Autumn Hells

The other day I was out for a stroll, pre-snow. A's family was in town and the valley was in full autumn, gorgeously red and gold and brown and possessed of a certain mustiness that heralds the winter and can be likened to a berry-sort of goodness folded into a kind of muskegg and arboreal decay just before the freeze arrives and arrests most things organic prior to the spring major thawing. A's mom and dad copped a place at a bed and breakfast with full frontal view of Pioneer Peak. The vista granduered and the climate was frisky. All the elements were in place for an adventure. I availed.

This year's holiday time features a few things I dislike. There is air travel, first and foremost. Then there is hospitality-ing and guesting and Christmas partying (both of the corporate and familial variety) and a general feeling that all this merry making could be better served doing anything else. (I could finish the weird novella draft re-write. I could watch some football. I could get a new short story done before the new year as was my end of 2017 goal. I could get out there and do anything else life related that wasn't wasting time.)

Recently, I fell and broke some bones of the rib-cage variety. I was in the shower. The bathroom Defensive Coordinator called a two-gap blitz and came with the linebacker combo of Slippery Shower (TCU) and Indestructible Commode (THE Ohio State University). I was in the pocket. I turned to avoid the rush and was shoestring grabbed by Slippery Shower as Indestructible Commode plowed into my midsection. After the play I was up and calling signals, but the Head Coach (A), came in to call a time out. I finished the drive and was good to play, but had to go out of the game, not on IR, but not starting either.

It's been six weeks and I'm still not 100 percent.

ROCK LOBSTER!

Put an old lady in the ground this weekend. Don't feel there's too much to add to that.

Gotta Live My Life

This, all of this, is horseshit.

 Like DMX raps, "We all gots to go, but who wants to be forgotten?"

Steve Jobs died this week. And so a bunch of shitheads took to the internet to honor a man that ramped up conspicuous consumerism and mobilized legions of middle class, aspirants to cool-dom, white kids who desperately want to distance themselves from myriad other vapid and clueless white kids, and too cool for school visual artists who "just can't get the same level of creativity from a Windows-based OS/hardware" (as if MS paint hasn't been the breeding ground of the most innovative minds the innernet has ever witnessed). {Also, I'm making all this shit up, but haters are wont to hate.} 

At first, it slightly sickened me to see this kind of hero worship for Jobs, who was, in all fairness, just some guy who got lucky enough to get famous and then unlucky enough to get cancer and die in a public venue. Then, I just got angry at the stupidity of the masses who think that Jobs somehow enriched their lives with his baubles that diverted our collective attention from the fact that we're lifeforms with a shelf life. So get that new iPod, son. It'll totally make you forget you're harboring the nascent cancer cells that will metastasize and kill your bitch ass. Fucking MacBook Air, gonna give you the immortality you crave! Spend far out the ass in the hopes that someday soon "science", by way of your idiotic purchases, will yield some kind of miracle so you can keep leveling up in whatever shithole forum/game/digital simulation you choose to be a member of. 

Yeah, so fuck it, and fuck him too, because everyone goes and not all of us have the ability, or the good fortune, or the know-how to make bank by exploiting the vast reservoir of existential dread that first world cultures harbor.

Felicia's Grams died on Friday. Ain't a journalist out there going to give a fuck about her plight.

Nothing from Nothing leaves Nothing

Pretty Cool.

You know, when you see your child rocket out of the birth canal, you feel a certain something. I won't call it love, because it's not, but I will call it a sense of, "goddamn, there it is". I'm not saying this as some sort of fatalistic, this is the end of my manhood and sowing wild oats period, stupid shit. I'm saying it in the kind of fatalistic, this is my progeny and half of it is me and this is as close as I will get to immortality and I HAVE to die one day so this is just as good, so long as I educate this motherfucker right.

Tonight, I let the kids stay up as long as they wanted, provided they were quiet enough. Kiernan crapped out pretty early, at 1030 PM. Gavin maintained and it was pretty cool, I had some one on one time with my oldest, and that is always good. I showed him pictures of my parents and tried to explain to him that my parents are dead and that, despite this, they would have liked to see him.

To see the gears of a four year old attempt to grapple with mortality after I showed him pictures of his Grandma and Grandpa, brought tears to my eyes.

I ameliorated my sadness by: drinking more, and assuring him that by the time that he gets as old as I am, science will probably have solved the problem of aging so, that while I will probably grow feeble and die, that he will not.

It felt good.