MAY 2025 SULLYGRAM: April thunder wasn’t bluffing, and May is delivering as I write this. Headwinds glissando across budded branches like piano keys. Sulfurous clouds are having a pillow fight, and silver lightning skittering on the horizon daggers down every now and then to stab something and leaves a pool of oozing ozone. Kind of apocalyptic, these opening janitorial tasks of Spring cleanup. Makes me think of life’s cardinal dictums somehow, the urgent drivers of thriving beyond surviving.

Fame, love and fortune, by name – the holy and unholy trio of our questings as human beings. You could mold that trifecta to fit the crude motivations of almost any creature on Earth of will or urge, but it gets exquisitely refined in us featherless bipeds. So deep are the instincts, the addiction to acquire fame, love and fortune, that a little of each is seldom enough. And if you sidestep them on the grand stage, they come back into your life in petty ways. Life is habit.

I’ve written about them before, but like water or air they are subject to the tides and currents of time passing. When I think about them in my own life, my reflex to each of them seems remarkably against the grain. I think I missed a memo, or a lesson. I’m like anti-matter when it comes to mainstream motivation. Very different reactions in a not very typical life. What’s the literary stereotype…Anthony Adverse?

In a way, it’s kept me young. Perpetually “becoming,” but never quite arriving. Always on the journey, never reaching the destination. Of course, you could just call that failure and denial. Willy Loman in process. Or is it a way to keep goals from tarnishing? For sure it enhances pleasures and satisfactions, enriching what might otherwise be mundane and prosaic.

What about you? Are your senses keen to the music of experience, the poetry of thought, the light in the forest leading you on? What fuels you? Do you savor benchmarks along the way that affirm your secret progress like a finger pressed to mute lips in a dream. Sometimes the signs are all bad and the karma is bleak. As a young man, there was this drunk I met in a bar who I blew off until he came out with “…oh, you’re one of those guys with a failure urge,” and the frustrated female who said “you don’t let anyone love you.”

Haunting portents? Food for thought? Yes and Yes. Else I wouldn’t still remember them. We all have cues that get to us, create doubts, stifle goals, no matter how small our microcosm. As an athlete within a second of a swimming world record (back when times were crummy), I used to fantasize that if I knew I was about to hit the wall under the mark, I might pull back.

Not surprising to me then that so many legendary glitterati seek to escape their audience, as if fame suddenly turned hollow. Actors go behind cameras, singers cringe at touring, aging marquee names become reclusive. With few exceptions, public figures experience fame behind a mask and a masque. Their curried image is the mask, and the other type of masque is the surreal opera in which they move surrounded by a retinue of grasping hypers and promoters (try finding a true friend in that feeding frenzy). Discover the truth of fame within your allotted 15 minutes, and you can count yourself lucky. Stretch it to, say, an hour, and you risk selling your soul. Parse it into separate venues of 15 minutes each, and you might pull it off if you can learn when to leave the building. 

Win, lose or draw, the trifecta of fame, love and fortune are a good way to peer into one’s soul. Your turn on the subject of love. Did you find it? Lose it? Still looking? Alas, I hid my heart in darkness while passion waited like the substance of a shadow; and the gods of irony saw that and put my name on their dice. There is a game we used to play in South America called Bidou. You play it with leather cups and die, rattling the cubes around and slamming the leather cup down as if to trap lady luck. That’s what my heart felt like when the substance of my shadow was suddenly shaken around like those bones in a leather cup late in the game. Love found me the only way it could have happened. If you haven’t checked off the box for “love” in your autobiography, keep your diary open and a brace of multi-colored pens handy for Technicolor entries.  

That leaves fortune – symbol of security and access (a species of freedom). And, though I am not rich, I have to believe it’s the easiest of the trio to come by. Building sufficient wealth is as simple as giving gainful employment time and discipline. It’s amazing that so many are willing to utilize the former but not the latter. You read about the eccentric old coot dishwasher who dies and is discovered to have amassed a fortune. Not a mystery, really. In American society, the only question you need answer early in life is: do you want to pay interest till the day you die or earn interest? Simple choice, but instant gratification wins more than it loses. People jump aboard the cattle car of the credit train and get up to a speed where escape is impossible. Live within your means, let your meager moolah gather interest, and sooner than later you become the engineer hooting the horn of the roaring locomotive. Time and discipline. Simple math.

Spring photos below…

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan