Now.
One last thought on the last day.
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So the other day I took a look at the stats for this thing to find that people are actually listening. I think that's great. I hope you're enjoying it. I hope you're getting some use out of it. I get a lot of use out of it. It really helps me to think out loud about these things, but it's been a minute, and so I wanted to get one in before the end of the year.
Things have been really busy. Midnight Burger sometimes fills all of the empty space in my life, and it's the only thing I have time for. But in the new year, I am going to endeavor to get back to doing these because they're really helpful for me. And if they're helpful for you, that's even better.
So at the end of the year, I wanted to quickly talk about two text messages that I got from my dad. The first one was the type of text message that I get from him from time to time where he drops a crazy story on me from when he was young. When he was young, my grandmother was a bit of a wandering rich lady and kind of dragged him all over the world for a while, and it's because of that that he wound up going to high school in Morocco. And the most recent story he told me was about when he and his friend were on a beach in Morocco and he was about 14 years old and he had his guitar with him and he was playing a Bob Dylan song.
Coming up the beach was this lady who was flanked by two dudes in suits, and she walked up to him and he played a song for her. He played, I think, "Bob Dylan's Dream." Turns out the woman that he played the song for was the mother of the King of Morocco. He played a song for her and she said, "Thank you," and she kept walking along the beach.
He dropped stories like that on me all the time. You know, one day there was a bat in his room and he had to shoot it with a slingshot and then throw it over the balcony. He jumped into the ocean one day and was surrounded by man-of-war jellyfish that could instantly kill you. He had to all of a sudden leave Morocco one day because my grandmother's latest husband may have been a smuggler.
Things like that. And then the second text I got was about the present day, which was him telling me that he was finally going to retire. As I'm recording this, last night my dad played his last gig ever as a musician. Now this is not the first time he's retired, but for some reason this one does feel like the last time.
It makes me a little sad, to be honest, and I think it makes him a little sad too. But he is pushing 80 and I think he's beginning to wonder why he's wandering around with this heavy thing strapped to his shoulder. These two texts encapsulated his life as an artist. His very first gig on a beach in Morocco at 14 years old, playing for the mother of the king, and now his final gig playing in a weird little town in Texas.
I think it's a nice feeling to have something in your life that you've been doing from a very young age to your current age. That thing that's been like your companion, something that becomes ingrained in your DNA. But it did get me thinking about starting things and how we feel about starting things and why we stop ourselves from starting things.
We stop ourselves from starting creative projects for a million different reasons. I think the main reason is probably we don't start because we don't want it to be bad, and we don't want to spend a lot of our time doing a very bad thing. That's understandable. That's a whole hobgoblin of its own that we could talk about at a different time.
One of those myriad reasons why we don't start things has to do with age. We feel like we're too old. We feel like it's too late to start something. We have this concept—I don't know where it comes from—but we feel like when you're young is when you start something. You start this thing when you're young, you develop it over the course of your life. Then in your old age, you look back on all the great works that you've created. Sometimes you get to a certain age and you think, "I'm too old to start a new thing. This is not something that people my age do."
But when you really drill down into that thought and you really look under the hood, you'll see that that's not exactly true. Vera Wang didn't enter the fashion industry until she was 40. Laura Ingalls Wilder didn't publish her first Little House book until she was 64. When Frank McCourt won the Pulitzer Prize for "Angela's Ashes," right before that, he was a 66-year-old high school teacher. These things that we make, they can happen at any time, at any stage in our life. Sometimes it only happens when it's time for it to happen.
Now I've been a writer all my life. It's the only thing that I've done with any consistency in my life. But I didn't create Midnight Burger until I was in my late forties. And though I've done other things in my life that have been more financially lucrative than Midnight Burger, Midnight Burger is definitely the most successful thing that I've written in terms of something that I feel good about, something that feels like I'm finally writing the way that I want to.
In Midnight Burger, we talk about the past, the present, and the future, and how these moments all exist simultaneously right now. And we all live forever in every moment we've existed, but the only moment that you have access to is right now. So as we move this moment of now into this new year, maybe we should try and let go of the lamentations of the past or the anticipation of the future and acknowledge that there is only right now. Now is the only moment you have. So now is the only time to start.
Okay, everyone, here we go. Another year.
-j