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I Don’t Have To Understand Jazz

By David Todd McCarty
In Essay
September 11, 2020
4 Min read
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I

“Jazz is rhythm and meaning.”Henri Matisse The French painter Henri Matisse once said, “I don’t paint things. I only paint the difference between things.”  This is how I feel when I try to understand jazz, and to be clear, I do not understand jazz. This is not to say I don’t appreciate it, I just don’t understand how it’s supposed to work. I am forced to play catchup the entire time, because I can’t quite predict where it’s going to go. So if jazz could be described as the place...

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I Had Something To Say But I’ve Forgotten What It Was

By David Todd McCarty
In Essay
September 10, 2020
3 Min read
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I

It has taken me the better part of half a century to learn that I am not a good public speaker. This is not due to a fear of getting on stage, or speaking to large groups of people, but a realization that my mind does not like to perform in real time. I am not a performer of any kind, and despite my abiding love for standup comedy, and the secret fantasy that I might have it in me to perform in this manner, I am not that guy.  “It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good...

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A Bear OfVery Little Brain

By David Todd McCarty
In Essay
September 10, 2020
10 Min read
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A

My issue with authority began at an early age. I realized early on that adults were not only infallible, but often incompetent as well. This can be a scary thing to learn as a child I suppose, but I was not deterred. I just assumed I would need to do it myself, and so proceeded to do just that, throughout my entire life.  My parents had given me a solid foundation for exploration, where I understood the ground rules and believed their authority to be legitimate. They were not capricious...

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The Crick Be Damned

By David Todd McCarty
In Essay
September 8, 2020
5 Min read
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T

Fifty-two is not that old really, even though I am now decidedly middle-aged, but since we raised our kids when I was especially young, it’s hard for me to imagine raising a child today. If I had a deficit of patience back then, which I most certainly did, I have infinitely less of it now. Being consumed with my own career, and having come late to the party of raising children I had no part in creating, I was often bewildered at how I had come to live with these small, messy humans. I generally...

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Cutting Bait

By David Todd McCarty
In Essay
April 20, 2020
7 Min read
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C

I wasn’t there the morning they found old Bill Yawley with a knife in his chest at the fish camp, but you can be sure I heard all about it when I got back. Story went, and this was from several reliable sources, someone shoved a filet knife straight into Darryl’s chest, clean through his yellow rubber waders, and either he fell back into his chair or he was sitting when he got stabbed. Don’t really matter much either way. They found him sitting there, on one of those cheap, white plastic...

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Wicked This Wind Blows

By David Todd McCarty
In Essay
April 14, 2020
10 Min read
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W

Many of us, from time to time, during this peculiar period of forced isolation and rare discomfort we collectively find ourselves, will indulge the desire to protest our current situation, even as we sit there, idle in our climate controlled abode, full of all manner of food and drink, replete with all the comforts of modern life including toilets that flush, the miracle of electric power, cable television, and of course the entire body of knowledge discovered over the course of all human...

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Seven Seconds

By David Todd McCarty
In Essay
April 7, 2020
5 Min read
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S

It’s been thirty days since I last had a drink. I don’t know why thirty days holds such a big place in sober circles, but it does. I guess it’s as good a marker as any. A month. Four weeks. Long enough to mean something and at the same time, a mere blip in the radar of life. I have decided that I am not going to drink today, or at least not this morning, and probably not tonight, and at this point, no plans to drink tomorrow either. After that, who knows really, because there is a novel...

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America’s Game

By David Todd McCarty
In Essay
March 28, 2020
9 Min read
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A

One of the hardest things to endure when it comes to the global COVID-19 pandemic—for me at least—has been the lack of baseball. To those who are not fans of the game, or sports in general, this might seem callous or even downright offensive in light of the death and destruction that the coronavirus is leaving in its wake, and I’m not suggesting we should be doing anything differently at the moment. Just that I am missing a thing I really enjoy.  Baseball is known as much as a pastime as...

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Stir Crazy

By David Todd McCarty
In Essay
March 28, 2020
7 Min read
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S

As a general rule I am not a terribly social person, and in fact avoid in-person social interaction whenever possible, so when I was told to isolate myself because of a global pandemic, I didn’t have to even think twice about it. No problem, I thought, I’ve been waiting for this moment my whole life. I’m quite certain that introverts the world over were downright relieved that for at least a few weeks or months, the world would operate on their terms, instead of the other way around. We would...

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Hunting For Gold

By David Todd McCarty
In Essay
March 22, 2020
31 Min read
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H

When I close my eyes, I no longer have visions of deer picking their way through the trees, and the voices in my head have completely stopped, but every now and then I believe I can still catch the faint scent of a mesquite campfire off in the distance. It’s been a week now since I’ve been home, and I continue to be haunted by the memories of my time on a ranch in Sonora, Texas. It’s been a week now since I’ve been home, and I continue to be haunted by the memories of my time on a ranch in...

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