June

Here it is June already, the beginning of summer, which means we're already halfway to 2023. It's a cliché to bleat that time passes with increasing speed as I slide into the quicksand of "extremely late middle age," but clichés exist for a reason. I've come to see aging as something akin to falling from an airplane without a parachute: suddenly weightless, not much seems to be happening at first. The ground is so far away that there's no real sense of falling -- you're just surfing on a powerful wave of wind while enjoying a wonderful view.  But after a while you notice the objects down below are growing larger with each passing moment, rushing ever faster towards you -- and in those last few seconds before impact, they're coming at you with shocking speed -- which is when you finally grasp what's really happening, and then ... nothing.  You've exited the mortal realm and moved into the next world, whatever and wherever that may be.

I'm in that second phase of the drop now, with the final phase in sight -- those objects below are definitely bigger than they were last month, but not as big as they'll be next month, so I can't complain. It is, as the saying goes, what it is.

Yes, this month brings another re-run, this one from 2009 when my little cable show was cursed with a young director whose extensive thespian pedigree should have been good training for the job. Alas, no.  I didn't identify him at the time -- hey, I still had to work in that town -- but there's nothing holding me back now, especially since he was recently fired from his job producing a reboot of the very same show that made him semi-famous in the first place, and provided him with a career.  

It's not clear yet what he did to get fired -- sure, he was a lousy director, but I didn't see any untoward behavior on his part during that week of rehearsals and filming back in 2009. Still, I'm not really surprised.  Those who go about their work with a sense of entitlement often must learn first-hand the meaning of "Pride goeth before a fall."  Maybe a year or two in The Hollywood doghouse will instill a little humility ... and maybe not.  At any rate, that's his problem, not mine.

So, step on into the Wayback Machine with me, and here we go.*

* Not that I've jumped out of any airplanes with or without a parachute, mind you, but I've seen enough skydiving footage in movies and on TV to have a notion what it's like.

* The Wayback Machine