I have no idea what I thought I was doing by returning to write here. I am having some sort of climacteric failure, though it is difficult to say exactly what the nature of it is, or what its underlying basis is. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. It is all very simple, this foundering: life is short, mine too close to being over. More precisely: I'm going to die. I can feel it for the first time, rather than merely knowing it in some abstract way. Feeling is sometimes a much worse way of knowing. These years have confirmed everything that had been merely make-believe and play.
How anybody doesn't become consumed with this thought after a certain age is beyond me. Maybe they do, and I'm just the new guy that doesn't know anybody here yet, and that we're not supposed to talk about it, or not in this way. Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. We bleat and protest how parts of our bodies hurt, or how things will never be the same again, and we can never agree on how they were then anyway. Yet talk of eternal oblivion and the utter meaninglessness of all existence should be avoided in company.
If I don't want to spend eternity with any of these people then I should at least have the decency to reflect that in conversation.
The boy stayed home sick all this week from school and watched some sitcom series - all day; every day. Modern Family. I tried pointing out how dull the writing, acting, and production was, how stale the characters, how they had written themselves into a corner by the later seasons and nobody was inventive enough to script their way out. Their audience, my son, probably doesn't notice or care, and this is why he shouldn't watch shows like this too much. They dull the sensibilities, and make the capacity for humor a mediocre and rote expectation. The blood dimmed tide is loosed. Every show seems to have a subliminal laugh track in it. Some barely audible signal is transmitted where once they paid audiences to sit in a studio and laugh when the light that says to pops on silently for them to see.
I doubt that the sniffling boy embraced my assessment or saw me as a better person. He probably thinks I'm just a dispirited crank. He's right, of course. All I lack is the obsession with some alternative.
I tried to let the boy lounge and watch shows he likes while recovering from illness. Not really, not very much. I kept walking into the room, watching the actors half-heartedly trying to pull off stale, predictable punch lines. Each delivered by characters who have not grown but have instead amplified their single marketed dimension. I kept thinking: this is my son, I should do or say something. I took the form of a recurring nuisance, the sounds of mild disappointment that I tell myself are some inverted form of encouragement ... everywhere, the ceremony of innocence is drowned.
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