Nighthawks and Blogposts

Today, September 16, 2025, is the twentieth anniversary of my blog Mixed Meters -- yes, two full decades have passed since.  There's little incentive for me to post here these days.  My small corner of Blogspot has been getting fewer hits and comments than ever before.  It has become quite the lonely place.

This painting, Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, depicts another lonely place.  It shows three otherwise normal-looking but mysterious customers sitting in a diner, at the counter, on which we can see coffee cups, napkin dispensers, salt and pepper shakers but not much else.  We wonder about their relationships.  Do they all know each other?  Does the single man feel jealous of his twin who is showing off his lady friend?  No incel, he.  And why don't the men take their hats off when they're inside?  Maybe they have receding hairlines.

Nighthawks happens late at night, somewhere in a city.  Why are they drinking coffee so late at night?   There's a server person in a white uniform doing something mysterious.  Two large coffee urns are behind him.  I assume one of the urns contains decaf - or these people will never get any sleep tonight.  The server and the urns represent the brightest part of the painting.  I suppose that painters think about light and shadow quite a bit, so that must be important.

And there's a door leading to the back but no obvious way to enter the diner from the street.  How did they get in there?

The rest of Nighthawks shows the barren outside, visible only because of light from inside.  It reminds me of a studio backlot.  Across the street is a generic storefront with completely empty display windows, save for one mysterious object - a cash register?   Upstairs we see apartment windows with shades half drawn.         

Above the diner itself is the most relatable and realistic part of Nighthawks - a good old capitalist American billboard hawking cigars for 'only' a nickel.  (Phillies cigars are still sold although the price has risen.  I would assume, anachronistically, that Hopper was paid for product placement.) 

Nighthawks, a cultural touchstone depicting isolation and loneliness, has become the inspiration for many parodies.  It calls out for a back story to explain what these people are waiting for.  It calls out for a future story to imagine what happens to them next.  It calls out for cast changes; new actors from every fictional universe brought in to play the different roles.  It calls out for artistic style changes, swapping Hopper's Philip Marlowy noir-ness for every other possible artistic style.

Several years ago I started collecting Nighthawks images as I noticed them online.  My thinking was that I could use them someday for an easy Mixed Meters post.  'Someday' equals 'now'.  These are but a small sample of the available Nighthawks parodies.  Don't believe me?  Do your own research. 

If you click on any of these Nighthawkian pictures they should enbiggen themselves.  If you hover your mouse over them, some information about them should appear.  

My profound apologies if you're trying to read this post on a cell phone.  Twenty years ago it was assumed that people read blogs on their desktop or maybe on their laptop.  Back then I delved headfirst into HTML programming.  I set fixed column sizes.  I futzed with things I didn't understand.  Then I promptly forgot everything I had learned.  That didn't matter much because everything I had learned started changing faster and faster.  If you've read my palaver this far and you have simple-to-understand suggestions for how to make twenty years of my posts easier to access online, please get in touch.

"I don't know how, but word got out about this place."

These days however I am twenty years older and wiser - enough to know what a waste of time it would be for me to attempt rewriting the code.  Mixed Meters' infamous tag line ("Life is too short to listen to ugly music") may not be true at my age - because I do actually enjoy listening to a lot of what you, dear listener, might regard as really ugly music.   It is absolutely true, however, that life is too short to re-learn HTML for one project.

Besides Nighthawks, I still have other ideas for new posts; some easy, some difficult.  My question is 'Where will I find the energy and motivation to make a few of them happen?'  Is there a reason to keep posting if I only do it once per year?  Is there a reason to keep posting if I get zero feedback?  

One post that would be simple and long overdue, would include pictures of our current pets.  We now have three cats - Lisa and Maggie (our two Simpson girls who have yet to appear on Mixed Meters) and Doctor Pyewacket (who has gotten lots of coverage here since Leslie found him in the bushes.) 

It has now been three years since we lost our dog Chowderhead, the big red beast.  He lived to be sixteen.  I've posted many pictures of him here, but he deserves a proper online farewell.  Someday he may get it.

Obituaries have become quite common among the recent Mixed Meters posts.  One that hasn't been written yet is for my friend Tom Brodhead, who passed away last year.  Tom was a brilliant composer, painter, computer programmer and Charles Ives expert who valiantly fought cancer for 15 years.  He only lived to be 56 years old.   Mortality is all around us.

I still take a lot of pictures, usually searching for the perfect abstract composition.  To that end I have another blog called Mixed Messages.  It has been almost 18 months since I posted anything new there.

The one thing I do try to do as often as possible is to compose music.  Hey, years ago I actually trained to do that.  They gave me a degree and everything.  I had wanted to become a professional composer but I lucked out by failing in that quest.  Now I compose for my own pleasure.  When (if) I finish anything new I'll announce it here.  Plus this heads-up: someday I hope to post my music to Bandcamp.  Until then, you'll have to satisfy yourself with my YouTube.

My previous blog post - exactly one year ago, on MM's nineteenth anniversary - announced a massive musical work of mine which you're welcome to listen to.  It's entitled Music From Inside My Head.  The entire work is eight and a half hours long; it took me two and a half years to finish.  There's a lot more to be said about it and I could, if I chose, say everything I can think of to say in one massively huge blog post.  That post would still take considerably less time to read than it would to listen to the entire work.  (Hint, start by dipping your toe in: just listen to a random twenty minutes.)

One post I am not likely to write would be about our current president.  For a while last fall I thought about writing "Notes for Donald Trump's obituary" because everyone has to die sometime, right?  And it doesn't hurt to be prepared.  

But in this new age of political assassinations, name calling, ad hominem revenge and thought control, I would have first needed to remind everyone that I actually wish him a long life, if only because I believe that his supporters will not break free from his clutches until he himself confesses just how much evil he has wrought and willingly accepts his punishment.

Which only goes to prove that I live in my own little bubble.  Leaving the bubble has become far more frightening than it was twenty years ago.  Why bother?   I'm old enough to have realized that nothing I do will change the world.

"Not you, too, Larry. Pumpkin-flavored?"