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.