One last word...

After hearing the news that R.E.M. have split up after 31 years and my own marriage is concluding after 13 years, all I want to say in this brief post is "thank you" to the band that really pointed me in the direction I needed to take. From the moment I heard "Chronic Town", parallel to joining Two Minutes Hate, I knew R.E.M. were something special. And their influence, a little TOO obviously, helped shape what was to come in The Punch Line. Anyone and everyone who knows me knows how much that band meant to me.

I loved R.E.M. with my girlfriends; I loved R.E.M. with my wife. And now all of those are just a memory. So, with a great deal of love, some sadness, bittersweetness and respect, I say to R.E.M. thank you very much for helping write a part of my own soundtrack...

Yesterday in the western world

Surprising that it's been a month since I last wrote anything. But time and changes are coming faster and faster now. An upcoming change of address, so to speak; a shift in domesticity and so forth. Divorce is not easy, but cruelly, sometimes necessary. People come and go in and out of my life and I've learned to accept it. I don't necessarily resign myself to it and frankly, I don't like it, but if my stability and solid sense of footing clashes with someone else's state of chronic flux, then why be there?

I'm not a young man anymore; I'm officially at the end of "middle age" and it's long overdue that I re-evaluate my life and try to find the most positive avenue for whatever time is left. And that isn't wrong or bad; it's just reality, which I find greater comfort in. Especially at this time and age.