The past few months have been the epitome of mind fuck.
There was the strange occurrence of A's middle of the night labor during a major earthquake while in a tub full of muck with a non-compliant cervix and an unexpected hospital visit wherein a healthy boy was squirted into the world after a mere 30 minutes of pushing (the child, named Ulysses, accrued many years to my life by dint of his fetal heart rate monitor alone). Then came the equally strange carting home of placenta in a Ziploc bio-hazard bag where it stood in the freezer (atop bricks of salmon steaks and pre-made, frozen meals) until A and I took it to the river for burial in the still frozen stream bed (we planted it, using a clam shovel, in a channel to be swamped with spring meltwater, and covered the spot with large rocks to ward off any opportunistic dogs in the meantime). Then followed the equilibrizing of the home in light of Uly's appearance (still not accomplished, never to be completely so, but dampening in its amplitude). Then came the trip to show him to his brothers.
The trip was, by any metric, a dalliance with exhaustion.
There was the air travel, the Xanax, the airport beers, the staying in your ex-wife's house (to save on hotel fare and be next to your other children who already live there), the Masses (Good Friday, Easter Vigil), the train depots, the walking, the touristy things [monuments (Washington, Lincoln, Korean, Vietnam, and Second World wars, White House)], the museums (National Gallery, Aerospace, a sculpture garden), the mad gatherings of populace in the opulent spectacle of the nation's capital (itself a ripoff of the Roman Republic/Empire's largess, strangely fitting for the current geopolitical climate), the Art [all of it mind blowing (most memorable were Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance, Van Eyck's Annunciation, a gallery filled with Rembrandts, some Rubens, a DaVinci, Rodin's Burghers of Calais) in that other hands, now skeletonized, had at one time served as conduit for a still extant, if slippery, muse], the space age implements of the ultimate trade (in particular, a discontinued Soviet, two-stage, solid propellant rocket topped with three dummy thermonuclear warheads that obliterated my capacity for cognition with its implications), the meal from an Indian food truck eaten while squatting in a windy public park (chicken tikka masala, curried dal, chana masala - I was shorted on the naan), the cherry blossoms, the Asians taking cellphone pics of everything, the homeless and deranged black man panhandling in a non-conventional fashion (sitting on cardboard atop a heating vent and shouting, without pause at the passers-by, "Dollar? Change? Fuck you then!"), the walking 25 miles in 2.5 days, the metro, and the people, oh Lord, the people.
The new year saw me begin work on the first draft of a new novel.
For my writer friends out there (especially those in pursuit of loose, baggy monsters of their own), you know how much of a disconnect from reality this can be. Yes, we've all read about characters and stories developing in their own right and, in no small part, out of the author's control but there's something about it (the delving into a wholly other personality and life, even if that life is invented, and mucking around for some sort of arrow pointing towards universal human experience) that is... unsettling. You tend to lose focus on the hard edges of your own life. Things [mundanities like showering or household chores or eating (for me at least, I imagine the list changes for others)] go out of the window. It's a futile exercise, an absurd one, but one you can't quit, not yet, because in the past week you got an encouraging rejection from a well respected (if unread by hoi polloi) journal and you think that if you just tried harder (Why couldn't you do that in either of your two marriages?) that the next time, this time, will be the breakout.
My grandfather turned 99 yesterday.
I messaged a friend of mine about it and we marveled at the sheer amount of change he must have seen in his lifetime. I remarked that I couldn't imagine that span of experience [Grandpa is roughly three times my age and how he's not gone insane at the magnitude of the world he's watched, I can't understand (I feel on the cusp of a mental breakdown while standing in the self-checkout line at the grocery store)] and my friend agreed.To quote him, "That was milkman, horse, etc. days," in reference to the range of difference. I can't help but wonder what he thinks, if anything, about the nature of man, or life in general, or all the seed he's dispersed into the world, sprent, like dust, seed that keeps self-iterating (Uly being his most recent capsule) and what, again if anything, he thinks that means. I doubt I'll ever get the chance to ask him and most likely the next time I see him in the flesh, he'll be composed for interment, boxed up, ready for shipment into the earth, gone, and all of us awaiting the same.
