OCTOBER 2025 SULLYGRAM:  Seasons? Turns out they’re not just for weather changes and spacing out holidays. We spend the spring and summer of our life planting and growing, then the autumn and winter thinning out the harvests, good and bad. Include in that range organic relationships from pets to people and inorganic testimonials to how we set the world on fire. In my case, the testimonials embrace eighty-some years of paper entombed in a dozen 4-drawer legal-size file cabinets that I sometimes wish weren’t fire proof. Add boxes of mss published and unpublished that could potentially re-ignite. A few months ago – sensing that I might only have 25-30 more years to live (youthful smile) – I began the long-procrastinated task of sifting through the ashes and tinder.    

You might think correspondence ranks low on my paper trail, but I’m far too deep in the weeds and gardens of life to just let memories, records and thoughts go. They are the autobio I’ve never found the motivation to write. As it is, I’m using a shredder in the sorting process, else I’m digging through the round-file to disinter some memory hours after tossing it. But maybe I’ve discovered a way to ease the post-partum.

Sharing part of a decades old letter on FB, as I did recently, stirred some off-channel response that made me think memories don’t have to be lost to eternity. Giving voice to that reminiscence was like saving one note of a signature song. So, here’s another note…this one from a letter I wrote to someone when the desire to escape to Minnesota was building in me:   

“…Incredible few nights this week. Spoke in Flint, Howell, Brighton. Flint was taped for U. of M. TV, I believe. Holiday Inn in Howell was for American Business Women’s Association. Funny how even a smidgen of attention triggers good ol’ Christian guilt in artists who come blinking out of their garrets. Never thought I’d be unable to cope with the la-la, but that’s how I feel at the moment. There are people at these things who have heard me speak two and three times in the last month. What are they looking for? Hope for their writing? Understanding for their frustration? Some secret they mistakenly think I have? I get about halfway home at night with the radio on when the sadness and feelings of unworthiness hit. Kind people offer me things, and women on secretary salaries are buying two or three copies of MOON without anyone to give them to. One of them went to nine used bookstores in three cities until she found a copy of my early pot-boiler DIAPASON! Made me feel phony and overwhelmed.

“The week previous I donned my worn three-piece suit from ‘The Warehouse’ to speak at the War Memorial in Grosse Pointe, a heavy culture affair with a lot of luminaries and the Fourth Estate in attendance. Arriving forty minutes early, I killed time in a park on Lake St. Clair, looking at the water. But as I was getting back in the car, disaster struck. There is no sound like trousers splitting. They call the wind Maria and it was blowing up from the south. Roared down Lakeshore and East Jefferson looking for a commercial storefront, but it’s all block-long mansions at that point. Was weighing my chances of borrowing a needle and thread up one of those 500-ft. drives when I saw the tawdry glitz of Detroit ahead. One of the first establishments was a dry cleaner, and I don’t know why I thought they might have fabric repairs, but I was desperate. Never an old man behind the counter when you want one, the clerk was a libido-challenging beauty of Asian extraction. I sidled in, sidled around with my back to the wall until the lone customer left. By then I knew the clerk spoke only broken English, but waving my hand behind me I tried to convey the problem and my rush. A worldly grin spread over her face. “Zip-zip,” she said. The room she waved me into was mirror city with klieg lights. Zip-zip, you betcha. I saw about fifty of me standing in two-thirds of my three-piece suit as I held the other third out the door. Scant minutes later she had sewn up the pants and handed them back through the doorway. When I came out, she was strumming an acoustic guitar, faintly smiling. I held out my wallet. “No charge,” she said. Of course not. She just had a million-dollars-worth of laughs. Touched by her lack of avarice, I stole another minute to search briskly down the street, looking for some way to repay. Ghastly choice. Liquor and porn. But the booze check-out had a display of trinkets that included ear rings. $100 it said on the velour, on sale for $1.99. When I left Saint Seamstress the second time, she had her guitar, her smile, and a pair of the world’s cheapest ear rings. Don’t remember a thing about the War Memorial speech except that each time the audience laughed, I heard zip-zip.”

Hope you are amused. A bit of my relevance on planet Earth is now preserved from a long-ago letter I don’t remember writing about an evening I barely recall. Damned shame to lose zillions of people and events to the past when you start to close in on a century. But the truth is that what I just wrote in a vain attempt at preservation is an exercise in futility. Our relevancy isn’t in the past or the future. It’s in the now. Amazes me that as a species we are obsessed with legacies. We cast eulogies around – “…never be forgotten…remembered for all time…enduring memory.” Alas. The next generation, the next trend, the next cultural earthquake, and everything fades to black.

Man or machine, it’s down curtain after a brief dance upon the stage. Dial-up telephones, cursive writing, 8-tracks, typewriters – all consigned to ancient history. Ditto lifestyles. Tell your chilluns that you used to have to wait a week to get your photos developed and that service stations pumped your gas, cleaned your windshield, put air in your tires and checked the oil every visit. Farmer, plumber, clerk, emperor, scientist, rock star, explorer, inventor – the hordes of history go to dust quicker than a gnat’s orgasm. Names that survive are spun in revolving doors of interpretation and re-worked judgments. Revised by wonks to fit all kinds of agendas, they become the hijacked heroes of doctrines, moralities, and social orders they might well have opposed in real life. Villains turn into synonyms for evil. We joke about spinning in one’s grave and lasting legacy, but I’ve never really understood why either one matters. Does perpetuity feed on zombies? Legacy doesn’t forward royalties to the dead. What matters is celebrating every step of the journey while you have a brain to enjoy it.  

For that matter, earthly tenures themselves have changed drastically. Life expectancy in 1900 was 32 years of age. People were too busy surviving to angst 24/7 about intangibles. No iPhones, texts, messaging or email. But now we carry the village well in our cell phone pockets, and the physical demands of the past have largely morphed into emotional ones. Overall, society never got a handle on leisure time. Ease of living created a vacuum that we fill with anxieties, stresses and hills to die on. Media as entertainment, media as distraction, media as information, media as education, media as culture, media as government… We’ve outsourced our lives and independence. We’re out of balance within ourselves, out of sync as a society, unable to center in either. Sometimes recovering one’s balance means taking a step or two…backwards.           

In 1970 Alvin Toffler published FUTURESHOCK, noting that data was doubling every 4.5 years and that very soon it would be doubling overnight. (Wake up, you sleepy-head) we’re way past that now. If you want to live fully, if you want to be relevant, find yourself each day apart from the trends and narratives of society and its shifting cultural quagmires. Relate to the timeless universals in nature. Relate to the clockwork gears of life apart from discordant media and ranting radicals. You are here; you are now. The sky is blue. The sun and moon make their appointed rounds. The night firmament calls you home to galaxies and stars. And morning light awakens you to all the life you can live in a day. Zip-zip.

Photo below: Sully October, 2025: Yup…I can still fog a mirror.

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan