Taqriir ASayf Athaalith

We went berry picking in Hatcher Pass for one of the last hikes we'd do when K was here for the summer. There were other pickers and hikers there and the trail was mucky in some places and we passed by a rock covered stream which could be heard from beyond the boulders hiding it. Off trail, there were massive, industrial sized blueberries of the high bush variety and we filled our containers, netting a full 2 pounds of the fruit. Later, K and A would render some of the fruit into a pie for my birthday. 

During the trip, Ulybear lost his stick that I'd carved and lacquered for him and I went down the trail, alone, looking for it. I found it amongst some crow berry bushes, glinting in the sun. When I returned with the stick to where the others were foraging, K asked me how I'd found it so easily when he and A had been unable to do so. I replied that I was good at finding things when I wanted to. The pie forged from the berries we picked would prove to be a tart, delicious thing, much like the mountains whence it came.

I've found a lot of things in this experience, most of them bad. There are, however, some good things out in this world, and I have to believe this, because otherwise it's the big shutdown.

I'm a fan of thinking that this reality is a simulation one, one that other, probably simulated in their own right, beings created and I'm growing strangely okay with this. Like, yeah, none of this matters but at least I can do a thing for a consciousness that thinks the thing I did matters, even if I fully believe it doesn't and it, the action, is illusory in the grand scheme of everything. 

This past week we had a graduation of students at work and the biggest compliment I got was from a former student of mine who introduced her son and significant others to me as "the coolest guy on campus" and the one who she "would go into his office and say I want to burn this whole fucking place down". During the commencement ceremony, I had wanted to weep with hope and pride, but forced myself not to because none of them needed to see that.

K went home to NC this past week. He didn't want to stick around for the fair because his brother had gone on before him and, through a teary conversation we'd had, he told me that he didn't want to go because he'd miss all the things he'd normally do if G were around. We went to the airport, Tuesday, a terrible day for flight, and we went through the song and dance of check in and security and handing him over to airline personnel . When he went to board, a pencil skirt uniformed gate agent asked if he'd like a final hug and he came to me and I held him and all I could manage was "Be good" before he loped off, down the skybridge, gone. I drove home, alone, and proceeded to drink a copious amount of liquor in my sadness and woke to a text from him - "I made it home." Sometimes, you think today is the day.

The north is burning. I took this picture on the drive back home from K's departure. The smoke is thick and choking and the mountains are obscured in the fires' grenade pop. I can't think too much about the future, as I've mentioned earlier, but the gut feeling that I have is one of despair tinged with resilience. I've thought about trying to explain this dichotomous feeling to others in my "real" surface-level life, but have quailed because of the awkwardness that the conversation would engender. I saw a Vice article (not linked because fuck them) recently about "How Millennials Use Weird Memes To Cope With Their World" or some shit and it was pretty true. I liken it to a sort of Gotterdammerung, a last laugh, a gallows humor but collective in nature. Everything is dark yet the thought remains that "I" might make it, into whatever "it" turns out to be. 

We went to the fair yesterday. Uly likes the truck ride and the train, but when he went with A on the "Fun Slide" I stood at the bottom and watched their descent. He was good on the way up, the previous year he had called the ride "fun" but as I watched him swoosh down, I saw his face turn to terror on the first bump, then grow increasingly awful before the bottom where he burst into tears and fright. A picked him up and consoled him, child to mother's breast, and he was a long time in calming, the way I remember being the time that I ran into the freshly mopped kitchen and fell, chin to the tiles, and wrecked my face, my own mother holding me in the same manner. 

Maybe today is the day. 

On RTJ's third album they rap about... things. It's inspiring? Killer Mike has lines, "I sip a fifth of the whisk, I smoke a dub in the tub, then I will split both my wrists." Uly bear made this collection of words. That "DAD" made it into the mix was grand. He had his first day of preschool today. Gavin had his first of high school. K had his first day of middle school by himself. There is no universe where this is okay. 

Summer Report, Athanie

Yeeeeeeeeet.

Josh Homme, frontman of QOTSA sings the lyric "I'm much older than I thought I'd be." on the track Feet Don't Fail Me. The cafe this morning is filled with a mix of the young and the middle aged, women in their late adolescences contrasted with the older, turquoise-ring-wearing lady on her smart phone who has recently completed a daycare interview with another woman, now departed and lily white skinned, who sported rastafarian dreadlocks. At the end of the interview, the two hugged. One of the thin young women across the cafe is wearing athletic gear that resembles a second skin and I wonder if she knows or has any idea she'll get to the place of the ring-wearing woman in her blousy yoga wear and thick fingers. They already have similar sandals. 

I abandoned a story this morning. Word count: 5936. That pushed my total word count for all my pieces, both published and non, to over 600K and is the ninth story I've completed this year (Of course I keep track of these things.). This shouldn't be taken as an entreaty for compliments, more as evidence that I'm a fool for continuing to roll that boulder up the hill and that I could have taken up a much more acceptable filling of time, like golf, or recreational team sports. I suppose, much like the journals that I keep, that if nothing else these digital papers can be left to my boys, so that they could, at some hoped for point in the future, peer into the well of my brain and perhaps have some insight into the kind of mind that was responsible, in part, for preparing them for the world and offer some kind of continuing instruction even after I'm no longer around. More likely, they'll never look at these things and most of the information's assembly will have been a useless contribution to the universe's total entropy. I suppose we've got to get to that heat death eventually.  

I had a birthday this past week. I spent the day at work and the only person I told was a former student of mine who came to visit me in my office during her time between college finals. When informed of my age, she said with her joking and distinctly Yu'pik lilt, "That's almost 40. You're so old." She drew out the "so" the way Native Alaskans do when they want to really emphasize their point. Later on in the week, one of my older co-workers saw me in passing in a hall and asked how my day was going and addressed me as "young man". Perspective, I suppose, but the thought that I am simultaneously both those things is no little pause for existential terror. 

I attended a small and semi-impromptu concert for a hip-hop and classical harpist duo that I've seen before here in town. I went after work, after a few Moosehead beers, and took the remaining summer boy. First there were opening acts of these local guys pictured here. I stood so that K could sit and watch and I thought a lot about how my parents had never taken me to things like this, not in a blaming way, but in a "my child is experiencing things I was not privy to" way, much the same as I have in my progression to the current state. It's a strange thing to think about, the linear movement of time, and I am reminded of a story my mother told me about her schooling, in that girls were not allowed to attend Algebra classes in her high school (coincidentally the same one that I graduated from) because they "wouldn't need it" and how my father barely completed high school himself, likely because he would have, had he attended today, been labeled as having "Oppositional Defiant Disorder" and been medded up to the gills. Now, here I sit in this weekday morning cafe with a graduate degree, a homeowner, massively in debt, victim to an inexorable and cyclic dysthymia, a veritable paragon of the middle class, a vast confirmation of the rightness of the American Dream.  

The harpist and rapper performed their set. There were complimentary snacks - cookies in non-recyclable plastic packaging and bottled waters for the two score folks in attendance, almost all of them white. There was also kombucha from the local kombuchery and the logistical chains that conspired to bring us all into that space was a monolith in my brain. I became, under the harp strings' popping and the synth accompaniment to the rapper's lyricism, obsessed with the idea of the far past simultaneously together with the unseen future and the need to connect with other apes that has persisted, will persist, for as long as any two of us, collectively, remain alive. I held Uly and swayed to the beat, crying behind my sunglasses. 

Summer Report NUMERO UNO

This summer's visit was truncated for my oldest, pictured here on the close end of the sofa. He doesn't know shit, won't know shit, for some time, maybe not even ever. I went on a bike ride downtown today with the remaining two. Uly wanted to bike through the neighborhood and did so, until we got to the intersection where he was to be ensconced in the bike trailer for the lion's share of the trip to the mid-morning Saturday cafe. We, K and I, crossed before Ulybear and he became spooked at the approach of our neighborhood mail truck. He stood across from us on the asphalt, his face a screaming terror. I yelled at K to take my bike and I ran back to get him. I scooped Uly up, his legs gripping my torso and him fright crying until he finally subsided into calm. He hugged me and had no idea that on the trip to the intersection I had watched him grandly smiling as he biked with his brother and my heart broke and I wept, wept at his joy.

As the last hurrah of the short summer, A graciously reserved for us one of the yurts at the Eagle River Nature Center. We hiked in with all our supplies for an overnight in said yurt by the rushing and churning and ever changing Eagle River. A bear went through camp. I ate some questionable things and went on a hike with the boys wherein we spoke of machine guns and combat tactics I'd learned as a foolish young man and myriad other things. We arrived at a bend in the river and sat for a bit amongst the mosquitoes and flies and the inexorable river. On the way back things got very Alice in Wonderland and I spent the next few hours in a kaleidoscope where I completed a flora collage with Uly and watched the river and we threw hatchets and chopped wood and attempted to pump freshwater from the river with a faulty filter and played cards and motherfucker do I hope, with all of the urgency of being, a live sentient being, on this planet that I made an impression on these boys, these sweet and stupid and ignorant and beautiful boys, that they could someday impart to whomever they decide to fuck with.

I took G back to the airport a scant 3-ish weeks after his arrival and, due to the awful nature of his flight time, we went to stay in A-town at the Qupqugiaq Inn, known on the internet for being home to cheap lodging with the added bonus of also being a haven for for bedbugs. We checked in with the concierge, a young woman with a forgettable name and an utterly defeated face, who showed us to our room at the end of a hallway carpeted with ancient and strangely patterned low pile industrial grade covering that looked at one point to have been improperly dried after a plumbing mishap. The corridor fairly reeked of reefer and the walls were set close and bore the evidence of the passing of many bodies. The room was quaint, the deadbolt out of commission, the door jamb victim to many previous and ill-repaired break-ins. My oldest and I repaired to the patio section - a pop-up canopied area in the parking lot, complete with rickety chairs and tables - with drinks secreted away in traveler mugs, him ginger ale and me a forbidden vodka. We watched the by the week renters arrive after their day's labors and my oldest and I spoke of many things about his future, living wages, employment and educational options, living arrangements, a grand unspooling that I hope yet to be witness to while at the same time having no real expectation of living long enough to see the things we parsed. Later would see the early morning airport in all her badness and a pisswarm beer back in the inn and a nap and then I'd return to work in the empty cab of my ride.

Sometimes, a small and childish part of me wishes the world were simpler and I could be like this vehicle's owner, or at least be like the persona this owner projects onto the world. I mean, how nice would it be to know my place in life as well as this guy seemingly does? I can't even imagine the lack of self-doubt, the missing sense of sham-hood, the absence of one's lurking fraudulence, the sheer confidence that all one is doing is good and right and capital "t" true. 

In any event, the summer churns on. We made tie-dyed shirts yesterday, one for G in his absence, then K and I biked to town for pool and NASCAR and communal vegetable harvesting then back home for pizza and Hot Pockets and drinks and old episodes of Chopped and The Great British Baking Show and a hostile email to my state Senator about the budget then oblivion sleep. Today is gray. Sad tunes pump out of my computer. I write on.