Eyes Front | Flash Fiction

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There is nothing you can do. No time. When Daddy says get in the car, you get in the car. You don’t make him wait. You don’t talk back. You don’t ask questions. You sit in your seat, eyes front, buckle your seat belt and be ready for the ride.

You won’t know where the two of you are going. It does not matter. Where Daddy goes, you go.

Sometimes it is scary because it happens so quick. One minute you are eating Cheerios together in the living room, watching late night TV and you are laughing together about the stupid things people tell Johnny Carson and everything is great and happy and fun and then, with exactly no warning, Daddy goes all still, listening for something you cannot hear. And he leans forward in his chair, suddenly tense and ready to spring, like he is waiting for something to happen and then he is yelling and grabbing for his keys. Pulling at your arm, telling you to hurry. Yelling for you to be quiet. And there is urgency in him. There is precision. And you reach for your favorite toys because there is no telling where you will be going this time, for how long. You manage to grab Dolly which is good because Dolly is the only important doll anyway. She’s the one your momma gave you when you were too young to remember. And it would be awful to leave Dolly behind since you don’t really remember your momma except for a few pictures but you like to think that Dolly remembers her and leaving Dolly would be the same as forgetting, except forgetting forever, which would be another kind of dying for your momma who is dead already. At least that it what Daddy says but you can’t be sure because sometimes you look behind you to try and find the person driving the car that is following you in the abysmal dark and it is a woman so you think it might be your momma but you don’t dare ask your Daddy about that because he just tells you to shut up about that and keep eyes front.

Eyes front is the family rule. Look ahead. Be ready to move. Go when Daddy says go.

And you are in the car and you are trying to be brave even though you are really scared, which is not the same thing, Daddy sometimes tells you when you are safe and quiet at the hotel or truck stop or wherever the two of you will be sleeping tonight. Even when you are scared, you can always be brave. Actually, when you are scared is the only time you can be brave. And it is good to see him smile when he tells you this but it isn’t his good smile. It is his eyes front smile. The smile that isn’t happy or glad about anything. The smile that doesn’t want questions.

It would be nice not to have to be brave so much all the time. But even that doesn’t matter after a few hours on the road when Daddy is playing the radio and singing along and he isn’t driving the car so fast and there’s time to watch the night time world pass by. The way the world seems to emerge into the headlights. Like the trees are stretching out to touch you. And the yellow dashy lines from the narrow, country highway strobe in the dark. There are no gas stations out here and Daddy is keeping his eye on the gas needle and also an eye on the speed needle but mostly he is practicing what he has told you. Eyes front. Looking forward.

He drives until you fall asleep. You wake up in a strange, different place. Dolly is with you so maybe momma is with you too. You don’t tell Daddy this. It would just stress him out. He looks sweet and peaceful, sleeping in the hotel room lounge chair. He needs to shave. He needs to brush his hair.

You should brush your teeth but you can’t because you left too fast and didn’t bring your toothbrush. You lay on the bed in the dark room and look up at the hotel ceiling, an unfamiliar sky. There’s nothing to see there. You look anyway. Eyes front.

After a while you will be sleeping and then there will be the dreams. Momma and daddy and kiddo. All one happy, smiling family.

Prompt: “No Daddy No” by Pretty & Twisted.

2017: Look Back

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2017 was a difficult year.

Okay, that was a literary device called understatement. 2017 was a shit ass painful year. It was frightening, dispiriting and chaotic. People I love got swallowed up by their depression. The monster got me into its mouth a time or two, but, for now, I manage to keep climbing back out.

In January, we swore in our Reality TV show president. He gave us a dark, sinister inauguration speech. American carnage, anyone? American carnage ensued. Most mornings through June I woke up in a panic, thinking there had to be something I could do to help slow the carnage.

I wrote my senators. One of my senators sent back form letters explaining why I was stupid and wrong. My other senator sent thoughtful, considerate replies. He actually agreed with me on a few points and voted accordingly. Then, he sold his vote for personal profit. If you haven’t noticed, the representative part of representative democracy is broken.

But I digress. This isn’t a political post. Politics was a blanket over most everything I thought, felt or did in 2017. It made me an anxious wreck. Politics are important and inescapable. Politics describe how power moves through groups of people. This isn’t Republican vs Democrat stuff. This is The Powerful vs Everybody Else stuff. Please do pay attention.

At yet, as I sit here in the last 12 hours of 2017 thinking back over the year, it isn’t the awfulness and anxiety that comes to me. I find, looking backward, that my life remains wonderful.

I started taking piano lessons in January. I’m not brilliant but the practice is creative struggle. It is difficult. The difficulty is the point. My daughter plays too. She has more natural ability than I ever hope to have. It is a joy to let her see me struggle with my imperfection. What I lack in talent, I make up for in discipline. I hope she notices me getting incrementally better.

We bought a piano in February. Felt hammers on metal strings in a house with wood floors. We make a joyful noise.

My wife and I attended a weekend poetry workshop at Campbell Folk School in June. I reconnected with poetry, enjoyed the company of fellow poets and ate dinner with a few blacksmiths. It was a very Walt Whitman weekend. Oh, and I befriended a tree.

I run three libraries for my college. We recarpeted the largest library in June. The new carpet made a huge difference. Our entire building felt the way you feel when you wear new clothes for the first time — fresh, eager, confident — plus that new car smell. In preparing for the new carpet, my team recognized that our shelves no longer showcased the best of what our library has to offer. We woke up one day and realized we were highlighting dusty back runs of magazines no one read anymore, reference books no one needed and microfilm no one understood. We lightened up, opened the space and created alcoves to show off our new books, new magazines and media. There’s still work to do, but you can now step in the front door and understand what the library is for.

Fall semester started with a full solar eclipse. I watched with my family from campus while listening to Dark Side of the Moon. It was incredible.

In September, my wife and I saw HGTV’s Property Brothers give a live performance. I didn’t know what to expect. It was super fun. They took interactive questions from the audience via Twitter. My Twitter question was first. Jonathan Scott gave me a shout out by name. I felt Twitter famous for something like 20 seconds.

My house is a refuge for needy dogs. We’ve had five dogs for several years. Four of them were senior. We lost Bella and Bailey this year. Bella was blind and getting confused. Bailey’s back legs gave out. We miss them terribly. The morning we put Bailey down, my daughter asked why dogs have to die before people do. I told her it was too help us practice loving people we know we are going to lose someday and loving them anyway. It was a hard truth. Truth is always hard.

We took our first family camping trip in October. Three nights at Big South Fork Park. We had great weather. We rode a train and visited an old Kentucky coal camp. I woke up every morning profoundly grateful for a mediocre cup of instant coffee and read Mary Oliver while in the woods. I put down my phone and took off my Fitbit. I measured time by hunger and the angle of sunlight. Like Thoreau, I lived deliberately. I felt awake.

A few weeks later I visited a community college as part of an onsite accreditation team. The team I worked with was well-organized, well-prepared and well-led. We liked each other and helped other. I’ve done leadership academies and conferences. I read about leadership principles and practices. That three day visit was one of the best professional experiences of my life.

In November, my library team hosted our first Long Night Against Procrastination. Two hundred students showed up to take advantage of extra library/learning center help, get focused on their end of semester goals and eat free food. It felt good to help student focus on practical, specific goals. It reminded me to do the same.

I ran my first half-marathon the week before Thanksgiving. I trained with a running group on Saturday mornings for months. Each week, I felt myself getting stronger and better prepared. A few weeks before, I did a practice half with these friends and found I had set my goals too low. I knew I could run 13.1 miles and a bit faster than I had expected. I had a terrific partner for race day. We ran the best race of our lives, greatly outperforming my own expectations.

And now, I am enjoying the last few days of a two week vacation. I stay up too late with my night-owl wife and wake up whenever I want. We are visiting family and friends. We are together.

And so, it seems 2017 wasn’t awful at all. My life is bursting with richness and reward. I find that I am well-blessed to live in a house with people I love and who love me. I work with great people, and our work is meaningful. I write things. People read them.

The year ahead will be politically brutal. The Powerful will seek to make themselves more powerful still. They will seem to succeed. We will resist. But as we do, as we engage in the coming struggles, let’s remember that our lives are made with our attention.

Every day is new. Every day contains wonder.

Empty Chair

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There is an empty chair at your Christmas table. Maybe you lost someone 40 years ago. Maybe you lost someone earlier this week. Our Christmas celebrations recognize abundance — the gathering of friends and family into our homes, the tables laden with roast and casseroles and treats. Our Christmas trees are rooted deep in piles of gifts given and gifts received.

But Christmas is also about what’s missing. The people we loved, we lost and we need back in our lives. When we slow down to recognize the empty chairs, it isn’t only their absence we feel. There is greater abundance. We laugh. We tell stories. We remember. Their lives fill our lives.

We hug our children. We kiss our wives. We celebrate the long unbroken line that is our family meal. The table stretches farther before us and farther beyond us than we can possibly see. And yet, we each have our plate, our place at this table. For this moment, maybe the next, until one day we too have passed and the empty chair is ours and it is our time to hope our lives have helped make the meal richer for all.

Star Wars: A new New Hope

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It has been a week since Star Wars: The Last Jedi dropped and armies of hyperventilating nerd trolls are still wandering the streets looking for their despoiled childhoods. I get it. I felt it, too. Last Jedi was weird. It was packed full of not always funny jokes, the battles were fewer and less epic and, oh yeah, the Luke Skywalker thing.

Star Wars was my childhood. I learned how to tell stories by playing with buckets of action figures everyday for hours and hours and hours. I mastered the ventriloquistic verities of blaster and lightsaber battles. I could voice distinct X-Wing, Tie Fighter and Millennium Falcon flight sounds.

I had the requisite adolescent crush on Princess Leia, though I strongly preferred her in the giving orders/looking worried Hoth/Cloud City get up rather than the infamous golden bikini of Jabba’s Palace. The Endor look was fetching, but the braids were a bit too precious.

Yoda was my sensei. “Do or do not. There is no try,” is everything you need to know about Buddhist meditation.

John Williams was the soundtrack to my early years. I still use the “Throne Room/End Titles” to celebrate important life events. Not sure why Michelle and I didn’t use it for our wedding march. That was a missed opportunity.

So far, every new Star Wars release has been more or less a predictable affair. The Lucasfilm logo appears, the audience cheers, the unnecessary preamble words scroll and we launch into a game of interstellar cat and mouse at warp speed. Along the way, we are reminded that so and so is our only hope. Ben Kenobi, Luke Skywalker, even that pesky Anakin twerp. All of that is done now. The Last Jedi killed the formula. They told a different story.

The first 7 episodes were the Skywalker family story. Dysfunctional to be sure, but I defy you to name a single intergalactic hero worth his/her salt that doesn’t have father/mother/sister baggage. We were led to believe Star Wars would continue to be a story about the crucial importance of an all-powerful Chosen One magically born at precisely the right moment to save the galaxy from itself and restore the rightful order to things. That’s the story Lucas was telling. Its the story we thought we wanted told in endless iteration. It isn’t the story we need.

The story we need now is the story in which Luke says, “It is time for the Jedi to die, and Yoda says “pretty much”. And when Luke can’t bring himself to light the fuse, Yoda does it for him.

So many wasted conversations wondering if Rey would turn out to be a Skywalker or a Kenobi. She’s neither. Ha! She’s just a ordinary not-Skywalker like the rest of us, except she has more Force awakened in her pinky finger than all the Mace Windus and Qui-Gon Jinns who came before. Rey is a reminder that, if the Force truly is the mystical energy that binds all living things, then we should all be enjoying a bit more of it in our daily lives.

The Star Wars story we need now is one where heroes can be cowardly and where even Jedi Masters make wrong choices and are called to atone for their disturbing lack of vision.

We need a story where the cocky, reckless Han Solo-type makes things worse, not better, by taking things into his own hands. Luck isn’t a plan. Luck gets people killed.

And we need to see the Bad Guys majorly conflicted about their path to the Dark Side. We couldn’t watch Episodes I, II and III and wonder if Anakin would fall. It was his destiny. We knew it would happen. We had already met Darth Vader. Anakin’s fate was set long before the kick-ass pod race on Tatooine. Yeah, he killed a bunch of Tusken Raiders and set fire to the temple. Boys will be boys.

Kylo Ren is far more interesting. He doesn’t have to go dark. He has a choice. He knows his parents. They are good people. Still, he has that inexplicable urge to come into his full power, to be his own person, no matter the cost. He starts out pretty emo but eventually says cool, deep, existential stuff like, “Let the past die. Kill it, if you have to. That’s the only way to become what you were meant to be.” That’s straight up Nietzsche.

And let’s have a moment with Rose, who risks her life to save Finn from his suicide run on the First Order’s battle cannon. Did she seriously just prevent Finn from ending the First Order’s assault on the rebel base? Maybe, but it is okay because “We’re going to win this war not by fighting what we hate, but saving what we love.” After the most intensely political year of my life, I’m hoping we might all agree to go out and get this tattooed somewhere on our selves. It is everything I have come to understand and believe about future building.

I waited a week to start writing this post. I needed time to figure out why this film felt so much more complicated than all the others. I think I get it now. The Last Jedi is the film that makes Star Wars more than just a cool idea George Lucas had forty plus years ago. This is the film that makes Star Wars more than just an insanely profitable product line.

Star Wars has been liberated from my childhood. Star Wars doesn’t just belong to me. It doesn’t just belong to you. It certainly doesn’t belong to George Lucas. It belongs to everyone now. Star Wars has become mythology, a narrative that connects the nostalgic past to the unwritten future.

When I was three years old, I watched Luke Skywalker receive a message: “Help us, Obiwan Kenobi. You are our only hope.” As it turned out, Obiwan wasn’t the only hope. There as a New Hope, Luke Skywalker. Now, at 43, I learn that being the only hope broke Luke Skywalker. Its way too much pressure. People are flawed. All people. Your cause is lost the moment you make someone your “only hope.”

Star Wars: The Last Jedi could have been called Star Wars: The New, New Hope. The Force no longer depends on a single, skillful hero. The Force depends on all of us to keep the spark alive.

And so, let us take our moment of silence to honor the fallen. Obi-wan. Yoda. Han Solo. Luke Skywalker. Carrie Fisher. Our myths connect our past to our future. But our future is not yet written. Nothing is predestined. Our heroes fail. Our heroes die. They leave us with nothing but a spark and each other. It is enough. It has always been enough.

May the Force be with us all.

Of Mice and Men | A Review

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Of Mice and MenOf Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Brutality and tenderness interleaved. Sometimes a dog needs killing and the only mercy you can offer is being the one to pull the trigger.

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Walkaway by Cory Doctorow | A Review

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Walkaway: A NovelWalkaway: A Novel by Cory Doctorow

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Too often, our science fiction tells us easy stories of how technology, either misapplied or misunderstood, runs amok to enslave and debase humanity. The narrative arrow points directly from a relatively decent today to a dark, oppressive tomorrow. In these stories, technology is a malevolent character, presented as an external force that subjugates and depraves. Such science fiction, think the Matrix, calls upon a single woke hero to band with a small group of the oppressed to fight the power and restore light in the darkest hour. I used to enjoy this story. Call it the spectacle of despair.

Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway points the arrow the other way. Our present day is the dystopia and creative, generous communities of shared effort use technologies to make possible a better world.

The novel opens in a non-specific future that feels like the very near future, say next Tuesday. Post-scarcity technologies have solved problems of labor and distribution of goods. Food, clothes, shelter, and medicine are all readily available upon demand through a combination of 3D printing, biochemical alchemy and the wide scale distribution of scientific knowledge. Despite this, the richest continue to get exponentially richer while everyone else stays stuck. There’s no need for inequality except that the uber-rich, the “zotta rich”, need someway to perpetuate their specialness. They need to keep score. This status quo world is called Default, the intolerable made tolerable by an industry of mass distraction, a relentless flood of entertainments to placate the discontent. The disaffected drop off out of their dystopian lives by “walking away”, the term for leaving the life of consumerist consumption to join a loose network of makers building a post-capitalist, post-consumerist society.

The walk away world is utopian. Walk aways live in leaderless maker communities organized around the basic principle that people must use their talents as they see fit to make things better. Distributed information networks get the people, the tools and the resources to the right place at the right time. If someone screws up, someone else comes along to fix the problem. No blame. No credit. Just people doing meaningful work that matters.

Oh, and sex. There’s plenty of well-written sex, a rarity in science fiction. Believable without being smutty.

The premise of Walkaway is that the default conditions cannot be fought on their own terms. The only way to overcome them is to disengage, to walk away. When the walk aways discover the ability to copy and upload human consciousness into the Internet, they find the ultimate tool of resistance. A kind of digital life after death. Doctorow’s exploration of artificial intelligence and digital immortality is exquisitely rendered in its balance between humor and existential horror. This is a joyful, serious story.

Walkaway is Cory Doctorow’s best written book to date. He pushes further into themes of post-scarcity society, digital immortality and how finding the right work makes life meaningful. If you’ve read Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom you will recognize these themes. They find fuller, more satisfying exploration here.

Highly recommended.

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Metallica and the Middle School Morning Commute

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Listening to music in a moving car is one of life’s primary pleasures. The speakers surround you. You are encapsulated by sound. If the car is moving fast, all the better. You can melt into that sound. The boundaries of your body disappear and you are allowed to become the amalgam of your thoughts, feelings and sensation.

The music you choose is important. It sets the tone for the journey and colors your mood upon arrival. Always important, but perhaps never more important than the middle school morning commute.

For most of my daughter’s young life, I have been DJ, curating her musical experience with chauvinistic care, thoughtfully exposing her to the things she is supposed to love. She heard Beatles and Hendrix and They Might Be Giants with odd bits of classical, jazz and current pop tossed in. She soaks it all in and has taken my playlist as her playlist.

Now she is ten, and I let her assume the awesome responsibility of iPod selection. She dives in and out of her playlist. She grabs random tracks just because she likes the title. When we are out in public, say the grocery store or a restaurant, a song will occasionally reach out from the background and catch her attention. “What is this?” Tap Shazam. “Add this to my playlist.”

My daughter is getting her ears.

Every day for the past three weeks, my ten year old daughter has chosen Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” for the middle school morning commute. Understand my surprise and amusement.

Metallica is an incredible sound. Metallica is art, but I could not realize it when I was ten. When I was in middle school, music was tribal. The music you chose for your own defined you. I found the Beatles and Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. I was nerdy and in my head a lot. I liked words and abstraction.

When I was a kid, Metallica belonged to the “hoods”. Those rough and rude, slightly scary smokers with the badass tee-shirts. They lived in their bodies. They weren’t “my people” and thus, Metallica was not for me.

I hope it is different now. I hope the ease with which we shuffle our playlists or stream across Spotify genres reflects the ease with which people of different backgrounds and experience blend their musical personalities. Perhaps music is no longer tribal.

As I grew older, I realized the Metallica listeners actually were my people. We were all people who formed deep, intense emotional connections to whatever sounds helped connect our inside selves to our outside. They just had cooler tee-shirts.

My daughter still dives through my iPod playlists. She still digs Beatles and Hendrix and TMBG. But she is finding her own tastes. She is curious about K Pop and hip hop. She likes video game music. She adores Melanie Martinez, an aesthetic I call “baby doll mope pop”. She is finding it on her own.

And so, “Master of Puppets” every morning for three weeks. I like to think it lifts her morning mood, cuts through the haze like a first cup of strong coffee. I imagine her bursting through the middle school doors with that intense, learning forward energy, feeling like a bad ass as she walks through the lockers, toward her people and her day.

That is the pleasure of music heard in a moving car, a pleasure you carry with you, felt most keenly during the middle school morning commute.

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai thinks you are an idiot

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So right before repealing Net Neutrality, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai took time to record and share a mocking video explaining how we’ll all still be able to binge watch Netflix and post selfies with our food on Instagram. He doesn’t mention how the Internet has become essential plumbing for most of the creative work being done today. He doesn’t mention that the Internet fuels innovation and is crucial in helping small companies get better ideas to market. He isn’t talking about the internet that helps level economic opportunity by making online education available to working adults in rural communities. In short, he isn’t talking about the internet we actually care about. He’s talking about entertainment. We’re talking about the infrastructure of our communities.

This government needs to get serious about its responsibilities to the future and stop wasting time posting dumb videos and picking Twitter fights. America is moving backward. These people are taking hammers to our future.

Middle School Band Holiday Concert, a Proud Parent’s Review

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Miles Davis. Wynton Marsalis. Louis Armstrong. Great trumpet players, all. You know their work.

Less familiar, perhaps, the sonic stylings of Emersey Benson, 5th grade trumpet player for Robertsville Middle School band. You can be forgiven for not yet knowing the impressive oeuvre of this young talent. She started playing trumpet three months ago and made her triumphant stage debut on Thursday, November 30, 2017.

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The evening was a rousing success. Dozens of eager young musicians crowded onto stage, some of them battling their first bout of stage fright. Others seemingly immune to prey of nerves. The palpable expectation of young musicians and parents alike radiated through the auditorium as our musicians warmed up, practicing their embouchure, clarifying their tone, moving together as one unit through a series of controlled aural blasts.

And then, show time. The band director introduced each section, one by one, letting each present a sample of their craft so the audience might better appreciate the contribution each instrument brings to the sonic weave. The trumpets were ascendant.

The 5th grade performance was crowned by two performances of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”. The program listed the piece as “Star Search”, but we knew the song’s true title. The first take had trumpets playing medley. The second take had trumpets providing color. Both were solidly recognizable.

As any proud parent, I strained to hear the notes sail from Emersey’s horn but could not pull them apart from the other joyful sounds. That’s pretty much the point. Unless you are playing a solo, it is usually best not to stand out. Emersey’s trumpet melded with the rest, indiscernible, but I knew from her practice at home just days earlier that her playing was solid, steady and bright. All the notes in the right order at more or less the proper time.

It was, for me, an intensely emotional experience. I am learning to play piano but have never played in the company of other musicians. I love to see music played live. The coordination and self-discipline required to bring one instrument into concert with many others is beautiful. Every performance, no matter how small, is a conversation without words. I am always overcome, sometimes moved to tears.

I often feel most human in the company of musicians having their conversation. Each of them connected to one another in a unified band and the band, in turn, connected to the audience, which is now its own thing rather than a collection of people. Live performance welcomes individual people into human company. It is among the most powerful things people can do.

Thursday night’s performance was special. I felt the thing I felt when watching Dave Brubeck, Sonny Rollins or Wynton Marsalis perform at the Tennessee Theatre. The thing that moved through me Thursday night was the same thing that has moved through any of the Indigo Girls, U2, Tom Petty or Violent Femmes shows I’ve attended.

I can only hope my trumpet playing daughter and these young 5th grade musicians felt it too. I hope they will continue to develop their coordination and self-discipline no matter the level of talent each believes they individually possess.

I hope they recognize what they are doing together is art and that they keep mashing keys and pressing forward to recapture the transcendent experience of music so they might always know what it really is to be human.

 

My No-Longer-Secret Shame

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I need to tell you a shocking secret, but you must promise not to tell anyone. If you tell even one other person, it will ruin my professional reputation and call my credentials as a friend of culture and the written word into question.

Okay. Here goes.

I, Robert Benson, have never read Of Mice and Men.miceandmen

Shocking, right? I’m a college library director, and I’ve never even once read this short, accessible literary classic. My team at work found me out this week and are now questioning their life choices. How can they work on a library team led by someone who has never taken the time to experience a 100 page staple of American literature read by millions of American middle school students every single year? I have no answers.

It gets worse.

I also have never read Pride and Prejudice; The Diary of Anne Frank; Little Women; Wuthering Heights; The Picture of Dorian Gray; or The Old Man and the Sea.

I once started Moby Dick but thought it was boring and stopped.

Hard Times is the only Charles Dickens novel I have ever read.

I’ve never watched Gone with the Wind, Casablanca or Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

I don’t particularly enjoy Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong or Billie Holiday recordings. I desperately love the music but the sound quality of those early recordings hurts my ears.

Too much? I know it’s painful, but there’s more you need to know.

Most rhyming poetry is willfully opaque and boring. Unless its not.

Emily Dickinson seems pretty sexy to me, but I can’t explain why.

I definitely enjoy William Blake’s poems best as decoration for his engravings.

I don’t get the big deal about Robert Frost.

When I read Shakespeare, I don’t feel like I completely understand what’s happening or even what the characters are saying until I can see it happening on the screen or stage.

You still with me? Are we still friends?

I’m sorry you had to find out this way. I know this is a lot to process.

In my defense, there’s a lot of culture to take in, and we keep making more of it.

I am 43 years old and have been actively reading a book every day of my life since I was five. My Goodreads profile says I have read 462 books, but that’s just since I started keeping track in 2008.

I have read a lot of great stuff, both classic and contemporary, but there’s so much greatness I cannot take it all in.

My “To Watch” list is a hot mess. I hope to live long enough to see Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and 200+ other classic films that will make my life richer but one of my best friends loaned me the first three seasons of Game of Thrones on DVD over two years ago, and I still haven’t returned them. Sorry, not sorry.

There are 24 hours in a day, seven days in a week, 52 weeks in a year. Movies last about 2 hours. You do the math. There’s a mathematical limit. I sleep, eat and work. I have a family. We do stuff together.

At this moment right now, I am listening to Yo-Yo Ma’s rendition of “Sarabande” from The Cello Suites Inspired by Bach. This gorgeous 6 minute and 36 second track is just one of 8706 songs in my iTunes library rated 4 stars or higher. It would take 25.6 days of continuous listening to hear all of those songs I love play just one time. I’m trying. I have a version of my playlist sorted by date last played and another which extracts only those songs I haven’t played in the past year. There are 621 songs on that list which would take 48 continuous hours to hear. I still buy music.

But I digress. I was telling you about how I haven’t read Of Mice and Men. Yet.

You and I live in a miraculous time amidst the staggering abundance of cultural riches. At any given moment, we can access visual, aural and written art created across most of recorded human history. It is, in fact, the absolute greatest time to be a person.

But our time is also one of scarcity. We have precisely as many hours in our day as Monet and Newton and Voltaire, yet we feel ourselves constantly time-starved. We pack our own lives with activity and distraction. We often feel the lack of time as if it is a thing that is being stolen from us, as if we are being robbed.

I am going to read Of Mice and Men and also Charles Dickens. Soon.

I am also going to keep watching movies and listening to music. I am going to read poetry and see brilliant (and not-so brilliant) productions of Shakespeare. I am going to keep writing things and and playing piano.

There is no end to it, no bottom to the list. I can’t take it all in. No one can. But we never stop trying because art is sustenance. Art feeds life. The books and poems and movies and songs and paintings and plays are not culture. What we do them is culture.

Abundance and scarcity. The absolute greatest time of all.