Hemingway sought 'one true or perfect sentence.' I'll settle for a word. Then, another.

 

Sometimes, it's just an exhausting, ultimately depressing, and a desperate challenge to write.

When you are approaching 72. When a once exciting journalism career, and a couple years of book- writing, copy editing, and freelance writing wither in a market eroded by A.I., a flood of soulless content writing, and media pursuits increasingly driven by mindless ideologies.

It's tempting to just throw up your hands and declare, why try? Who cares? Who wants to read this? Or who will pay for it?

Ah, then you realize. Before the jobs, the paychecks, the mortgages, car payments, and pursuit of things . . . there had been that urge for art. 

Or, at least, there was that thrill, that yearning for the occasional taste of the words, the molecules of truth revealed, of beauty described -- if they only amounted to a single leaf on a flower, one of thousands in a meadow, sprouting beneath a forest of redwoods, sentinels nourished by the mists and waves from endless oceans stretching beyond the horizons.

Ernest Hemingway's tortured life ended in suicidal despair, but not before it  celebrated flashes of literary brilliance immortalized by his quest for that "one true or perfect sentence."

He did that well.

I'll settle for just one true perfect word. Then another.

Let's see how this goes.

A rant about 2024, and the hopes for a better New Year

OK, 2025. Let's try a new theme this time around, OK?

If the caricaturistic Baby New Year arriving as the Old New Year troll departs is what springs to mind, let's give the new kid some steel-toed combat boots to use while 2024 empties his cosmic Depends undies into the commode of history.

War, everywhere. Terrorism abroad, and on New Year's Eve in New Orleans. 

Family homelessness up 40 percent under the soon-to-depart Democratic rule of the past four years.

Crime surged, especially among the tens of thousands of illegally arrived convicted criminals, narco-gang members, and human traffickers that flowed across our broken borders; inept and misdirected immigration law enforcement played no small role, as directed and crippled by "progressive" far-left Democratic Party policies.

Then there were gender identity debates that tossed reason and biology to the winds of emotions and manufactured civil rights diatribes. Too often lost in the vitriol was the idea that every human being is worth something, loved by God, and is, for various reasons and the vagaries of life, in need of individual respect.

Finally, the voters may have rejected the lemming-like rush to the abyss, but will the pendulum now swing too far toward over-zealous retribution?

Will enforcement of the consequences of the years of deteriorating values and the resulting hate and division end up not fulfilling promises to restore moral and civil sanity . . . but devolve into our species' all-too-familiar patterns of revenge and retribution?

So, there's that to mull over, from a societal, even global perspective. By this time next year, we might have a clearer, and I hope more encouraging perspective,

Personally? My 2024 was one of hearing loss, the remedies -- hearing aids adjustment, possible yet-to-explored medical options -- seemingly in a frustrating, inconclusive stalemate.

Heart problems continued, treated with new prescriptions when electrical shocks failed to reset irregularities, and then a couple weeks ago by "ablation" (zapping from inside the heart, via arterial catheter). 

So far, docs say, that last procedure worked; they seem confident (and I pray) that all this did indeed cure those stubborn atrial flutters.

So, may 2025 see me turning 72 feeling better than I have in several years, and building new memories of love with my wife and family and leave those worries behind.

As for family, we all suffered as 2024 wound down. Thanksgiving and Christmas get-togethers here were unavoidably derailed.

Thanksgiving turkey dinners went into the freezer, instead of the mouths of gathered family. Christmas was not filled with the delighted shrieks and laughter of family opening gifts with us, or of packing our condo with hugs.

The stockings, which lined the fireplace mantle, were unfilled, that Jolly Old Elf a no show.

But Facetime video visits helped, digitally uniting grandparents in Utah with children and children-in-law (?) both nearby (but sick), and grandsons newly moved to Arizona from Maryland, and our granddaughter still in Baltimore.

Gifts went from being under the tree here, to being UPSed to their recipients, arriving a couple days late, but still appreciated. Whew.

Barbara, my mate of 51 years, and I endured a flood of Christmas TV movies. There was holiday music enjoyed as it played from the stereo, as we watched the fireplace, and how  its flamelight reflected and flickered along green holiday wreaths and manger scene miniatures.

Barbara helped with the Christmas programs and celebrations for kids and adults alike at her Evangelical church in West Valley City; I found my peace, awe, and loving fellowship amid echoing chants, clouds of incense, bells, prayers, and a constellation of candles at my Eastern Orthodox church in downtown Salt Lake City.

Lessons? 

St. Paul put it this way:

"Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and reaching forward to what is ahead." -- (Philippians 3:13)

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