This day arrives, the crest of another week passes in foam.
Some people are at Burning Man. I want to go, build an art-nest to traditional gender roles, with decorative chicks, to see what sort of weirdos I can drum up out of the dust, if just. I have yet to empty my actual car from the past weekend of camping. Am waiting for a next girlfriend to help me. It is but one of the many arts of manhood.
Seem capable, needed.
Before it is over, some woman will wish to have my baby, again.
I'd do it. I have achieved the wisdom of a pubescent.
I sit now, looking at the imaginary section of days that sit between myself and my next weekend. I understand what it might take to move past this, if only by rote acceptance. Once those days are gone, then they are gone. The ones yet arrived have not yet; they are as gone in distance as all else, disappearing when you place much weight upon them. The future works inversely. The moment is the thing there is. No way to go back and enjoy time, much less the feeling of joy that left its shiny residue there upon the surface. If you think that you wish to enjoy the future then spend your present preparing to make good memories.
Yet so few fall in love with a song upon its hearing.
The importantest parts of life tickle the see-saw of time. We tell ourselves anythings, all times. Seconds becomes precious, they unfurl within us as minutes, or as ever, or less than else.
I don't know. How would I?
Life was dense with opportunity and joy. That might well be how life tricks an object into noticing itself - dim the lights a bit, see who squints, see who cares... see who sleeps.
For those that had siblings, they will often do this infuriating thing to one another: mimic and repeat everything said by the other in mocking childhood tones. It becomes maddening, and yet true to itself. It is a truth which no one should be expected to suffer: the reminding of one's self in another.
It's why love fails, unless you married the wrong person, then it's just their fault.
Inevitably, one child will appeal to either or both parents to have the other stop. The imitator must also appeal to have it stopped, giggling as they go, imploring in exaggerated tones the request that would end the torture for one of them. What value would there be in such a thing, at all, if only to give up at such a moment that their echoing efforts are finally being recognized. The moment of triumph!
A real rebel will start to imitate Dad, as that statue lays down the new law.
There is no better defense to dogma than its immediate proliferation. Only the severest of families can resist the temptation of laughter when dad seems like anybody else in the car.
Hopefully, Dad feels the same.
It is occurring to me slowly now, that parenting is little more than this game writ large, stretched out over a generational difference or two. The boy imitates everything that I do, everything that I say, sooner or later. It's maddening in its own way because I am imperfect, and no highest form of flattery will change that. I'll pretend to be hurt when he finds other heroes to imitate. Who knows, maybe I will be hurt by it, or maybe I'll remember this moment, and offer my vanity to the prevailing winds of his interests.
Anybody with a liquid dose of self-honesty should find some relief in not having a template made from their own behavior, formed deep within the daily behavior of another, that of a child.
I don't know. I don't know.
I'm trying subtly to reverse the process, often look to the boy for behavioral clues, have had some success there. He seems happier than me, so why not. Why not? Why shouldn't I be more like him, than him like me. I could use a new hero, too.
I don't know how other people do it, or what they think and feel about such things. I'm tempted to start filling the boy's head with daydreams about Christ's eternal sacrifice, perhaps just to insulate him against any future nonsense in that regard. I promise here and now that I will never tell him about U2. What more is required of a good parent of my age?
Things can go terribly wrong, as when a parent catches their kid smoking and makes them smoke several, or a whole pack. U2 can't help with that, because they are retarded, and their growth was stunted by success. They are midget Christians. It's awful, but they are doing what they can in their little midget hearts, in Africa, or somewhere else, wherever they are, or will be midgets next.
To force poison upon a child was the mythical wisdom in the 70s and even the early 80s, at least among the families in suburban Orlando. Now, that would rightfully be called abuse, but you know... things change. It's why The Human League are no more. Kids don't have to listen to U2, now, unless they are victims of Apple stuffing. We were all victims when the field was wide open for making the heinous claims of the effect of others. Victims are the largest and fastest moving demographic, and they are making new ones every quarter.... Thanks, Jobs!
The person telling the apocryphal tale of having to smoke a carton would sometimes be doing so across the fumes of the cigarette that they were smoking,
I try not to picture my boy with tattoos, body piercings, smoking cigarettes, herpes, simplexes, or worse. But, I look at the young kids in this area and I accept that he will likely appear as they do to me now, once they become his new reference point for coolness, the new standard by which he will gauge himself, if all of my reading recommendations have failed. I give it another handful of years before he'll be wearing rock t-shirts of some sort, locking his bedroom door and not wanting to sit down and talk with me, embarrassed when I discuss pop culture with his friends.
The cliche exhale when I even ask him to come to dinner, his favorite food of the time, the one that I made him.
Beleaguered Consumering.
It seems inconceivable to me now, but so do many things. My 40s were a lifelong myth I gleefully trusted would never arrive, not realizing I had consumed them before they had their chance.
Whatever time I am scraping off of the walls of the dungeon now are those of my 50s.
Arthur Miller's Afetr-birth of a Solicitation.
Such forward slippage of time - a sense of many motions falling, the woozy feeling that something implacable is shifting far underneath, some thing propelling things forward, predictable by pattern, increasing in scope, ushering time and self along with it. To see fractals unfurl within you renders all things part of something else, useless.
Thoughtful people tried to tell me about it when I was younger. I listened, but didn't quite know what to do about it. Old people are disgustingly disappearing. Why would they vanish otherwise? Age is awful, but death is the reminder of how disgusting is the effort that keeps us all alive. Just watch an old person eat. I would turn against them if there were any left.
Ah well, ah fuck, ah this, or that, next.
Every now and then I wish to sit quietly, to endure the moment of peace to be had from within, though not for long. I note the occasional breath amidst the mist, to avoid the seasickness of time.
Mostly, though, I want life to move faster than it is, find myself bored with the collection of diversions that created me, that I will soon be stuck with, as objects of love to pass on; to this with, that with.
I've smoked the whole pack now, still stand, wisps of sinuous smoke rising around a group of dubious non-believers, generously exhaling the poison that I had also been warned of. As if time were frozen and wanted nothing more than me not melting.
These are just opinions - the elongated world of social media has encouraged me to detest the opinions of others - factless, baseless, ubiquitous, insisted upon, then against, full of self, or the emptying of nuanced charm of mind.
A favorite thing to claim, and oftenest will: you must have misunderstood...
It happens.
If only fact.
Deflating a well placed misunderstanding.
Details diminish life, as scurry,
with promises better
or, best unhurried.
.
