Some thoughts about belonging

 A little departure here. Click away if you don't want a little meditation on aging. This post began May 17, 2026. Updates noted and dated...

Contrary to what you've maybe expected, the title up there was written first thing. I may get a little self-deprecating or a little self-appreciating. I have no idea. But this post is the result of some old retired man introspection and who knows? I may just delete it after I write it. 

Note: I just connected headphones to my streaming player and put on "Sonus Choir" to play while I write. Let's consider that the soundtrack to this post. My affection for this group is biased largely upon my beautiful and talented daughter's membership in it.

So, night before last, my wife noted in conversation in between one of our nightly journeys into entertainment media on the big flatscreen over our mantel (yes, this has been festering a few hours) that I have been cancelling memberships and appointments with healers over the past week, and that I have not enrolled in my art studio class with friend and mentor Charles Brindley for nearly half a year now. Well, 5 months. All valid.

Here are my thoughts:

Yes, it has daily approached the 76th anniversary of my birth, here where we now live and love, in Nashville, Tennessee. 

Yes, a recent x-ray indicates the cause of my current dominating local pain may well be a torn meniscus tendon in my right knee. There are a lot of pains one must bear as one ages, but maybe one of my biggest is reading or hearing about old people discussing their pains. I will say that anyone my age has at very least a few, and at an average many. Also, let's get this out of the way: Anyone my age, and likely a decade younger, or older, who claims they do not have thoughts about mortality and some moments of despair over that upcoming inevitable and closing-in-too-fast condition is either 1) lying, 2) minimizing, or 3) very very lucky or very very ignorant. Mortality thoughts are about common sense, and I am clearly aware that if I had a faith or subscribed to a religious belief those musings might be a bit relieved, assuaged, at least to some degree.

Well, I don't. Have either.

And the reason that I don't may be that all my life, since early childhood, I have been wary of belonging. 

There. Cat's out of the bag. Be it church, social media, military, professional organization, political community or office, choir, school administration, or workout group, that's my take: Nah. Thanks but no thanks. My work environments have all been so central to my identity, and those disappeared, evaporated, passed, upon my retirement May 27, 2022.

I LOVE the little community that Charles has built around art and artistry, and I always enjoyed being there and interacting with other humans in its group of them, but committing to actually continuing to be one of them is something I have, eventually and perhaps temporarily, shied away from. When that mystical human addresses a room as "artists" he means it, and the ongoing work and conversation with the members has been so natural and welcoming that being amongst them has been unfalteringly lovely. I have made friends. Why not keep going on a weekly basis? Why put visits to my incredible Tai Chi master at Osher Center, Vanderbilt Hospital, or my brilliant acupuncture therapist there, on hold? 

Perhaps the answer goes back to my infancy, when as a second child I was left in a playpen for hours at a time. A memory that sticks with me is peering through playpen bars at my passed out paternal grandmother, a lit cigarette still streaming smoke from between her fingers on a hand draped down from her drunken body on the sofa across the room in our little Cadillac Drive bungalow. Maybe it's the time I was enrolled in Sunday school as a 4th-5th grader when I was in 3rd grade and bullied because of my size, never to return. Maybe it's the abuse inflicted on me by older scouts in the hallway outside the community meeting room of the Belle Meade Methodist Church, when they held me stretched out on the floor while another slammed a packed fluorescent light fixture into my groin like a post-hole digger. Or the resulting retracted testicle hernia repair, without which I would not have fathered our two young creative miracles. Heck, who am I to say?

Different perspective: What formal and informal groups have I belonged to? Let's bullet this:

• Cub and Boy Scouts
• Explorer Scouts
• a high school fraternity, Sigma Phi Omega
• an apprentice program team for a regional theatre company
• school classrooms, both attending and teaching
• a church
• jobs and work communities, including a magazine staff, restaurant/bar staffs, and various and sundry school faculties
• musical bands, as singer, guitarist, and /or mandolinist
• an artist community
• community organizer, The International Society for Technology in Education

Lemon

Aaaaaaaaand, May

 Hi y'all. May 6th here. Up in the morning and dedicated to getting something online for this month so here:

Up at 6:30 a.m. after sleeping like a proverbial baby last night. My sister-in-law Amy is sleeping, Lee Ann is at work, and here I be. Outside, past my computer monitor, the open blinds, the window, and the thriving Red Maple in our little yard, it's 50 degrees Fahrenheit with unblemished blue sky and a forecast of more of the same and a high of 80. Cool. Then warm. I camped again this past Sunday and Monday nights, bailing Tuesday morning to pick up Amy at BNA and forge home from what is normally a 20 minute airport commute to nearly an hour and a half in (ahhhhh) Nashville traffic. 

A little traffic was irritating, but not so much in the light of "news" announcements this week that more than half of "AI experts" believe there is now a more than one in ten chance that artificial intelligence will end human existence. 

Amy flew in to take her sister to Nissan Stadium to attend the Bruno Mars concert that filled the place night before last. That is so close to 40,000 humans in one place it's not worth arguing; and though the weather was threatening and drizzly, they both were still a-gaga with bright shiny fan eyes all day today. They were adorable in their evening selfies and snapshots:

Just for the record, I love these two.

As usually happens when our Denver seester is in Music City, we have eaten out twice so far, and Frankie's won the ratings war, far outdoing Bad Idea, which was aptly named. Our server at the latter was charming, but we found the food ridiculously overpriced and underwhelming. I won't go into detail, because it would be too easy and fun and I don't like to cut any restaurant a new backside, honoring the hard working service workers who are trying their best in an increasingly challenging time. I will note that the "sin tax" on liquor by the drink in Tennessee combines with standard appx. ten percent sales tax levied on everything to achieve a whopping 24.5% tax on any alcoholic beverages one might imbibe.  That makes it hard for everyone wanting to have a nice glass of wine with dinner. Five dollars tax on a 20 dollar glass of wine? I'm swearing off. Good job, fascist state government/buzzkill. 

Tonight is Friday, and we'll once again be calling Lyft or Uber to get downtown, this time to a concert featuring the inimitable Sonus Choir, to hear and see my dear dear daughter Miranda sing with this most impressive and enjoyable a 'Capella choir. 

Amy flies home to Denver tomorrow, but we get to attend a premier of symphonic rock genius Cody Fry's new documentary short film "The Unlikely Mariner", which highlights his new symphony in four movements. Why? Because Sonus performs in it, and because Miranda's much loved husband/drummer genius, Tim Buell, is also in it! Tim joined Michael W. Smith's band full-time this year, and he's on the road with Smith's 2026 tour currently. Life overfloweth.

I did another couple nights camping this past week, up at my favorite spot on the mighty Cumberland. Gonna slap a link in here to the pic album from that time. It was, as always, the schizzzzzz.

See the album

Last week in April 2026

 Well, well, here we are, the last week of April, Saturday the 25th, and I did not post in March and have almost let this one of a dozen slip by without a word. 

There have been words, though, and I'll share some of them. There has been a three night camping jaunt, some fishing, some music, a great puzzle, gardening aplenty (or meadow-tending, as may more accurately been the case), significant amounts of planning for travel in July, grown children making lives, paint applied to canvas, and if there were a god I'd say god knows what else.

I made the painting below, and shared it at my scottmerrick.me website and in Second Life at the scottmerrickdotnet gallery. It's the largest I've so far completed, and that because I found a castaway canvas from art.com in one of the alleys my Lemon walks with me and drove back to fetch it. I picked up a fresh jar of white gesso at Michael's art supply store and slathered layer after layer on it to overpaint its mass produced image and ready it for painting, then I began throwing ideas and textures at it, knowing I would find images in the resulting mess. When I think of sculpture, in particular the sort that involves some carving, I often remember the description I read somewhere in my past about an artist bringing out the embedded life within a piece of wood or stone or clay. Most bronze work is created with casts made of carved other material, I do think, and so there you go with my criterion for this painting. 

At the end of it, when my senses said it was almost done, I saw three shapes that suggested candles, and my final act was painting three black shapes indicating wicks. Though I had intended to paint candle flames, I stopped just short of that, opting for the unfulfilled, the thing the viewer can add, completing the piece her or himself, or themselves. I call this, at 36"x48", "candlesinthemaelstrom". 

I spent some time a couple weeks ago at my favorite camping spot. For me, it's ideal, open, shady with hundred year old pecan trees, close to home, and riverside. It's at Lock-A, Cheatham Dam Campground, an Army Corps of Engineers getaway just the other side of Ashland City. That is all for now. Excepting: 

Take a look at my little Google Photos album of the 3 nights camping at Lock-A in Cheatham County.

Nature Writing Reading

 Hey, all,

I have been reading a lovely tome every morning for several months. I sometimes stop at one of its brief entries, and I sometimes read two or three. I found it quite randomly, perusing the shelves at a local treasure--the Rhino Booksellers about a mile and a quarter from our home in The Nations, here in Nashville. Rhino's does have some social media identities, and a (single page) website, but seriously, the only way to "get" Rhino is to visit it. Make sure you have plenty of time.

I had been looking for anything by Tristen Gooley, having read and thoroughly enjoyed his Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs. That accounts for my being so investigative of the nature section; but though I didn't find any Gooley, my explorations proved to my advantage when I discovered this hardcover edition of The Oxford Book of Nature Writing. It had been marked down from 11 to 10 dollars, the 11 on its liner page lined through with pencil and the 10 entered (in the same handwriting) in pencil beneath it. Whoopee! 

So I opened the book and read its brief introduction by editor Richard Maybey, a celebrated nature writer in his own right, and scanned the first few pages. They include several paragraphs from Aesop, and nearly two pages from Aristotle, 344BC. I flipped through and saw brief writings by folks like Darwin, Emerson, Thoreau, GM Hopkins, along with many from authors unknown to me. The final writing is from Primo Levi in 1985. The book is arranged in chapters, each roughly identifying with one of seven historical periods chronologically.

But I digress. Imagine that. 

Anyway, when I read these passages, I sometimes find myself reading aloud, because the language, oh, the language. The varied voices, some in translation, come alive in the reading, so so vividly and with such detail. I recorded a few of them to see if they sound as delicious as they read, and I think one could make that argument. Here's a just under 6 minute reading of one of them, credits at the end. I'm slowly creating a collection of them, and though they may sound better read by a digital voice in Speechify or another speech to text app, they are so much fun to read aloud that I'm going to share one here. I highly recommend this little book!

Nature Writing Reading 5

The Oxford Book of Nature Writing

The (first) ice storm of 2026

 ...and I hope it's the last. 

Wow, it was, and remains an impressive, visually stunning evidence of Nature's anger. I know, that's anthropomorphism at its worst, but there ya go.

Gonna post my images so far here, if for no other reason than that I haven't blogged in a minute. 

It was, and remains, a challenge for many fellow humans. In the great scheme of things, with my dearest human recuperating from major (~5 hours long) intestinal repair surgery January 8, the storm hit us 6 days ago with a couple inches of snow, which in Nashville is plenty 'nuff to cripple the city for a bit, followed by a major ice storm with "freezing rain" and an ice build-up that was the 2 punch in the old 1-2 knockout. Power was lost to hundreds of thousands just in our Metro area, and somehow we were spared that, here in our little one decade old tall and skinny home in The Nations, just west of downtown and filling up over the past decade with people and more overpriced homes. Not that I'm complaining--you know, equity.

Yes, I'm the king of the run-on sentence. Hello.

Early on, we did our little community bit by my venturing out into the icy streets to bring a young friend back to power and warmth, along with her spunky, a little freaked-out kitty, Luigi. Lee Ann was about in shape to go back to work anyway, starting part-time and now working up to almost full, though her business, Tinwings, took the income hit with virtually every other small business, cancelling the week's pickup orders and deliveries and limiting hours for walk-in market customers. She's back at work now, and our extended family member, an employee of that food gem as well as a dear friend, is joining her to cook for the market so people who can get out can choose delicious, made from scratch, original food, cooked with love and the highest possible standards of cuisine. 

I'm back painting, playing some mandolin, walking the dog, keeping house, playing Legacy of Thieves, and, well, blogging. I have had some fun sailing my 22 foot Loonetta boat in Second Life, and I'm continuing to make sure the neighborhood has access to information from the Card Campaign for Democracy, papering the occasional utility pole with the current or favorite card of my printing, and leaving them in public spaces for citizens. This is a small thing, but it's better than an old man doing nothing. Consider it for your own extra hobby. You too can be a pamphleteer--if it's good enough for Thomas Paine...

I will be offline Friday to support the General Strike in support of Milwaukee Americans and against the vicious despotism of the Trump Clown Circus. Yes, it's gotten deadly. His masked thugs are executing  people in the streets, and if you don't think it will come to your town eventually if unchecked, you are literally dead wrong.

Click to view my developing photo and video album: