Although I often whine about my chronic insomnia, in reality, it’s not a big deal because I’m retired.  Rarely do I have to be at a certain place at a designated time, so I can nap whenever I want, sometimes snatching a snooze as early as ten a.m., so it’s not like stumble about zombie-like all day, sleep deprived. 

In fact, it doesn’t make much evolutionary sense to be unconscious eight straight hours. I’ve read that our spear-toting pre-agrarian savannah-dwelling ancestors didn’t necessarily sleep through the predatory night, and during the Middle Ages, people engaged in a routine called “two sleeps,” turning in around nine or ten, slumbering for two or three hours, then awakening around one for what was known as “the watch,” a period in which they’d tend to tasks, socialize, and/or procreate.^[1] Around two or three they’d again hit the literal hay (or if wealthy, a feather-stuffed mattress) and sleep until dawn or a bit later. 

However, I don’t want to give the impression that now that I no longer have to battle Folly Road traffic in the a.m. that I dawdle away the day doing crosswords, binging Netflix, or wasting time on the internet. This week, in fact, I’ve been especially busy going through the second proofs of my next book, engaging in a political protest, and most vexing of all, jumping through the electronic hoops of TurboTax. Being retired makes performing these acts much more convenient.

Excuse me; I need to vent. Correcting the proofs on Long Ago Last Summer was much more difficult than it had been with my first book, Today, Oh Boy.  This time around, rather than having a human being perform the copy editing phase, the publisher shoved the manuscript’s 62, 327 words through the woodchipper of AI.

The book is a compilation of short fiction, poetry, and personal essays that features a medley of Southern voices. Each piece can stand alone; however, collectively, they form a sort of mosaic with one of the major patterns being Southern Gothic, that literary subgenre that features “incestuous aristocrats, necrophiliac halfwits, sadistic Alabama sheriffs [. . .] the suicide hanging in the attic, the alcoholic great aunt who gave birth to the idiot child buried in the backyard.”^[2]

You know, the human byproducts of the post-Reconstruction South, the folks I grew up with. 

Alas, AI wasn’t up to the task of dealing with the book’s cacophony of styles and voices.  Not only did it remove double negatives from the foul mouth of serial killer Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins (who picked me up hitchhiking in 1970) and replace them with grammatically correct utterances, but it also altered direct quotes from the poetry of Emily Dickinson. Anyway, on Monday I completed the weeklong task of correcting the corrections. If I were teaching full time, I would not have had the leisure to pick through the rumble and piece back together my original tiles.

Nor could I have attended Tuesday’s anti-Trump demonstration at Hampton Park without having to take a personal day. I had planned on Tuesday to do our taxes, but it ended up being one of those rare days when I had to be somewhere at a specific time. The protest occurred on the very day of Trump’s state of the union address in which he stupidly misconstrued the words “transgender” and “transgenic.”

Trump: Eight million dollars for making mice transgender. This is real.

Jeff Tiedrich: No, no, no, no. Nobody is spending government money to make mice transgender. You low-wattage dolt. The word is transgenic.

Let’s say you’re a cancer researcher, and you implant some human genetic material into mice, in order to better study how cells mutate. boom! — you’ve just created transgenic mice. 

Nobody is doing sex-change operations on mice and setting them loose in Nancy Mace’s bathroom.

But I digress. I hadn’t engaged in a public protest since the fall of 1971, and I it looked like many of the protestors in attendance were alive and kicking during the Viet Nam era, which makes sense, given they are past retirement age and free to go wherever they choose midday on a Tuesday in March. I used to tell my students that if the governor told my generation that we couldn’t drink until we were 21, there would have been 300,000 of us on the lawn of the Governor’s mansion every day of the week. 

The protest, though somewhat limited in its attendance^[3] and no doubt in swaying public opinion or sending shivers up the spines of Republican representatives, did provide an outlet for our outrage at Trump’s destroying our democracy and cruelly wreaking havoc upon the lives of so many of our citizens, not to mention his abandoning of Ukraine and the rest of our European allies. 

It was somewhat comforting to rub elbows with like minded people whose intelligence and commitment was apparent in the signs that they carried.

photo credit Joan Perry

photo credit Linda Bell

Okay, don’t worry about this 5-paragraph essay set up. I’m not going to give you a blow by blow account of my doing taxes, which thanks to my late wife’s assets is complicated by K-I limited partnerships, etc. Nevertheless, I do them myself because nowadays accountants essentially have you enter your financial information into their computer software instead of TurboTax. It ends up being the same amount of work. Using an accountant might save us some money, but what the hay. 

Ah, with my daily labors completed, here I sit sipping a Westbrook IPA at Lowlife Bar on a Wednesday afternoon scribbling this down in a composition notebook, happy to have completed the taxes and survived the tornados that never showed up on a day when Charleston County schools were called off.

Cheers! Thanks for reading until the end.

PS. Uh-oh! I just saw on LinkedIn that I appeared in 12 searches, two of which were the State Department and USAID. Yipes.

photo credit Joan Perry

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^[1] Since families usually slept in communal beds, having sex could be problematic.

^[2] from the preface of Long Ago Last Summer, 38-9. 

^[3] The Post and Courier estimated around 500,