It is of course sobriety that has soured me on parenting. Time chants its flat imprecation, without dreams of baboons and periwinkles. There will be no catching tigers, no red weather. I may not seem sober right now, but I am. It is a horror. That is perhaps part of what a divorce can do. But it can do the other also, old sailor. It is a simple matter, enduring a reconciliation. Without drinking I often lack adequate access to my impulses. One must put effort into inconsistencies when alcohol is absent. Otherwise, chaos arrives in its own time.
I kid along a bit, mostly to belabor the point.
I am bored and it is Sunday. Three days left at my current job, then a Florida vacation. I have been on a diet for about two weeks and have not lost a single pound. I believe that's a personal record.
Here it is - Sunday. Rachel and I drank champagne last night while we watched television with the boy, which was pleasant. We started watching Apollo 13 but it upset the boy when things started to go south for the crew. Perhaps the idea of somebody's father dying helplessly in a cold and isolated place was too much for his nine year old mind. That could just be me, projecting my fears and desires.
We're good parents.
CS said something to me the other day and I suspect that he is right. Being a father has done something horrible to me. It has stripped me of my sense of humor, my verve. Well, being a father and being in a relationship. You end up losing whatever audience you had and gaining one that only finds you funny if you're relaying pre-endorsed humor. Dad jokes, etc.
I go to a three hour coaching camp this morning. I will discover some best practices for being an assistant coach of a boy's 4th grade basketball team. My pre-game speeches, I hope, will propel these young boys into a lifetime of victories. Some will say that my coaching style is too barbaric and cruel, focusing on my emphasis of the perpetual shame of loss rather than on perceived positive qualities like sportsmanship and good old-fashioned hussle. I have a speech already prepared for this eventuality, focusing on why Simone Biles was such a disappointment to America and ending with a fact-free prolix on the "spiritual innocence" of Kyle Rittenhouse. Then, I'll ask them all to donate money to his defense fund and to join me in an "All Lives Matter" team chant. It should be fun.
She was married when we first met, soon to be divorced.
I helped her out of a jam, I guess, but I used a little too much force.
We won't be moving to Denver. We got the news today, oh boy.
I have mixed feelings about it. I can make my way towards a paralyzing ambivalence on most issues. It has helped protect me from being decisive, indemnification against certainties.
The boy told me that he was glad. We bought flowers at the market on the way home.
I can not decide what book to read next. Soon I will have no more books by Houellebecq left to read. I may try to re-read him, but it is too soon. The first book of his that I read was only a few months ago. I have ordered books of his poems, some thing about H.P. Lovecraft, and his observations on Schopenhauer... because the well is running dry. Such is the contour of the coming crisis. It has been a while since I have discovered a writer whose complete works I read almost uninterrupted. It feels good. It reminds me of the enthusiasms of youth.
Bukowski was probably the last writer whose works I read with this sort of appetite. I should be cautious. He provides rich examples, yet perhaps remains a poor model on which to base a life.
Every day at work I inch closer to departure. The strength of the feeling that I have around this gives me some indication just how far into a comfort zone I have backed myself. I passed off one of my accounts to a friend today, a very big account. It was sad and sweet. There were congratulations all around for me and the warm smiles that one gets when "moving on." I imagine it feels a little bit what retiring might feel like. Though of course there will be a lot of work to do when December arrives. So only the sense of departure, not in the paralyzing openness of the future.
That is, I think, why I started writing here again: the feeling that I might not be able to soon. It is curious, the function of feelings. Sometimes we want what we can have.
I've discovered a word that, if I repeat it a few times and let it echo around in me, can sometimes prevent me from writing a poem: cenotaph. I barely know what the word means - some sort of monument for the dead - but the word reminds me of some of the poetry I read when I was younger, mostly bad stuff from the mid to late 20th century. It's the type word that only someone who believes themselves a poet would try to use poetically.
What an absolute sucker I have become for late middle age. I do all the things that retirees wish they could still do. The envy of the elderly.
I'm reading a book by Lawrence Osborne - The Ballad of a Small Player. The descriptions of compulsive gambling make me feel uneasy about other compulsions. The book has made me want to die young, a little bit, though it is getting to be late in the evening for that. Only halfway through, so who knows, perhaps in another hundred pages it will make me want to live forever, though that narrative trajectory seems unlikely.
Between two jobs, I am in a type of limbo. Awaiting the time at one role to expire before I depart for a three week vacation, returning to the new job with much training and learning to get through at the onset. My usual, comfortable pace will need to quicken. I am trying to return to good better study habits, but my mind is fragmented from the work that I have been doing for many years now. The new job will require new skills, patience, and attention.
Chatting with CS today through text. He has me wanting to go out with a 24mm lens and just shoot and shoot and shoot. Real film. I have ten rolls of Ilford HP5+. He is also trying to get me to buy a medium format camera but that is perhaps part of another story. He is always trying to get me to spend money. He will not rest until I live in desperation and squalor. Though the idea of getting out and shooting film excites me. I love and miss the feel of shooting a manual film camera. Those ten rolls of film aren't getting any younger.
The picture of Rachel above was not shot in film. It was a digital image that I removed the color in Apple's Photos app, which is a complete waste, a turd made of code, all zeroes and no ones. Apple has succeeded in making most all of their software useless or worse: common. Their new phone software has "convenience" features that can not be disabled, which is antithetical to the very idea. My hatred for them motivates me to hate others like them, also.
Thanks For Your Corporation!
This marks two days in a row now that I have not written much of a post, but have instead offered three or more unrelated paragraphs about anything that pops into my head. It is not therapeutic the way that writing can sometimes be. Instead, it is having a poor effect on me. I am saddened lightly by my inability to express and my lack of having anything worth expressing.
I'm having a bit of writer-shock. I finished reading a great book by a great writer and then started reading a mediocre book by a sometimes gifted writer. It's hard to let it go, how disappointing it is that the book should be better than it is.
I saw The French Dispatch today. I will hold most of my reactions though probably not keep them. It was pleasant to see Anderson indulge his unique storytelling style once more, in a theater by myself. The parts sometimes exceeded the sum - there were scenes that were compelling, smart. The framework of the foreign reporting office was perhaps not strong enough. Or, maybe I was expecting something more complete to be the result, even though the film made no hint or promise of that. I will want to see it again at home.
I have a week and a half of work, then three weeks of vacation. Two of those weeks will be spent in Florida. The traditional family beach vacation. I may buy a beach hat. We will all wear sunscreen lotion. We will take him to the beach and to amusement parks. I wanted my son to see where I learned disdain for things.
This is a list of paragraphs. Setting down in form things that can not carry themselves. Too bored to fly, too sleepy to dream. I have nothing clever to say, though all day I have had clever thoughts. They have abandoned me, as my luck in the sequence of books. This paragraph does not belong on the list of paragraphs.
That's right - dog pics. I don't have anything else. I had believed that reading good and great books would result in something for me in life. Of what, I am not sure. I thought there would be an actual reward. Turns out the world is full of readers. There are people who have succeeded wildly and yet still find the time to read. I've met some of the well-adjusted.
I had a chat with the boy about drug addiction. I'm not even sure why. I was the one that brought it up. He has been asking about pop stars. He has a fascination with Michael Jackson, so I had to explain that he was a pop star with problems. From there it was a short leap to Kurt Cobain, heroin addiction, and shotgun suicide. You might think I'm kidding, and I wish that I was, but that's what we talked about as we went to pick up lunch the other day.
To help balance that conversation out I told him about the artist Bill Plympton. He, Plympton, has done the introduction animation for the Simpsons several times, being among the animators' favorites. So, I tried to find any of his shorts on Netflix or Hulu, and perhaps I just don't know what I'm looking for, but I couldn't find anything. I'm certain that there is a service out there, with a monthly fee, that would provide for me everything that I might wish to watch, yet it is always just out of reach. There are illegal ways, of course, and that is what one must resort to if they wish for the internet to fulfill even its most modest promises.
It is impossible to say what love is. This can be said for others only slightly more than for oneself. The constant speakers will, of course, always disagree. They will tell you what something is and isn't. Their truths needing to outdo yours. Their insistence is reliable - the tedium of certainty. They contradict themselves if left to speak for too long, or when interrupted for any time, but who can blame the for never noticing. When one is so full of thought it is a wonder they never burst. They are like the joke about socialists: eventually they run out of other people's air.
I feel as if I am running out of time to write, and I am.
I am sitting in a hotel in Denver, drinking a Stella Artois. That is why I took the picture above. It is among the worst of all of the images I have posted here, I hope, but I had the sudden impulse to write something and did not wish to be delayed by finding an image, or the right image. What you see above is a man in need.
There is a chance that we - the Q6i - will move to Denver. Raquel is interviewing for a position, a role. I have accepted an offer for a new role that will take up more of my time and intellectual energies. I invite it but almost as one who invites music lessons only to play the guitar. I will need to learn many things that might seem dry at first, but it is in having knowledge of them that I am hopefully able to synthesize them into something more meaningful. You must sometimes have the pieces, and know them, before you can work above them. Other things you can just fake with intelligence. This new role will require research and attentiveness.
It's more fun for me when I write about Raquel. Am I a shallow man? Her interviewing for this role has made her very sexy to me. To see her getting ready in her underwear has done this little magical trick in which I want to move to Denver with her now.
Well, I hadn't said it until just then, but I suppose now I've said it. The idea of moving has suddenly taken on an appeal that is affecting other parts of what I can still call me.
I am listening to some of the most powerful chick-rock I've heard in a while. There is lots of it, now - so much, some say more than ever! The Bands: Crumb, Dry Cleaning, Goat Girl, Liz Lawrence, Penelope Isles, Squid - to give you more than just an idea, but actual real-chic examples, with some great chick bands in there, also. Don't hate me if those female bands aren't Vega for you. Don't hate me at all. It's all anybody can ask with their variety of substitute verbs.
Don't blank me. Don't _ me. Don't me.
The river is rising. It has breached the bank on the opposite shore. We are prepared for overnight flooding. We seem quite high on the riverbank, but it can and has flooded here before. They were giving out sandbags at the local park where we used to go and hit tennis balls back and forth at one another. Or, not at, but towards. Sometimes over the net, other times not.
I have not been writing here, I guess, because I can't. Or, I can't seem to very well. It was maybe a mistake not being anonymous, by believing too much in the aegis of meaning less through jest, regarding too lightly those things which people hold dear and sacred - above all else - most of all those precious things held loftily above others.
Oh, I'm not a victim. I didn't mean that. I can always just choose to be the thing I hate, to escape. People never know what to do when you concede anything other than defeat, but they hate you for becoming what you have been announcing all along. Well, they may know what they believe they're supposed to do, but they don't know what to do with, or about, you. These new ways we speak to one another have ossified more quickly than the malleability of the language can prove itself flexible enough to function, yet language survives.
And camping we went - two nights, three days of satanic heat, day hikes, cooking exclusivelyover an open flame, bike riding, walking dry creek beds, chatting around the campfire late at night before drifting off to our tent to read Harry Potter.
I took the first portrait of the boy that I have taken in a while. My interest in photography has lessened a bit during Covid. Or rather, my main subjects deserved a break from often having a camera pointed at their faces. It is the first portrait of the boy that I have liked in a while.
That's about all that I got out of the weekend. The rest was work, lots of it. Setting up and breaking down a campsite with a nine year old boy is a lot of work, though there's really no need to mention the boy in that sentence. He spent most of the time playing with a bouncy ball wondering why it was taking me so long to load the car.
The boy and I leave today for a couple days camping. Or, that is the plan. We go this morning to put our names on a waitlist at a state campsite about 45 minutes from here. It has been booked solid for many months, but they keep a few sites open and release them to those on the waitlist as they see fit, or as they become available. This plan has always worked for us in the past. So, fingers crossed in wanting witchery.
Some people don't like camping. That's okay, even understandable. The activity seems to work best when there is some partnership in completing the various burdens. A significant amount of the pleasure derived from the proceedings, I believe, can be found in just that: partnership can be satisfying, even when the specific leisure time involves labor.
That's what I'm hoping for: that the boy and I find a pleasant way of working together and being buddies. The Covid-sheltering has been difficult on our relationship. It is challenging to be a parent, a teacher, and a friend, with very little clear delineation between those roles, all while trying to have some sense of space to yourself.
Watching how our local school board has allowed teachers to call pretty much all the shots about how and when students will be able to return to school has somewhat soured my feeling of benevolence towards them, though I have no wish to live in Florida right now, either. It will be difficult for me to ever talk again about how hard their jobs are and how hard they all work and how much they care about the kids. The reality of Covid has disabused me of most of those unchallenged notions.
Teachers are just like everybody else, you have no idea how hard their jobs are...
Cops are just like everybody else, you have no idea how hard their jobs are...
Etc, etc. Ad nauseam.
Yes, they are like everybody else: incompetent when they're not too busy being lazy or corrupt.
Sometimes I'll have Raquel get dressed up in a nurse's outfit just to reaffirm my faith in the working class.
I survived another night. I awoke again this morning feeling relatively well. We'll see how I'm doing by the end of the day. That has been the pattern so far - feeling okay in the mornings, then feeling drained and weak by evening time, with chills and floating phantasms. Perhaps I was bitten by a vampire - I crave life's essence as the night descends. My body has been shapeshifting for a couple decades now. I should probably read more inter-sectional feminism. If you have not already read my exhaustive post on the subject then do a Google search for: Succubus, come hither. Or: My succubus likes to ride on top.
They were both written with the intention of being published in academic journals but all of my rejection notices were of the same kind: Dear Sir, Again we must remind you that our organization does not publish supernatural pornographic fan fiction. We ask you again to please stop sending draft revisions.
I have the strangest sickness. It arrives and departs approximately every 12 hours. This is its third day cycling through my life. Fatigue, chills, soreness, other maladies that I need not catalog. Tomorrow I am supposed to have an appointment with my dentist. I fear if I relay my condition I will be told not to come in. The next day I have plans to go camping with the boy. My wisdom teeth feel sore. If I press the sides of my throat they are both very tender, though it is not difficult to swallow. Earlier today the feeling in my chest made me suspect a heart attack. Though, if so, it was a very minor one.
What do I know? Perhaps people die from miniature heart attacks all of the time.
I slept an extremely long time last night - eight hours. That is nearly a miracle of my nights. Had a priest or nun blessed me the evening before I would be arguing right now in front of the Vatican cardinals for sainthood. Maybe it was only a normal night's sleep that made me feel as if the sickness had subsided. Fatigue has a different set of symptoms, though. I looked them up, along with those of the heart attack. I am nothing if not curious concerning the suspicions that will one day assert themselves upon me as more than intuition, refusing all offers for negotiation.
Life is far more simple than people allow it to be.
One should:
- Get lots of rest
- Drink lots of water
- Work hard
- Get married
- Don't beat your children or their cousins
- Have many strong, male offspring
- Pray every morning, every evening, and before lunch
- Handle poisonous snakes to demonstrate faith in God's power
One should never:
- Dawdle
- Affiliate with strangers
- Befriend neighbors who walk too close to your land
- Fall asleep with one hand below the covers
- Drink alcohol, do drugs, or receive anal sex
- Take the Lord's name in vain
- Blaspheme the Holy Spirit
- Covet your neighbor's wife's ass, or that of the maidservant
If you can manage doing, or not doing, those simple things then you will be mostly fine and your rewards will be waiting for you after death. You will be stockpiling something that this world can not take away from you, in a faraway Kingdom of praise and joy and songs in major keys. If you choose to instead follow the path of the wicked then your rewards will be few and temporary. Every righteous soul already knows this. Only the wicked lament these truths.
I ran out of new pictures and these came up in a social media feed a couple weeks ago. They are not that old, yet already they are of a time that is so distant that I'm surprised it can still be seen. That is the magic of photography, any other use of that form is probably from the devil's crimson eye. So, be wary of tricksters, particularly those that try to tell you that images include additional dimensions. That's the serpent's hiss, plain Beelzeblubbering for sure.
If I've heard it once I've heard it whispered for all of eternity.
We planned on a Tahoe weekend - mountain biking and boating - but now it is all cancelled. The fires in the region have destroyed any possibility of doing any of the activities that would bring you to a place like this. It relies on people being outdoors. The skies are filled with smoke and the Air Quality Index is at 268 - Very Unhealthy. Yesterday it was closer to 500.
We spent most of the day indoors yesterday drinking expensive and delicious wines. I broke my nearly one month break from alcohol. Today I am feeling the repercussions. We did, at the very least, have a chance to spend some time with our friends and their new baby girl, Neeva. She is walking and beginning to talk now. The last time we visited them it was nearly a year ago and we could not go near them. They are here from Henderson, Nevada, and have rented a beautiful place in Incline Village for a month. They have been able to be at the house about half of the time.
Last night we started talking openly in front of our son about the desire to move away from California. Raquel and I have some things to figure out between us. A move of that kind is a significant life change and it requires a type of teamwork that she and I only seem to ever possess in fragments. But life is just a series of fragments, ones that sometimes seem to re-occur. Don't trust anybody that tries to tell you otherwise. It is only a trick of the mind that creates the sensation and appearance of a continuum.
Well, that is what three bottles of wine are whispering to me from the recent past.
I could have flattened the paper out more before taking this iPhone pic of the print, and I could have left the colors alone rather than letting the phone "correct" them, but instead I didn't do either of those things. CS sent it to me, telling me that it might not last or that it will not last. I forget if it has a chance or if it's doomed. At least it will now live here forever.
Now or forever?
I'm having a difficult time determining what I mean by anything any more. Perhaps it is the result of being manic-depressive, though that is an emotional disorder more than a cognitive one. It does wreak occasional chaos on declarative memory and executive function. I'm not sure how that explains or excuses the confusion of the previous words I've written, though.
I don't know why I came in here to write. I am not of a single mind tonight and can't seem to harness or create anything on this last final spot.
Raquel and the boy are home from Arizona. It is only a matter of time before I begin to feel crowded again. I know this in advance. The last few days I was increasingly eager for them to return.
It is the way of certain things. We want what we dream we do not have. We tend towards longing. We lean again and again into dreaming.
I started watching Parasite tonight. I made it about halfway through but stopped. I wanted to finish watching it with Raquel. It is clearly plot-heavy and I do not wish to know what happens without her. It is a film about social classes, but also much more. The friend who recommended it said, Enjoy the ride! when I told him that I was going to finally watch it. So far, I have.
Speaking of finally, I got some sleep last night. The first night of good sleep in more than a week - 8 hours. These periodic bouts of insomnia destroy me as I get older. I used to just ride the wave of them without any joy though with less suffering. I was more willing to narcoticize my body into slumber, I guess. As I get older I have less left to fend with. The body's resources recede into the ever what was.
But that's all over now, I've told myself. The narcotics and the insomnia. Everything must go. Everything but the girl.
I told you that I had run out of pictures. I wasn't lying. Why would I? This is one of my favorites from the past. It's been up here before. Perhaps you will remember the shadow on the wall.
If I could go back I'd do it all over again. Making a baby was fun and exciting and scary. But that's not what you come here to discover. You already know that.
My body feels broken. I have had a terrible case of insomnia for many days now. It makes everything feel broken and brittle. Last night I only slept a couple of hours, maybe three. It's hard to tell since my mind races and I can never tell where it stops. It all just becomes a dark noise. I awaken and look at my phone, hoping that it tells me a miracle. Last night no miracles arrived. I've been up and working since 2am. It's not as if I've been very productive. I've made as many mistakes as I have had successes. Both have worn me out and I take joy in neither. I've responded with edginess towards most.
Everybody has suggestions - read a book, get a sleep mask, leave your phone and computer in another room, sleep with your hands above the covers, wear two pairs of underwear, most of all don't overstimulate yourself. Nothing works.
Now I await. The sun is sinking behind the creek. We'll see about it darkness.
I must be at "the age" in which I still have many friends and am in casual contact with most of them, which greatly increases the likelihood of me finding out they are now dead or dying. It makes me want to have lived life differently, to not know about it. I almost miss hearing about it from friends, a telephone call, a chat about it. Now it is an online event. The news of an old friend with stage 4 cancer in several areas of his body just posted. I had to look away. But to where? Here? Nothing makes any sense, and it never has. We do things because there is only one alternative to not doing things.
Do you remember when this site used to be funny? That was the sound of me doing things.
I should not write tonight. I'm in a shit mood. Whatever happened to my hopeful life of crime? I read all of the wrong books, perhaps, idolized all of the losers but never made the leap into complete temptation. I succumbed to a mid-life of labor.
I am trying to lie here and listen to music while I write, but it's not working. I also tried watching a movie and reading a book. I'm the chairman of the bored (watch that with the audio off, it makes more sense). I know why this is happening: I'm being punished for not drinking. The mind starts to penalize its host when its compulsions aren't satiated. It's the curse of the age. Drinking makes me foolish, abstaining makes me listless. Truly, spiritless.
I don't have any new images. This is what you get. It has no relationship to this post. I say that because it is virtually a guarantee that I will write something that I will regret associating with the image. I pre-forgive myself for any miserable thing that I do. It's how I get by. One must possess enormous flexibility in the department of self-forgiveness.
Well, now I've therapeuticized myself out of wanting to write anything horrendous. Do you see how damaging self-love can be for anyone trying to write? It has ruined me over and over again.
It is time to put a movie on, surrender to the earth's turning.
I probably shouldn't try to adjust the colors of an image when I have Night Shift mode enabled on my computer. The feature removes the blue light and leaves more reds and yellows. It's sleep science - it helps me.
When I took my new phone out of the box I made the mistake of trusting Apple. I let their setup software copy the data from my old phone to my new phone, wirelessly. Then it would not let me sync the new phone to the computer. It told me that I needed ~90GB of more space. This did not seem possible. I realized that in letting them copy my content and settings they had taken the liberty, as they always do, of changing my settings so that I was using their bullshit cloud services for backup. They wanted to double my music library, but I didn't buy enough space to have two copies of every song on my phone. Stupid me. So, I tried again. This time it told me that I needed ~100GB more space. I am trying for a third time now and I think I know how to trick them into letting me use my phone.
They are a despicable company. The reason that I still buy their products is because I lack ambition and mental energy. I'm a coward. The people I know that are enthusiastic about their products are all dullards. My stomach turns when I hear people's voices rise in pitch with excitement for a product release from them. I'm sure that somewhere there are intelligent well-meaning Apple enthusiasts, but not in my circle. I'm surrounded by the piteous sort. I don't mind nerds and I have nothing against gay people, but gay nerds are uniformly terrible. They can't help themselves.
The device is restarting again. This time it wouldn't let me get to the setup screen without doing a software update. No explanation why that had to be part of this restore attempt. Who am I to complain?
I haven't been able to read recreationally while all of this was happening. I have been seething, the effervesce of wrath.
Keep in mind that I was a technician for the borg for five years. I have a very good idea how I want to use their overpriced products. If I have these types of problems then I can only imagine what others suffer. Actually, I know. They have replaced Microsoft - too big to win, too stupid to please. The cash just keeps rolling in. My phone was $1500, with taxes and the extended warranty. They did not provide any headphones and only one Thunderbolt cable. There was a message about how it's part of their environmental initiative. I'm partners with Apple in saving the earth now, but it'll cost me.
The IRS displayed bubonic incompetence today also. I waited on hold for two hours before I was told by an automated voice that I was being connected to an agent, then there was an error message, then I was brought back to the initial phone tree options, except there were no longer any numbers to press that would allow me to speak with an agent. For two hours I listened to a loop of bad Kenny G, interrupted every 30 seconds with a loud reminder not to hang up, that I would lose my place in the queue. All for naught.
People wonder what I am always so angry about. It is this and this and this and this.
Ah well, Ahab - tomorrow is a new day. I was supposed to work but I chickened out at the last minute and traded shifts with somebody to work Sunday instead. I have a lot of administrative tasks to complete. Tomorrow I will run errands all day. I have a list, and I know how I want to get them done. As long as the American Telephone & Telegraph corporation doesn't cause me any problems I should be golden. Otherwise I may not be golden, I may be rusted.
Fuck it, here we go again. I am sitting upright. I've had no wine for about a week or so. I am prepared to tell the truth: she looked 18, sir. She seemed old enough to do all of the things that I like to do. We had a pretty good time together and we didn't hurt anybody.
The truth is that I don't want to talk to humans any more today, not even little miss titties up top. I have been putting in unusual hours at work. It has sickened me to the sound and presence of others.
How would somebody like R. P. McMurphy be regarded today? I assume that the younger crowd, if they would watch a cuckoo film like that at all, might see the horror that he represents and sympathize with Nurse Ratched. Why not? You can probably believe that there are some that might align with her struggles now, too. She had a difficult job to do, and what did he decide to do. There has been an inversion of the protagonists and the antagonists. It happens every 50 years or so, maybe more. The guy admits upfront that he likes to fight and fuck too much. Who would come to his defenses now for such things? Fighting and fucking are acts of violence. What could be worse than violence other than words, literally?
We have raised several generations of morons; they just keep 'em coming. They have access to all of the information that anybody could ever want and still they find a way of misusing it every time. People feel empowered by being informed. So, they start to believe their opinions are informed opinions, and why not?
You know something funny? Well, I'm sure that you probably know many things that are funny, but something that I find funny every time I hear the word "literally": the secondary definition of the word is in effect, virtually. It is used to express exaggeration, for emphasis. It has been this way for more than a hundred years.
So, the next time you hear some snotty little douche-bag (they always are) correct someone's usage of the word tell them to read a book, literally.
You've got at least five arrests for assault. What can you tell me about that?
Five fights, huh? Rocky Marciano's got forty and he's a millionaire.
There is some irony here, too. Raquel and the boy are gone. Arizona, visiting grandma. Somehow the day was not my own. I worked. I am often involved in email. It is a protocol that offers nearly endless problems to unravel, in all directions. Where would we be without problems. In the early days of the internet I could not believe the wonderful luxury of being able to write a letter from a computer and watch it vanish from the screen, knowing that it will arrive at its destination seconds later and make its mistakes.
I have been giving some thought to the meeting we had with the lawyer, preparing to map out the conditions of our love. The terms of the term. I am torn, like most, between what I thought I felt and what I think I feel.
I have loved her too much and for too long, but not well enough.
It is late now, the house is quiet. It is only myself and Akira, the husky. She sleeps in the chair near the bedroom. Sometimes she will come climb onto the bed with me. The quietude does different things to each of us. She seems sad and lonely, wondering where the family pack went. I try to cheer her up with additional niceness and playfulness, behavior of which she is suspicious. We both seem to love our morning walks the most. There is some sense of optimism in walking together. Or rather, it can fend off some of my pessimism, if I do it well enough.
I have not settled into the silence of being alone.
I am alone, or almost so, for the first time in a while. The boy sleeps upstairs. Raquel went into the city to go out drinking and to an event with a friend. They got a hotel for the night. I didn't check, but I believe it was a woman, her friend. She texted me after I had gone to sleep, telling me that she was at a bar that a friend of mine owns, some SF upscale place structured around some loose concept of days past. I did not get the text until early this morning when, as always, I awoke long before my preference to do so.
The boy now sleeps quietly upstairs. That will all change soon. He will come bounding down the stairs and ask if he can play video games. It is his life now. Most of his joys emerge from those screens where I can see many of mine vanish. Before Covid he was still present and available. Now, he mostly wishes to be playing a game, or discussing the goals and trials of playing one.
On Monday they both leave for almost two weeks. It will be myself and the dogs. We have booked plenty of time at the kennel for the most challenging of the dogs to care for - the husky, of course - in the event that I tire of her company, or the responsibility. Many that I know have spent long periods of time alone in the last 16 months. Not me. I've had very little of what could be considered time to myself.
Yesterday, Raquel and I went to see a $350 per hour lawyer, to talk about estate planning, trusts, wills, terms, beneficiaries, trustees, etc. It seems that we are going to reunite, though not under the vulgar banner of marriage. It will be more of a business agreement, where the individual terms can be more easily negotiated to suit our shifting moods. Prenuptial agreements, it seems, are not nearly binding enough. They simply don't work, insisted our counsel, they only cost you much more to enforce after things collapse. This bit of advice actually did sound true to me, knowing what little I do know of the family court system.
It is best to have contracts in place. There is unexpected death to consider, as well as the expected kind. Who wishes to give up their control merely because they are no more? That would be relinquishing your grip on the television remote only because you had slipped in a coma. One must be prepared for the eventualities of aging into decrepitude or sudden enfeeblement, also. Trust no one after your body and mind have perished. Your determination can live on through an estate. Your assets can grow like a flower from your demise. It is not quite eternal life, but it is some reassurance that you will defeat a small portion of the grave and the potential shame of poverty in the afterlife.
After the chat with the lawyer it occurred to me that the conversation, while amicable and friendly and even having some moments of levity, was among the more difficult conversations I've had in a while. Nobody likes to think of what might come. Or worse, what certainly will. I diverted my attention by thinking up absurd terms: funds will be released only if my soul's happiness can be verified through the psychic medium of my choice. If my son is ever heard singing Sweet Caroline the remaining assets will be forfeited to charity. Funds will be contingent on voter registration party affiliation. My body should be sent to a taxidermist and then placed within a medieval suit of armor and displayed prominently in the foyer with the visor kept open, my right hand affixed to a steely broadsword. My funeral should happen in a pyramid and my name should be legally changed to Pharaoh Q6.
For many years Bette Davis would often denigrate Joan Crawford after the latter had passed away. Once, on a film set, someone said to her, "But, she's been dead ten years!" A statement which was met with the famously cold Davis stare.
"Just because she's dead doesn't mean she's changed."
I have been poisoned by a crisis of anxieties. I can't seem to relax, and too often drink myself towards oblivion. It is a bad look and dumb sound. Once you drink past the point of pleasure few good things follow. That's one of the tricks of the stuff, I think: the imbiber believes the pleasures to continue and even multiply.
Those are my thoughts tonight. I am trying not to break my heart.
