Conversation

I'm an absolutely horrible repeater of things. I tell the same news or story to the same person twice, I come up with the same points quasi-spontaneously over and over again, my mind has its grooves and habits. We all do, but with me I think the tendency is particular, and it helps me as a writer, but it can make me insufferable as a conversationalist. I know it, but I've never concentrated hard enough to cure it.

One thing this recycling spin does is to bring ideas to greater clarity.

A great number of the posts here started life as conversations, or go on to become conversations. Probably the disproportionate contributor is X. We were talking the other day about how the concept of album-rock, something so common as to actually be a part of our social lives growing up (I remember going over to my friend P's to listen to his records, and often to listen to him playing album tracks on his guitar ... "woo Stairway!" ... or to M's to sit in his mother-in-law's apartment pad with the homemade party light, set to pulse *to the music*) but now now that format is clung to mainly by prog rock and less mainstream genre music these days. CDs are losing supremacy (NPR says the digital format actually sowed the seeds of its own demise, and that does have an interesting sense to it, yeah), and people pick and choose their tracks.

I don't think the world is becoming greatest-hits limited necessarily, but the harvest is a lot less even now.

X also came up with the descriptor of me I used recently, in the black sweater on a book flap blurb.

A lot of people don't "get" the X thing, and it's not like it tickles me to death all the time, being too far away to see him enough - but his brain, his conversation, are indispensible to me. The way his brain makes my brain work would be literally painful to live without - life would be less without him, even "just" in the only real form we have, conversationally.


When we memorialized my dad, I said of him at the time that life with him had been one long conversation. Our last had nothing to do with the hospital he lay in; we talked about X a little bit, about my birthday, which was near. We talked about Roman history, the end of the republic, the dictator Sulla, the women in that world. I miss talking with dad. There was the one person who set a standard of interest in others that's probably ruined me for most other people's attentiveness.

He never knew about my book. I didn't start it until after he died. Talking with him about it would have been ...

... I've missed being able to talk with dad. He would have been so enthusiastic. He was so interested, in so many things. He was a nice person, but not just some grinning schmoopy happy face. He respected people, but even so they had to earn it. He was differently musical, omnivorously literate. He was always quoting Ogden Nash, or classic american poets, or Kipling, or snippets of music, when he whistled. Mozart, Souza, or Chitty Chitty Bang-Bang, he was varied. As educated as he was, when he had a heart attack, it was probably spy novels he consumed the most of. Dad loved Bond and Le Carre, he was a bit of a "man's man" in certain entertainments, but he also had a big collection of original Broadway musical albums.

Dad was a really REALLY interesting person, and the longer I go without talking with him, the more he fascinates me.

He also, I think, probably had a talent for keeping me on a point. What the one was initially guiding this post appears to have been lost, unfortunately. But stream of consciousness. This is a blog, after all.



I miss my dad.

I'm also hungry. So I'm going to put down the maudlin-pencil, so to speak, go out in the sunshine he would have described as "glorious!", and forage for a meal.

It'd be sensless, after all, to sit here pinned to a computer, with a Sunday like the one we seem to have going on, going on out there. Just moping about the departed. So in memory of dad: a quest for a good meal, on a lovely spring day.