring us joy, and my projects – while on a temporary hold – continue to tantalize me with their possibilities. I am optimistic about the next adventure, no matter the hardship, because perseverance is inevitably the greatest tool in our collective utility belt.

And there’s one other thing I want to acknowledge. Over the years, my wife and I have striven to be the kind of friends who help anyone we can. We’ve opened our home and our pantry, our wallets when we could – sometimes even when we couldn’t – and the karmic elevation of that devotion to showing love and respect to those around us is paying off in dividends. It’s not a reward for good behavior – the reward, conspicuously enough, was caring for others – but rather a reminder that your kindness and compassion has a way of being revisited upon you when the need is there.

Good morrow, friends. Wherever you are, we’ll see you soon.