1. Today is my 35th birthday. If our allotment of years is three-score and ten, I’m halfway done.
2. I’m obliged to face up to the fact that I am not happy with the man I’ve become or with what I have to show for my years. If you’d asked me ten or five or even one year ago where I hoped my life to look like at this age, it certainly wouldn’t look like this. This is, of course, to be expected of life, but the problem is that I don’t see that much substantial has taken the place of my ambitions; just a continual sense of unsettled groping for somewhere I can stand, interspersed with fits of artistic output that leave me longing for the time when I’ll be able (whether in terms of opportunity or ability) to focus on them.
3. This is mostly, if not entirely the result of my own choices; in allowing myself to waste too much time, to sink into depressing head-spaces, choosing to let opportunities go by for one reason or another. Hence why I’m being so candid here; as a means of resolving to myself to do otherwise in future.
4. Part of the problem, as I see it, is that I am very self-conscious; I tend, like my country, to worry overmuch about what I am and what I’m supposed to be and whether I’m really living up to it. The result, naturally, is that I don’t live up to what I hope to be, since anxiously looking at oneself isn’t a quality of such a man.
5. As I said, I’m in Maine right now. My brother-in-law (who is an artist) has decorated one formerly-bare wall of the family cabin with assorted icons, paintings, mirrors, and even empty frames, making it a colorfully haphazard scene of beauty. In the midst of the frames is the big window that had formerly been the only thing in the wall, now looking like it belongs as just another frame amidst the other pieces. From where I sit can see a tall, snow-white birch stretching against the blue winter sky in a small, perfect vignette of New England. My sister talks about how she wants to surround herself and her children in beauty, and I completely agree. I hope that someday I have the chance to do likewise, though I’m undecided of where I’d want to attempt it as of yet.
6. New England retains a good deal of its old character, in the tangled Lovecraftian woods, clapboard buildings, and white granite. Where I live in Michigan (outside Detroit) is one of the most depressingly bare and generic places one could fear to find, being, with few exceptions, a tapestry of mcmansions, strip malls, and ugly modern architecture for mile upon mile in all directions, until one reaches the diseased hulk of what had once been a great American city in one direction and open fields and Midwestern countryside in the other. And perhaps it’s me, but the Midwest doesn’t feel like it has much character. Or rather, the Midwest is the good little boy of America, who does what’s expected of him, gets fine grades, is respectful and polite, and whose visage bears no promise of secret depths. That’s speaking generally, of course (the Upper Peninsula of Michigan being a notable exception among others), and it might be just that I’ve lived there my whole life while always hoping to be able to move away.
7. I am hoping, rather determined, to turn things around in this new year of my time. I have at least settled on a day-job to pursue, which is a big step. I’ll leave you with this song, which is always on my mind at this time of the year:
Serpent's Den 
Sorry this is a week late, I tried to post it last weekend but I guess something went wrong. Anyway, here it is…fwiw.
Having grown up in Missouri and Illinois, and having been blessed with the resources to have as a “summer home” the NW Illinois house my family lived in from my 12th year on, (we live near Dallas the rest of the year), I can assure you that the farm country of the Midwest has tons of character. You won’t see it from the Interstates, however. As with any other region of the country, you have to spend the time to get to know people whose families have lived there for generations, whether as farmers or as other cogs in the wheel of the rural economy. There are no more industrious, friendly, and caring people anywhere, and they remain so, despite having been thrown under the bus by the firms that once employed them in hundreds of small and midsized factories and supporting businesses, and by the politicians who assisted those firms in sending all those jobs overseas or to Mexico for cheap labor. There are fewer of those rural people now, but those who remain are no different from their forebears, and have grown tougher as a whole due to their economic struggles.
The physical beauty of the region, especially northern Illinois, eastern Iowa, and just about all of Wisconsin, is different from New England in nearly every way (I lived in the Boston area for several years), but just as beautiful if one has eyes to see it. The land is anything but the flat prairie seen further south, with gently rolling plains and a fair number of serious hills and valleys. Each season has its own distinctive color palette, best seen from the two-lane highways and back roads that are the primary means of travel for most folks. Spring brings the change from the flat tans and light browns of harvested fields to the dark brown of the tilled land, gradually replaced by the green, at first a light and then progressively darker shades, as the crops emerge and begin to grow. As the summer progresses, the vast expanses of green take on a golden sheen as the tassels emerge on the seemingly endless rows of corn, and the greens of the soybean fields seem to grow even darker by contrast to the corn. Then as fall arrives, the plants begin to turn back to tan or yellow as they mature for the harvest. At the same time, the wooded areas begin their transformation to the beauty of the autumn colors, and in a region as densely populated with maple and oak trees as is much of the Midwest, the entire landscape becomes a riot of color. Then winter sets in, with its own charms for those who remain there throughout the year. The beauty of a fresh snowfall or an ice storm (as long as you’re not trying to drive!) is as great in the woods on a farm or in the streets of a small town is no different there than it is anywhere else.
Just wanted to share those thoughts. The suburbs are the suburbs, wherever they are, and they are generally exactly as you described. But get out of the city and suburbs, and there you’re back in the America we love and still hope to preserve.
God bless all here!
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Appreciate the paean to the Midwest.
I should clarify that I do like Midwest landscapes and nature; the line about farms and countryside wasn’t meant as a slight. It was more that I don’t get as much of a strong individual character from the Midwest; not like the aged, colonial-haunted New England, the wild-yet-aristocratic south, or the frontier-remembering west, for instance. The Midwest…it might be my own familiarity with it, but I don’t feel much of a distinct identity to it, compared to the rest of the country. The Midwest has fewer ghosts, or so it feels to me.
That said, your comment makes me feel like I ought to look harder and explore the region more. I’d be very glad to find something I’ve missed in my home region.
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I didn’t take it as a slight so much as something typical for all of us, i.e., when something or someplace is totally familiar, and we’re immersed in it all or nearly all the time, we tend not to notice the things that may make it unique or special or distinctive in some way. I grew up in the Midwest, as I noted, but was transferred away in my early 40’s, in 1997, to wild and woolly Texas. Given that I was working massive hours and didn’t have time for long road trips, for years our only return visits to Illinois (where the family all lived by then, in the late 90’s and early 2000’s) were by air, renting a car in either Moline or Chicago, and using it only to get to and from the airport and the family home. Thus I didn’t get the full treatment of local color that has come in the past ten years since I retired. Now, we drive up to NW Illinois every summer and stay there until the leaves turn. That means lots of driving around that part of the state, and seeing up close all those things I described in my earlier post. It’s 30 miles to the nearest WalMart Supercenter or full-service hospital/medical center, and 50 to the nearest big department store, so the windshield time adds up quickly. I must say that having been away for all those years, the things that make the rural Midwest what it is are much easier to notice now. I don’t think those things would make as much of an impression on me had I never lived anywhere else.
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One postscript: my advancing age probably has something to do with enhanced appreciation of landscapes, people, and places. At your age you’ve got to stay focused on career and family. I’m done with my career, and most of my family is a lot younger than I am, with the rest of my generation starting to dwindle away. That has a way of encouraging a deeper appreciation of one’s surroundings and activites. 😉
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