I am sitting in a hot little room, (it’s August, after all, get over it) surrounded by canvases finished and unfinished, paints, linseed cans, guitars, mandolins, ukuleles, surfboards, bicycles, many, many books, and looking at the Atlantic Ocean under a gently loping ceiling fan.  The sum of my life thus far.  Contented?  Oh, yeah.  Saw a beautiful rat snake on the deck today, a manta ray jump four feet clear of the water.  The evening crickets and cicadas are starting up.

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Went to a local Class A baseball game last night, and very first thing had to stand through another horrible rendition of the National Anthem by a well-meaning, but wrongly encouraged and completely talentless young lady, who changed keys with every labored breath, her pace that of a heavily medicated sloth with aspirations of grandeur.  An impossibly terrible tune to begin with, virtually unsingable, it seems to attract those who would be wise to stick to “Three Blind Mice,” or some variation of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” but insist, unbelievably, on trying to mimic Aretha Franklin, who couldn’t sing it either.  I have no problem with a recording of say, the Marine Band, but please, no more.  It makes me want to go out even less than I do.  And to make matters worse, they always insist, in the seventh-inning stretch, to have some school kids attempt “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”  If you ever needed evidence for the lunacy of de-funding music in the schools, here it is.  None of the little scoundrels can carry a tune in a hand basket.  And nobody cares.  It’s insane!  They think it cute.  It isn’t.

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OK, I’m going now.  The August bats have arrived.