Today I am sixty-eight. The highlight of the day my son and I went to our local Mexican-American restaurant where I had four chilled Cuervo Traditional Tequilas and two Corona Light Cervezas, an order of shredded beef Taquitos Rancheros with rice and whole pinto beans, and a Chocolate Mud Pie to celebrate my birthday. I didn’t tell them it was my birthday because I wasn’t interested in wearing the sombrero and having the servers singing “Happy Birthday” in Spanish.

My writing is focused on my 319 Winesap Lane series. At this point in time Geoff is still celibate as a near elder gay man, Jerry seems to be coming out of his cloud of TBI, Erik is at the school for the blind and will soon be adopted by Geoff, Jamie has a boyfriend named Curt, Billy has acquired a boyfriend named Per, and one of the twins has been isolated from his brother.

My other stories that are “On Hold” will remain there for the time being due my diminished creative capacity. I’d like to do more, but there is only so much that I’m able to create in that direction.

I’m struggling with the bipolar disorder as I attempt to learn how to play jazz guitar on a cheap Yamaha acoustic. I have an $800 Epiphone Les Paul that I want to trade-in on an inexpensive Fender Telecaster. Of course, I’m going to have to go back to taking lessons. Since we live in East Snohomish County, I’ll have to find a teacher closer to the urban areas in the I-5 corridor. That will, of course, mean I will have to concentrate on my driving to overcome the attention deficit I have as a result of bipolar disorder.

Of course, I could just teach myself. It’s been done before, but in all those cases it was accomplished by people much younger than myself. It’s not that I don’t have the tools, it’s that I think I could do better under the tutelage of an experienced instructor. It’s one thing to learn major and minor scales, jazz chord progressions, arpeggios, and innovations on tunes on my own, but to do all that with an experienced instructor who is willing to work with an ol’ fogey who is trying to relive his younger years when he had the chance to be something with a different instruments (alto saxophone, baritone saxophone, clarinet, and bassoon), but stopped learning when he reached a wall and fearing being seen as incapable stopped all lessons and all chances of improvement sounds like a better idea.