Oddments of High Unimportance logo Oddments of High Unimportance

"It wasn't much of a game plan..."

I had no job. I was about to have no house, I still hadn’t found a boat. I had jumped into all of this without any kind of a backup plan. Every other accomplishment in my life had been part of a sane, linear progression. Now I faced a series of unknown what-ifs. What if my house deal fell through? What if I couldn’t find a boat I could afford? What if I couldn’t handle a boat? What if I got sick or ran out of money? All I could do, I realized, was surge ahead, clear one hurdle at a time, and keep on believing that I would be okay.

It wasn’t much of a game plan, but it was what I had…

Mary South, The Cure for Anything is Salt Water

Currently reading: My Father, the Pornographer by Chris Offutt 📚. Well-told, great details, and he takes his time unfurling the discoveries and weaving them in with his memories. But God, what a harrowing childhood he and his siblings had. Told with a tone of rather tired remembrance; there’s love there, sometimes (for his friends, his siblings, his mother), but little joy.

Finished audiobook: I Must Say by Martin Short 📚 We’d started listening to this last year and I finished it solo last night. Audiobook is the best way to experience Short as he does the voices, the characters, the singing, and his timing is exquisite. The middle career years are a bit of a slog, though he tipped me to some movies of his I’d never heard of. But the book’s heart is his relationship with his wife of 30 years, Nancy; the book’s last long sections detailing her cancer treatments and death were hard, tender, and full of love. I was so moved by his last conversation with Nancy that closes the book, and how his relationship with her was neverending (the book was written four years after her death). Come for the great showbiz stories, yes, but stay for the heart and the person.