As we sit in the Nestor household this holiday season, listening to the Yoko Ono Christmas album again and again as we repent our sinful ways, it's time to look back at the year in blogging. I began this in early June to test myself, to see if I was as much of a story teller as I thought that I was. Eighty five posts later, that point has been proven. But just what have I been jabbering away at?
This was to be used to ramble on about those topics that interested me, and what interests me is usually music, movies, art and literature. I promised to keep away from politics, and despite all the provocation from D.C., I have managed to do so most of the time, only slipping up once or twice. This blog has also allowed me to find a new outlet for my own music videos, even though, as an art form, they can be so random as to cause questions about my sanity. Then again, in insane times, it doesn't pay to be sane.
Perhaps the best trend that has emerged are long strings of interrelated postings about a single topic. In these days of shorter and shorter communication, reducing information way past the point of meaninglessness, completely expressing myself at the risk of being wordy feels satisfyingly contrary. It took a couple of months for that to become a focus, but I absolutely no reason to be terse. If you want instant messaging, you've come to the wrong place.
It's been simultaneously a very tough year and a really great time to be alive. In the loss column, my job became a thing of the past. As a video producer, I was used to walking on glass. When things started to get political, working in state government, it became impossible to do my job. No great loss at all. Time to move on and do new things.
A much greater tragedy was the death of my brother. I haven't talked about it much on this blog, although I did post a version of the eulogy I spoke at his funeral service. He was five years older and often not a nice person to me. As a youth, much of my time was spent either in direct conflict with him, watching him get in trouble repeatedly in every manner imaginable, or suffering from the destruction of my parent's marriage. It wasn't a particularly happy youth.
Not that I cared. It may say a lot about me that I learned to live for myself early on, traveling through a debris field left by my brother that often felt like Godzilla waded through the neighborhood. Moving at sixteen allowed me to start again in isolation, becoming immersed in all forms of art. Joining bands, writing for fanzines, making movies behind and in front of the camera, going first to art school, decades later to film school; all part of my journey away from anything that either my father or brother had anything to do with.
There were no family traditions growing up. If I had an interest in something, I pursued it until it ran it's course. Having a knack for staying out of trouble, the biggest difference between my brother and I, was the real game changer. I wasn't necessarily a better person; I simply didn't antagonize the law or get caught.
That may sound simple, but my brother never learned that simple trick. What he did learn was to shrink his world until problems no longer came from outside. But that doesn't insure that shit won't happen within your inner perimeter. His wife died in a car accident, leaving him to raise two boys by himself. He tried, but he was not prepared.
Not that I could have done any better if faced with the same situation. I was lucky enough to find somebody who loves me. My wife is a formidable woman; smart, educated, disciplined, someone who loves structure and is constantly trying to plan her life five years in advance. I'm often the exact opposite, willing to let things happen, quick witted enough to deal with the ensuing chaos. Together, we are the grasshopper and the ant. Fortunately, grasshoppers have more fun, so she sticks around.
Once I retired, both my wife and I vowed to help my brother. We could see that he was in trouble, but he won't talk directly about what was bothering him. We took him to Antigua for a week, where he wandered around lost, unable to integrate with either the Brits or the whole 'vacation in paradise' mindset. He was grateful, anyway.
He started coming over once a week, mostly to watch me work on the house. I spent most of the summer furiously painting and downsizing, getting the house ready for when we sell it and move in about a year. The upstairs hadn't been gone through in seventeen years. Closets were full of stuff we didn't need or use. It was a big task and I had the time to do it.
He would talk to me, always about the past, about being a kid in Long Island, about friends he hadn't seen for 50 years. He was also retired and flush with cash, so I kept asking him why he didn't go back and find them. Most were dead, a few very successful. My brother was overwhelmed with inertia.
I don't have the same fascination with my own past. My focus on the 1960s and 1970s concerns art, movies and most especially music, not about what I did. In truth, I was pretty insignificant back then. Still am. I had my fun, but it burned up around me. No need to search through the ashes.
That in a nutshell was the difference between us. He was always searching for clues in the past. I was always busy with the present. He wasn't fundamentally the same person that he was at twenty. I was, just more polished.
Every Friday afternoon around lunch he would come over. I would try to be finishing whatever I was doing, so that it wouldn't be in the way of my wife when she was home for the weekend. I might get him to help a little, but usually he sat down and watched me work. I would listen to him rant like a psychiatrist.
Maybe I wasn't paying attention. He never was specific about his problems. Later, I would learn that he had an addiction to fentanyl. He had always liked drugs, the source of many of his problems when he was young. There had been some heroin use, but I always thought that the move to North Carolina put distance to that. I was wrong.
He would always leave before my wife would come home. It was August, and she hadn't seen him since the trip to Antigua in May. She wanted him to stay the night, eat dinner with us. She wanted to check him out for herself.
That final Friday, it rained hard all day. He didn't show at lunch. I was cooking a special meal for the three of us. My wife kept calling, and I kept delivering bad news. Maybe he wasn't showing up.
I tended not to drink in front of my brother. He had an addictive personality and he always professed to having trouble with alcohol, although I can't ever recall him being a problem drinker. Nevertheless, I don't like to enable other people's problems. We gave up on him. It won't be that out on line with his behavior to be a no-show.
I was sitting down to a margarita when he pulled up a seven that evening. He said that he had gone to Topsail Beach to be by himself for a few days. In reality, he had gone to Baltimore to score opioids. We ate, he sat in front of the television, kept excusing himself for long periods, then fell out. I left him asleep in the chair, snoring loudly.
The next day, he and the wife talked over breakfast. When she left, we sat on the screen porch in the August heat, talking for a long time. He sang me a song by the Fugs, 'I Couldn't Get High', telling me that's how he felt. I didn't say much, not having that same craving.
He was dead by Monday morning. An overdose of fentanyl, a street opioid, in his room, collapsed on the floor, face first. His sons found him. I've been straightening out his estate ever since, the thing that's been consuming my life that I've never talked about in this blog.
Maybe that's why I've gone into so much detail on certain obscure topics. A distraction, a way to keep sane when things have gone bad. Even though I was the youngest, in my family I was always the fixer. Now I'm doing the final fix for my brother Jim. Just thought you might like to know.
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