Down On The Corner

By Paul Moffett

The Hazards Of Habits Undone

I believed that I had successfully given up the print edition of Louisville Music News at the end of October, when I was not obliged to drive around the city, delivering newspapers. It was a great relief, I thought. My friends asked what I was going to do with all the free time I was sure to have. The things that needed to be wrapped up still were on my mind but I figured that would clear up soon enough and life would be easier.

What I had not counted on was the backlash from twenty-four plus years of routines and habits undone, dismantled, cast aside, oh-so-casually discarded. It was not to be the case. At the end of October, I had vague and not-so-vague stabs of anxiety; I felt the need to be tending to things gone missing, like a lost pair of favorite gloves or a cell phone misplaced and not being answered. I also had discovered that the free time I thought I would have secured by the closing of the paper was elusively ephemeral, vanishing like the fog on the hill above the river, where the sun strikes first. I was very busy; I remain very busy.

Of course, heading into the holidays complicates the matter; I suspect that I won't begin to feel relaxed before the middle of January at the earliest, by which time most people will have forgotten that I once published a print edition of a newspaper. March will mark the actual beginning of that print paper, twenty-five years before, so there will be more memories resurfacing, a common situation related to age, I am told.

In the meantime, I intend to continue to rearrange my rowdy routines, to settle my complaining habits back into a comfortable – but not too comfortable – groove, while moving forward toward new activities or at least toward more of those I haven't given up, particularly my continuing attempt to learn Flamenco baile. A projected trip to Spain in the September will pull me further away from those old routines, forcing me to carve out new patterns of living

All the while, of course, I will continue writing about and reporting on the Louisville music scene.

Happily, I won't be killing any trees to do it. Just old routines.