We have too much booze in the refrigerator. Craft beers, alcoholic seltzers, pre-made cocktails. We buy them whenever we visit a locally-owned bar or bottle shop (both here in Las Vegas and in Joshua Tree, CA., which we’ve visited twice in the past six months), because we like craft booze and times have been tough for bars and bottle shops.

Laura rarely drinks, and we haven’t done much entertaining these past two years, which means it’s on me to drink up the overflow. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. I’d like to trim down, which is antithetical to everything that craft beer, alcoholic seltzer and pre-made cocktails stand for. (And nine times out of ten I’d rather get stoned, even though we’re not particularly worried about local dispensaries going out of business.) But the fridge must be cleared. This is work.

To be perfectly candid, most everything feels like work nowadays. My day job is repetitive, and I’m burning out in it. (It’s not the Weekly’s fault. I’ve been working the same gig, with lightly differing variations, since 1996.) The side projects that formerly kept me usefully occupied–the novel, the movie tour–are stuck in places where I can’t do anything with them with the spare time I have.

My frustrations on the home front: The house is in disarray and has been for several months. My blood goes cold whenever family members call, because it’s oftentimes they’re calling with worrying news. I have hypertension, high cholesterol, elevated blood sugar–the whole middle-age variety pack. And you get to hear about it, you lucky ducky, because my therapist dropped out of my insurance plan, which no means more bi-weekly appointments. We’re now on a monthly schedule that better works with my budget, and kind of a lot of shitty, shitty shit can happen in a month.

I’m sorry. I know you’ve got your own stuff to deal with, and I hope you’re doing OK with it. We are all of us striving to function in a place beyond what we thought our limits were two years ago. We’ve all needed to add more red to our redline. (It’s like that time Tr*mp expanded the path of that hurricane with a Sharpie, once again unaware he’d made himself into a living, breathing, big yellow metaphor.) I don’t wanna sound like I’m indifferent to the hard time nearly everybody is having; I’m not. But I can’t deny that I’m struggling with my own stuff, and I don’t know what to with it.

Last week was lovely, though. We spent a few days in SoCal, visiting with friends in Topanga Canyon. Standing outside their house late at night, looking up at the stars and listening to coyotes howl from nearby hills, I felt several competing emotions at once–calm, contentment, dread. I had Joni Mitchell on one shoulder and Sharon Tate on the other. If Laura had all this wacky shit going on when she walked the dog, she never let on.

Fortunately, I didn’t have much time to dwell on that stuff, because we were in town to see Sparks perform at the Walt Disney Concert Hall. It was the second show of their 50th anniversary tour, and the prevailing mood was anything but valedictory. We could have been teenagers, all of us, with a healthy surfeit of delicious angst in our pants.

Laura spent a small fortune to put us in the fifth row, along with our friends Jim and Melinda. It was easily one of the best concerts I’ve seen, both in terms of it being really fucking fun and in terms of feeling like I was watching some history being made. Ron and Russell Mael’s songbook is comprised of some 50 years’ worth of material, and their outstanding set drew from the entirety of it, nimbly jumping between years and genres. It made my heart light to watch them enjoying themselves in front of their hometown audience, two overnight successes at the ages of 73 and 76.

I’ve been thinking about that lately–where I’ll stand in relation to my own modest body of work in 15-20 years’ time. Like the Maels, I hope to still be in it. There are many things I’d like to create, to conceive, to collaborate on, to remake, to fuck up with panache. It would be all the sweeter if I was making this jazzy shit in a community that supports and inspires me, wherever that may be or whatever shape that sort of thing might take. And I’ll invite the members of that gold-plated community into my home to check out my latest whatever, seducing them with the promise of a fridge full of cold drinks.