Bradford Pear Trees and Despair

So I'm unemployed. Again. I suppose it doesn't really matter that much and all the people I worked with are convinced that I'm going to be re-hired in the fall and that I'll see all of them again. I also suppose that vibes of such good caliber are encouraging. But then you go home and have to deal with yourself in the interminable interim (wherein your life is a fucking shambles found in the nether regions of a "hoarder's" storage shed) and look in the fucking mirror and see that face floating there and all those awful questions arise like so much hot and stinging bile in your rapidly closing throat and you just have to try to take it and internalize it and NOT drink a shit-ton of wine and get into an argument with your wife about the transcendent love of Christ and the Church's teachings and patriarchy and the myriad apparatus of thinking and the novelty of "better" methods of dissecting/correcting the abuses of the human mind.

Might have failed a bit on that last one.

And I suppose all that's okay too, but fuck if it all isn't a thing that requires constant attention and effort to not find yourself flying down the suburban roads you inhabit and picking out the telephone pole into which you will pilot your vehicle, unseatbelted and at a very rapid speed, when you finally get sick of all of it. 

In Which a Reticence is Shattered

The inherent capitalist in all of us.

My boy turned seven this past May and it's been an insanely stupid and timorous emotional ride as I've watched him through his larval stage. He's at the point where the descriptor 'boy' seems fitting and I see him running about and going on his mind's adventures and kicking soccer balls and hefting sticks and finding out the true nature of his physical form and it all just fills me up with the most intense longing and pride and joy and despair. He's free in a way that I'll never be again and was too puerile to recognize when it was I who was at that critical juncture of my life. It makes a body sad to comprehend the nature of your life and the long, slow slide into senescence. 

I've taken up running again, as is my custom in the summer when the vanity of the beach calls one to parade sans shirt. In the mornings, I haul myself from the rack and stumble, sleep-eyed through the house's dawn gloaming and spill myself out into the new day's chill. It sucks. I'm stiff. I'm tired. My lungs aren't open and my hamstrings scream as I reach down toward my toes, only reaching them after some effort and I realize with ever sharpening clarity that I'm shackled to a body that's dying.

It's a hell of a thing.