Something, something, COVID-19 denial, I am a sudden epidemiologist who reads at a 6th grade level and I saw on the internet that the vaccine is Satanic mind control mark of the beast end times, masks are a tool to tyrannize and oppress and pacify, and the numbers are all wrong, and what happened to the flu this year, and if masks work why distance, and if distance works why masks? Don't even get me started on the election. Hoo boy, do you have hours to lose, to educate yourself?
It is rainy and a windy 37 degrees here in the nexus of my universe and there are three boys, my boys, crouching in this living room and all of us meditating on the reality of our screens. They've been back home for a while now, early November, and the shock of their nearness, their presence in my home that they'd previously mostly known during the summer, in the dim of the year, is a thing of wonder. It's fulfillment and despair and choked silent weeping as you make dinner because of the goodness and rightness and wholeness of it all.
Something, something, raising children is so soft today because I can't beat the living shit out of them and they exist and grow in an environment that is safer and less traumatic than my childhood and for this they are weaker and of less substance than I and did I mention that problem alcoholism is just fine as the model for your adult life with children? It's science, and religion, and the truth.
Uly-bear, apropos of nothing, decided to draw this scene which he described as a graveyard where the person alive was in despair. All this he narrated with a smile, an innocence that burned, as if he could never really know the true sadness of death because he's yet to experience it on the root level.
Don't mind me, I'm into the weeds on this one.
Something, something if homeless people wanted to work they'd find work but they don't and so I won't give them any of my hard earned money that I earn at my work which is stressful and busy and I have to prove, and prove again, my worth, my life to the company/my boss/shareholders and please press the gun of my financial debt into my skull a little harder so that I may find yet a lower place of groveling in the work worship, to abase myself more for money or position or status or whatever employment god I choose to deify.
All sense of propriety and ethical professionalism have exited the stage of the work comedy and this past few weeks I've devoted hefty chunks of company time to the pursuits of elevation, creative indulgence, and formless drifting stares out of the winter window at falling snow and the hope of birds in the frame and a shameless gaming on a miraculously unblocked site for school-aged children. I crafted these three, these gifts, for my sons, each piece informing the creation of the other and each again a small perception of who I believe these human animals so dear to me, to be in this world. The works are rendered poorly, and all I can focus on is their imperfections and they're one of those smarmingly saccharine tchotchkes of child/young adult hood that one hopes they cling to and port with them the places they will go, perhaps hanging them up, perhaps in packing, or in a well-meaning pile for the non-event of their hanging. I suppose it won't matter, in the end, even if these creations get shit-canned at some point, and one hopes it will be the memory of the effort that will inform their future selves. Who knows? I'm definitely not going to be around long enough to know, I'm sure.
This is the night of their finally completed arrival. I messaged my friends Nick and Dan that this was perfection, and I maintain it was one of the grandest peaks of my life to have these two smelly teen boys crowding my space. Uly loves them, their more attuned age, their energy. Even now, as they gaze screenward at games he hovers and watches, hovers and watches. I should yell at them to stop, to go do something else, to interact with the "real world" but I won't and so I'll let it go on and watch these watchers. It's pretty good, these scenes and prompts marveling at luck in how the world rolls along.
The view here is nice, you should join me.
