Notes from Maine - 2026/06/14
Everything is a bit slower now. I quit coffee this week. Last Sunday we stayed up all night for Project Graduation. The night was uneventful, interesting, and slow. Our part of the event was three hours of different types of games for the kids to play. I oversaw the air hockey, foosball, and pinball. Other adults worked the casino tables. I watched the former high-schoolers rush in and promised myself that I wouldn’t look at the clock for at least an hour. I didn’t want to stare at it all night. By the time I relented and decided to check, seventeen minutes had passed. Their manic energy made time stand still.
The graduates were polite and generally well-behaved. I didn’t see a single cellphone all night. I suppose they confiscated them beforehand? When 3am approached, the frantic pace increased. They filed around, trying to make sure that they had taken advantage of everything on offer at this venue. Their next stop was a long boat ride in the Casco Bay, but none of them knew that yet. I can’t tell you how many kids were there—a hundred? A million? They were an amorphous mass of young faces, wearing ironic t-shirts and college sweatshirts.
Erin and I drove back north at 5am, enjoying the sunrise and morning fog. By the time I got up on Monday, the idea of more caffeine in my system just didn’t appeal to me, so I figured it was a good time to quit coffee for a bit. I don’t regret it, but the change definitely alters the morning’s pace.
My nephew’s high school graduation was on Thursday. My friends were over for our normal dinner and we watched parts of the ceremony. At his school, each student is introduced by what I gather to be their homeroom teacher (they use the term TA, which may mean Team Advisory? — I never caught the definition). The graduation took forever as we actually learned a little about each student. At my graduation, as each student marched by, we often learned the student’s first and last name. That was, of course, if the principal could pronounce the name, which oftentimes was out of their skillset.
It was great to see my nephew a couple of weeks ago and meet his friends. Then, to see him again on TV collecting his diploma felt like I was really witnessing a defining moment in his life. I’m sure he won’t think of it that way. To him it will have been yet another obligation on the way to eventual freedom from childhood. I don’t know—that’s the way I felt at the time, so I’m projecting that on him.
When I was in college, the Indigo Girls sang, “I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind, got my paper, and I was free.” That kinda summed it up for me, although I had friends at the time who were incensed by that notion. I don’t regret all that school, eating up the first two decades of my life, but I still think there are better ways to do things. I’ve learned very little in classroom settings that couldn’t have been easier and more interesting to learn in other settings. I’m very much an “applied” knowledge type of person. Give me a problem and the tool to solve it and I will learn how to use that tool if it kills me. That tool could be calculus or grammar—I learn by doing, not listening to lectures. I suppose it’s difficult to arrange that type of education for a large group of students who learn in different ways and at different paces.
I wonder if I should go back to coffee this week. It would be the easier path, I think. I would be back to my typical routine and feel less adrift. My eyes take longer to wake up when I’m not drinking coffee. The rest of me takes longer too. I picked up my normal grocery order yesterday and forgot to cancel the cream. Now I have a stockpile of perishable dairy in my refrigerator that I’m going to struggle to get through. I didn’t drink coffee at all until I was 40. Maybe it’s a good time to re-commit myself to this perpetually sleepy state. I could go take a nap right now and wake up in time for dinner.
There’s too much to do today. I’ll finish out another day or two of detox and then consider my options, I guess.
