Anachronisms – End of the Day for March 31, 2014

End-of-the-Day / Writing

End of the day LogoOh it seems like this week and weekend have lasted forever. It was filled with work and theater and book readings, some more work and now a nice, quiet house with everyone else slowly drifting off to bed and leaving me to tippitty-tap out today’s note. Django Reinhardt and related music (courtesy of iTunes Radio from almost 100 years ago spills Hot Jazz gently from the speakers of my state of the art Macintosh.

Click a link to play this music as you read the rest of tonight’s essay, to get a bit of the feel currently here in the office. Listen via iTunes Radio or Pandora.

Django

Django Reinhardt

Anachronistic as it is, it is the music I wanted to listen to at the moment. Energetic but something totally different from my day-to-day pop and country listening. That was one sign that tonight was one for winding down, winding up projects and easing into sleep in a few hours.

I do love all the music services available these days. I’ve always been more of a radio listener — getting a variety of music instead of listening to complete albums or one artist at a time. I use these services to match my mood, my work and the current century I feel I am living. There are times when I feel I am living in the entirely wrong decade, generation or even millennium. Perhaps it is my small town upbringing, but there are days I can imagine living in New London, Ohio just after World War I, using horse and carriage to visit friends for tea or dinner in their lovely Victorian mansion on Main Street. That said, I can also imagine myself living on another planet in the far future, so I guess it really doesn’t always qualify as nostalgia. Maybe just a sense of being out of step with our times, my place in the world or the attitudes that surround me. Perhaps there are times when I just want to be somewhere (or some time) else. The online radio stations help me escape into whatever world I want to visit whenever I want.

Bedford Walk - Victorian Painted Lady

Victorian Home in Bedford, Ohio

Of course, life was typically even more difficult in the past and I am sure I would chafe at the limitations of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness living their would entail. I have always said that the trick to creating a better present is to take the best of the past and leave the worst behind. Maybe that is why I am always using the Internet for tasks that might have just as easily existed back at the turn of the century My newspapers and magazines are now blogs. My music comes from iTunes, Pandora, Spotify or a host of others instead of a Gramophone. I still read books in print, as well as on Kindle and my email will be the only “papers” i leave behind when I am gone.

For me, the present is always more of a state of mind than an actual place in the time-space continuum. In fact, as is demonstrated by tonight’s musical selections, it can range from one extreme to another in any given 24-hour period. 

 

Previously on End of the Day:

Related Posts:

  1. The attention you want and need – End of the Day for March 25, 2014
  2. Two decades past – End of the Day for March 10, 2014
  3. Tempus fugit – End of the Day for March 14, 2014
  4. Long dark journey into the office – End of the Day for March 13, 2014
  5. On understanding others – End of the Day for March 26, 2014
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