A lost weekend with not much to say

What a difference a day makes. I considered stopping in on the “First Fridays” open mic night at the library in Narrowsburg, NY this weekend, but opted out at the last moment... therefore: not much to say.

Late Saturday afternoon I heard through the grapevine that Victoria Lesser was hosting the Lost and Wandering Blues and Jazz Band at the fabulous Old North Branch Inn in (you guessed it) North Branch, NY theoldnorthbranchinn.com ... therefore, I hightailed it over there to hear two full sets from legendary jazz artist Danny Fitzgerald and his merry band of cohorts.

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Please don’t squeeze the forests

The holiday season is upon us. Candles glitter in the windows, families and friends congregate around the fireplace, and I’m thinking about paper.

Approximately 93 percent of our paper comes from trees. Paper production uses about a fifth of the total wood harvest worldwide, and as much as half of all the 85 million tons of paper products Americans consume each year goes toward packaging, wrapping and decorating presents. Here’s how it works: we convert trees into glittery gift-wrap and shopping bags, rip it off our presents, crumple it up and throw it out to the tune of four million tons of trash. So trees end up in the landfills.

That sounds really crazy to me.

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Getting our affairs in order

In one of those interesting coincidences, my father’s death came a few hours after Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, one of the events generally seen as marking the start of the so-called “financial meltdown” of 2008. So this year, between those events and the healthcare debate, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the financial system… and mortality.

The two, I’ve come to realize, are deeply intertwined.

Consider the language of simplicity: in talking about creating more sustainable lifestyles, we frequently use phrases like “slowing down,” “cutting back” and “letting go”—and aren’t those phrases that we might use when speaking to an aged relative, or to someone who’s terminally ill?

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Bad mood?

It had been one of those days where nothing goes right. The kind of day where a bad mood just floats above your head like a dark cloud. The kind of bad mood that hangs on you like wet clothes, like a massive throbbing headache, appearing without warning and unshakable.

I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed, I tell myself, trying to stay focused on work and having no luck. Henry and I bickered about writing an e-mail to a sound designer. I smoked a cigarette and walked around the block to cheer myself up. There was palpable tension in the office.

One of my favorite movies has always been “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

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