This album has nothing really to do with anything going on in my life, except for the melancholic tone, and maybe that’s everything to do with my life, or life in general. No sense in pretending that everything makes sense and no sense in demanding that it all has to connect. It’s just a good reflection of how things feel at the moment.

The old man passed a few days ago. Ronnie. My step-father. I’ve had a few father figures, some better than others and he was pretty much the best of the lot. Human. Inherently imperfect as human things go. Kind. He was kind. Flawed as every human has a right to be, but kind, and that’s probably the best way to be. I’m going to miss him. Not that I saw him more than a half dozen or eight times a year but that’s a lot more than I expected to be if we get back beyond ten years into the past. We were kind of distant, or rather, I was distant. It’s a complicated story that I don’t feel like getting into. Let’s just say there is gratitude that we were able to reconnect and those forays up the river to see him meant an awful lot to me. It lent a kind of normalcy to a life that was always very far from normal. Things change. In my case, they got closer to to normal than they’d ever been. I’m grateful for that.

I’ve grown closer to quite a few people in my family in recent years, and grown more distant from other. I’m not going to blame them for that, and I’m not going to take responsibility for the distance either. These are troubled times and the strife has seeded so much discord and animosity. Blood ties don’t mean what they used to, or at least what they used to tell us they were supposed to mean.

What am I doing here, right now? Just talking, I suppose. There are all these feelings late into Christmas Day and there was nowhere else to put them. I imagine there are people all over the world right now, a lot of people, in pretty much the same state of mind, wondering how we let it get like this. Not that there hasn’t always been troubles, but something seems to be missing now. What have we lost? I mean, I’ve gained on the micro scale. The very personal scale. But the bigger picture? It feels like we lost the plot. We seem to have forgotten how to hope. Everybody got tired maybe and wants a final solution in the I’m right you’re wrong game. There’s something I hear every day. Condemnation.

But now I’m just talking. I’m going to miss the Old Man. He didn’t talk much but he made me laugh. And I admired that despite a temper, he was a very tender guy with great big fucking feelings. He loved big and loved forever. And he always took us down the street and bought us pizza, like we were still little kids. I liked feeling that way.