Good-bye to all that

I hate pre-midlife crises. What a pain in the arse. I knew it was coming, I just didn’t know how bad it would get.

How would you deal with being slightly suicidal, feeling trapped, and being a more generally miserable bastard than usual? You know what? Who the hell cares how you would deal with it. As in all things, I deal with things in my own patented, slightly askew, deeply insane manner.

How to deal with a pre-midlife crisis

Step 1: Be increasingly miserable, surly and develop an intense dislike for everything and everyone. Stew in this mix of juices for months or years.

Step 2: Decide, at last, that drastic measures must be taken. Decide what those measures are, dawdle for more months while you get your brain bent around the reality of the situation and finally, wisely abandon all hope.

Step 3: Implement those drastic measures in a modified, not totally insane, way.

Step 4: Ditch everything and fuck off to Nashville, Tennessee.

Step 5: I’m still working on this step but it will involve dawning realization that you’re just temporarily insane, that it’s probably hormonal, that it will pass in time. But, in the meantime, it’s probably best to have a seven-hundred mile cushion between you and your bridges. Just in case you get drunk with a Zippo in your pocket and several barrels of gasoline nearby.

So, here we are. Nashville – by God – Tennessee. Still living a transient existence of hotels and strip malls while desperately looking for anything that even barely resembles a neighborhood in which a civilised human being would want to live. Half of this damned place looks like the false suburban strip mall towns of New Jersey and the other half looks like the wasted old boom towns you see in spaghetti westerns.

But I’m here. For a while anyway. If I can swallow hard, bend over sufficiently and take the pain I might be able to find a decent, if overpriced, home in the only thing I’ve seen approximating a neighborhood. At the end of that block is a small strip of tony shops and restaurants and a pretty damned nifty bar with every football game in the world on about eleventy-hundred TVs and every Red Sox game they can get. I suppose that will have to do for a home for now.

The shame of it all is nobody in that neighborhood is southern. Ah well, I’ll just have to hang around the Ryman and throw construction debris at country music fans.

Oooh! Even better yet! I’ll stock up on construction debris and drive out to Opryland. Then I can hit tourists that are country music fans! Damn, it doesn’t get much happier than that.

Maybe I’ll make it after all.