An astrological warning for the future

I left NYC seven years ago. Or rather, we did - the newly pregnant wife, the middle-aged dog, and myself, the soon-to-be dad. For whatever reason I put the date in my calendar and I see it repeat every year. I guess because calculating the date against Rhys' birth date must have seemed a task too difficult to confidently accomplish with any regularity. 

I thought you might want to know.

Each time I sit down here to write it becomes more and more clear why I'm struggling to do so: being honest becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible, and unpleasant by necessity. So, there is just a spiraling backwards into adolescent humor, or the frustrated disappointment of politics and social issues. All of it an ineffective diversion. The truth is that I have refined my life's focus around the organizing principle of fatherhood, which does difficult things to the mind and spirit, not all of them grand or beautiful. I'm not complaining, just trying to be honest. Many would rather I keep to only trying to relay the difficulties in a comical way, but I am slowly losing the ability to take pleasure in my own sense of humor. I noticed some time back that I have been laughing less. Levity is not the result of choices, but rather one possible result among a series of them.

Don't worry, mine is not entirely gone, but in the last couple of years something has changed. A sense of dread is replacing a feeling of buoyancy. 

Maybe a military parade would help cheer me up. A cavalcade of missiles and fighter planes lining the street, trumpets and drums, cadences broken by the triumphant punctuation of bugles in revelry. What sort of nation would not be stirred by such a display. 

I cancelled my 50th birthday. It's not going to happen. It was becoming too complicated, it seems. Or rather, I was not organizing enough. Both. Maybe that is a part of what is adding to my feeling: I don't want to become anything. I don't like aging, at all. It feels as if I'm contracting some agreed upon malady, and I'm supposed to accept it gracefully, with composure.

The diseasing of neither, its flickering of seasons, three at a time pass without blinking, bereft of poetry, symmetry, all of the other and either.

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