Winter-Fueled Self-Recriminations

Ulybear turned two a week ago. I know how I should feel about that (joyful, proud, excited, etc.), but I can't say that I fall into that realm. For true, I am all of those things, as another orbit around the sun has made him more robust and engaging and hardier and less likely to die from something as insidious as SIDS but there's all the baggage that goes along with having him become the individual he has always been and the reality that, truth be told, I'm far, far more lenient with him than I have been my older boys. I'm nicer to him. I always say please and thank you. I give him many more choices in things. Very few, if any, knife hands get thrown his way. I have yet to, as I once did with Gavin, force him to hold a heavy stone over his head and run around a house, shouting apologies, in penance for some now forgotten transgression. I'll likely never upend the chest of drawers, much like I did with Kiernan, and strew his clothes about the floor because he's not cleaned his room to the ordered specifications in the required time. 

It's strange to me to watch (my parental progression, I mean) and I get the feeling, unfactcheckable due to mortality, that my old man had the same type conundrum with my development. That smacks of hubris in the extreme but I feel it's a valid thing to explore. I was seven and nine years removed from my brothers and I know, both through their telling and my old man's own confession, that I had it far easier than both of my elder brothers. I can remember, out of context, speaking with my brother, the middle child of us three, about how I'd had it soft because "Pop could lay on a whipping in his thirties" a decade of his to which I was little privy and memory experience of which I had none. 

Uly on the left.

We went up to the mountains the other day for some skiing. The day was magnificent: clear, cold, new snow - the first in what seemed quite a while, and no wind. On the way in I noted the sledding hill in a rueful manner. Otherwise, I was stricken with the place, especially the seasonal attitude of the day and the sound of the snow underfoot and the crisp surface crust of the previously drifted dunes that crunched beneath my weight but held Uly's as he and I ambled about the area while A skied solo. Uly tired, and I booted off some snow from a picnic table seat so he could rest there. We, Uly and I, sat on that bench and watched the turn of the earth and the orb of sun in the sky and listened to the sound of the woods and we were quiet as we waited the final bit for his mother to return. After, we descended and resumed our normal lives once more.

We went down the Lower 48 way this Christmastide. I met the boys in MSP and we copped a cheap motel a bit down the road. There were only two beds and the elevator was sketch af but the television worked and so did the ice machine and refrigerator and we all cobbled ourselves into the room for a single night's rest before the trip out to Winona where Uly and A stayed with my newly minted in-laws. The weather was brutal - polar vortex cold and unseasonable temps. Morning after, we drove back, listening to the newest QOTSA album and grooving furiously to the tracks. 

Once in Winona, the boys, refueled by a night's sleep and despite the chill, availed themselves of the local sledding venues (not ideal but shouldered through regardless) and I watched those boys slide down the frigid and brush covered hills as A's father shoved them and followed after and the cold and the time and the fleeting nature of their childhoods came hurtling down with them into the pit that is me and I watched them go, run after run, yelling and laughing, until it was time, all too quick in coming, to head inside to warm up.

Maybe I'm just repeating myself here as I've said all these things, I know, before but I once heard a wise man say that we, as writers, are "all circling our own obsessions".

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.

The Real Me

A and Uly gathering blueberries in Hatcher Pass.

"Get me off of this; I need confidence in myself," The Weeknd balefully implores of his newfound lover on the track "Wicked Games". Good Lord can I connect to that sentiment, especially in the wake of the autumn's advent and the crushing apathy that is work and the never ending heartbreak that is shepherding children into this world only to have them go before you onto this stage and render every ounce of the love you pour into them to an unused lard that sits neglected and turns rancid on the kitchen counter of their lives. Sometimes I feel that, if I had enough of that confidence that The Weeknd desires, I could believe the direction my life flowed was good and true and not illusory and fleeting and ultimately false. 

Today we went, with A's mother and auntie and Uly, to the oomingmak farm that resides in Palmer, just up the road here. We walked around the premises and had a tour from a super nice woman named Grayson (?) and saw the beasts and learned about the farm's operation and qiviut gathering schedule and processing. The tour guide let Ulybear feed some of the calves (weighing in at close to two hundo) with a branch affixed with dead leaves. The animals' eyes rolled and the calves called in the manner of bovines and I had the intense desire to face down these beasts on the iced over tundra armed with only a flint-tipped birch spear and draped in stinking hides, screaming into a sub-zero whiteness. I know I'd die in such a scenario. 

We went to the fair this year, as always. It seems that, as I get older, the fair gets more magical as if I were slipping, temporally, into an adolescence that I never experienced for real (as real as this simulation universe can attain). Uly and A and I had all manner of fair food (fried pickles and pretzels with cheese and fried peanut potatoes with real bacon bit infused mayonnaise) in addition to many beers (Uly abstained from the brew). There was all the human noise there and the farm animals and Capuchin monkeys riding border collies and different reptiles in an exhibit and a woman on a mobility scooter motoring down the pathway with an obese grandson huffing along behind at a trot petitioning his grams to slow down and it was a different world altogether, as it is. I wondered about all those souls in that company and how they maintained with their own specific set of life attacks. 

The leaves are turning and falling down and it is at once beautiful and metaphoric and heart-fucking-sundering but in the best of possible ways.

Die, Motherfucker, Die

Here it is folks, a compilation of the summer's photos. I'll minimally word these to give you all an idea of where/when things occurred. It's been cyclonic, to be sure, and it always leaves one with the relishing sadness of experiences that are too meteoric to be contained in the accomplishing of them. Here's hoping you enjoy.

View of the Matanuska, taken from Lazy Mt., July 2017. Hiked with the two oldest. Did not summit.

Afterward, there were darts and drinks at the Moosehead.

Lazy Mt. Second picnic table. Serious.

The boys devo'ing a table-top, turn based, fighting game populated by animal characters gleaned from Ulybear's toys.

In the van, bound for Hope before heading to Homer for camping. August 2017.

Ulybear picking and eating raspberries at the Porcupine campground in Hope.

In the tent. Hope, AK.

K showing off his "Top Chef" inspired s'mores creation, completed by a fire roasted raspberry.

Me and the seed. Land's End, Homer Spit. August 2017.

Kiernan enjoys the campsite fire on the Spit.

They leave on Saturday, then, it gets darker.

Mountain Hop

We went for a hike in the mountains the other day. It was transformative. We didn't go far, nor high, nor was the route technical or in any way difficult, but the hike changed us, in the way it always does. We took a previously unexplored trail and wound up in a mostly neglected cirque where there was evidence of an abandoned mining op and the remains of a rodent (skull, scapulae, fur) and hikers on the ridge above with their dogs and the quiet that reigns up there and water and rock and sky. It was me, my special lady, and my three sons.

It's summer vacation here. I've got the eldest two for a month and a half and its awful in the way that it always is. We have to cram in a year's worth of work into that time and it's not easy. The other day I spent an hour and a half with Kiernan wherein we did some serious psychological work to get to the root of why the sight of a blue painted house on the corner that was visible from the breakfast table conspired to make him cry (turns out a shit-talking ex-friend lived in a similarly colored house and that image brought up painful memories). Before that I parsed out all the reasons my oldest didn't want to play soccer here (a sport he loves), then we relayed that info to his mother (not ideal). It's terrible to watch them grow like this but all the while wondrous.

Watching my youngest with his two older brothers is something altogether destroying. Uly shines to his brothers right away, engaging with them in a way he doesn't do with A and me, emulating them more fully, opening up more, observing, learning. He mimics what they do and enjoys their company differently than he does with his mother and me. He's taken to seeking out his brothers in the morning instead of solely needing his mother for the morning's entertainment. They all jive together, incomprehensibly, beautifully. It's more than I can take. 

We biked down to the river today. She was up, magnificently, higher than I'd ever seen. We went to the bridge and watched the roiling current eddy and gyre and crest the rocks where we normally could have descended and walked. The water rushed along, carrying with it the various driftwood parcels that swam on its movement. Gavin and Kiernan chucked rocks, larger and larger, into the brown torrent to see how large a splash they could produce. The youngest I watched with an unhealthy dose of paranoia, fearful that he might fall into the tumult below the bridge, thinking all the while that they, all three of them, were like the river, untameable, frightening, capable of being observed only. 

In the words of my friend Nick, "I don't know why living exists when you just want to die."

Fuck Everything

Been spending a lot of my free time these days getting stratospheric and staring out the window at the scenery. The birch tree in the front yard is transcendent. Beyond, rows of slanting houses tilt into the earth like absurd phantoms. The mountain that crowds the horizon is another reality entire to itself. The wine in my fist is sustaining on a level I don't believe possible. Birds arrive on evening missions to the feeders, mostly solitary, and spend their time gathering seeds from the spillage on the melting ground. The sky changes; sometimes there is a breeze, sometimes clouds. I watch the evening pinken, then dim, then pour myself the final abuse of that day's mini-bender. I'm going to be dead soon enough.

Last week there was a food truck/vintage shop festival at the fairgrounds. A and I visited with her parents who were in town for the week. I strengthened my morning coffee with vodka and we advanced to the grounds and perused the displays. I found a truck that hailed from my birth neck of the woods and ate a shrimp and catfish po-boy with fried okra as a side. It was delicious - fried perfectly and seasoned with just enough spice that the addition of Tabasco only heightened the flavors of the seafood and balanced the mayo-tomato-lettuce combo. The bread was the right consistency of toothy and fresh. As I ate, relishing, the meal made me think about my dead parents and what they might make of me being in Palmer, AK eating such fare. What might they have thought about having Uly as a member of their number? What about G and K who they likewise did not meet? 

I dyed eggs with Ulybear and fam this past Friday when I'd taken a personal day from work. It was A's parents' last day with us and they were soon to be flying back to MN. We did the usual stuff: put names on the shells, drew designs, dunked the eggs. While the grandparents had a time with Uly and his cuteness, I was drawn into my own interiority of previous, egg dyeing memory-scapes where G was younger and wearing one of my old, white t-shirts stained with dye, hands to match, holding up his creation in a photo I keep somewhere. There was G and K with friends in a similarly messy outing where they'd spent the day gorging on kid-friendly snacks and playing before the egg coloring finale. The scene congealed of a time they went to a secret proselytizing "egg hunt" where they sat through a non-denominational, feel good-ey, Christianity-lite service before being set loose to gather eggs "hidden" on a patch of astroturf at the Menard Sports Center. Of these things I said nothing.

Here's K at a soccer game I didn't attend. He's in the black kit, positioning himself, edging out that other kid and anticipating the drop of the shadowed ball that hangs just out of frame. Judging from the motion of the photo, he's going to get the first touch and ensuing advantage in maneuvering up the field. I received the photo - along with others of report card info and goalie work - on a Thursday morning while I was busy with a field trip with my students to the local recycling center. I scrolled through the photos as the pupils labored through a presentation on waste reduction. It would be four more hours before I was safely drinking secret beers at my local bar then on to home where I'd continue until it was time for window staring and the hoped for/anticipated nightly fade out. 

Fuck everything. 

Brain Problems

Here's a report:

The other day, I found myself out in the driveway, shoveling snow. This shouldn't be that bizarre an occurrence considering my locale, but the past two years have been shit with respect to snowfall and I've lived in places where snow removal has been someone else's responsibility. With the securing of a mortgage (via transferring my balls into the bank's vise), I've been granted the task of clearing said mortgage's driveway. Not to imply that I dislike the work. Indeed, I find the chore invigorating - outside, in the cold, laboring with a definite endpoint - and at the conclusion of which I can indicate palpable evidence of something useful having been accomplished. The driveway was snowy; now it is clear. I did that. Proceed to drink beer in triumph.

In any event, I was out, shoveling and after I'd done the required work, I heard a mewling from beneath the porch. A long haired, orange cat appeared, rangy, ugly, obviously street-worn with frost-bitten ears and matted fur. I promptly told the cat to fuck off, that we weren't doling out charity, and entered the house. The cat apparently took this as encouragement and hopped up to the porch in order to eat the spilled bird seed from my feeders and to lap at the melting snow on my porch boards. He then proceeded to mewl and cry at the door, going so far as to jump onto the bench and peer into my kitchen as if he'd been freshly turned out of the house for the day and was unhappy with that reality. 

By that evening the cat was inside, perched in my lap; by today I've settled on his name as "Captain Lawrence Edward Grace 'Titus' Oates", of the famously doomed Terra Nova Expedition. He's ill-tempered with the other cat, drinks from the toilet, puked on the living room floor, is gross in general, and prefers my company. 

Of course I like him.

I went skiing with A and Uly a week or so ago on Saturday. I don't remember exactly. Alcohol is a hell of a drug. 

In any event, we went out to the old train tracks that snake down the Matanuska river. The tracks are out of commission and run all the way to Sutton, almost 20 miles away, and we headed out into the day in the mid-noon hour finding it beyond magnificent. The snow was ground down by boots and paws and our skis hissed over the already laid imprints. I bid them go ahead and stayed to myself, going slowly and looking for birds.

We went about a mile out then turned back, just before an area where there is a massive and on-going earth slump as the river takes its toll on the bluff. The trail is passable there, but we mostly always turn back at that point as we worry about Uly's (and our own) safety. Returning, I let A take the lead again and told her not to wait for me. She skied on and left me to my thoughts. The river below shushed. My skis murmured in their traces. My breath came in rhythmic rushes. For a moment, things were okay.

A and Uly stopped for me at an overlook near the trail head. A bald eagle coasted over us, descending, until he perched on the snow pack near the stream of rushing water in the riverbed below. We left.

Uly turned a year. He walks now. He's got his own shitter now and has used it twice. Just this morning, he was fussy and yawning and I asked him if he wanted to go take a nap and he nodded his head and said, "ya," before he started down the hallway, without me, toward his bedroom. I followed him back and he crawled into his bed. After I covered him up, I told him I was going to leave him and he should sleep well and long. He nodded again and I left him. Within ten minutes he was out, like a light, as the Old Man would have said.

I returned to the living room, where I had been listening to Pandora. A, who had been at the store, returned but soon departed again to ski solo. Now it's only me, alone, sipping beer and listening to hip hop.

Something about that seems so right.

Work starts again tomorrow. 

I recently saw a facebook article from Cormac McCarthy wherein he gave an interview talking about how the 9-5 workday (I'm interpolating lots here as I only read the headline) is the death of creativity and that's why he's eschewed such a lifestyle. Can't say that I disagree there. Tomorrow will dawn and I'll arise and go to teach children (yes children) how to write resumes and set goals and compose cover letters so that they too might enjoy full employment as that is the endpoint of our current and collective economic delusion. 

What of the cat's example? 

What of the eagle's? 

What of Uly's?

I'll leave with a line from The Weeknd's newest music vid, "All I wanna do is make money and make dope shit."

Kill me.

*\(-@-)/* ~Kawaii~ [^*_*^]

I recently spent a week in a Hawai'ian island paradise hellscape.

While there, I experienced things that were beyond all right reckoning. Chief of all absurdities were the tourists (of which I was one) who seemed to wander about, devoid of observable purpose, zombie-like, and in need of scripted activities or tours to keep their minds occupied. They seemed ill at ease near the jungle, or on the seashore, or in any of the locals’ shops. Many of them engaged in behaviors that seemed to placate by way of familiarity: eating dairy ice cream in a locale where shave ice was the preferred chilled treat, obscuring authentic food trucks in favor of more outlandishly priced “gourmet” restaurants, or lounging (fretfully) at the beach where they seemed to wholly misunderstand the concepts of “tropical” and “beach”. It was odd to see - stressed biotic computers who’d purchased an expensive voyage to a place that was purported to be relaxing yet failing to evidence proof of the island’s endemic soothing effects. Despite their unease, I felt certain that, if asked, most would have quailed at the suggestion of overindulgence in pharmacological venues to calm their nerves. 

As I said, odd.    

Aboard the island I felt quite the foreigner for even being alive and imposing my consciousness on that place. The sham feeling persisted, was highlighted even, during interactions with the locals. The hotel lobby had a bar in which I spent some time (natch) and in that bar was a nice barkeep named Chris whose skin was the color of coconut shells. The ones available in supermarkets, not right off the tree. You know, the ones that fall on cartoon characters’ domes. In another part of the country, I’d have considered him Latino, but on the island I made him to be Native Hawai’ian (Hawai’ian Native?). He was good at his job, a conversationalist, impeccable drink maker, and possessed of the most important quality for a barkeep – knowing when to hold peace and let patrons mull the world.

Towards the last night I was there, I engaged with Chris over gins and tonics, and we discussed the nature of the island and how it’s changed. Chris said that until about 10 years ago (sweet Jesus that was 2006) the island had been a sleepy idyll, eschewed by many for the pleasures of Maui. Then, development took off and left the infrastructure behind. We talked of economics, and our children, and our histories, and how he’d been fortunate enough to buy a house and keep it. We chatted for a while, as other patrons came for “to go” Mai-Tais in plastic, lidded cups, and at the end of my rationed, public drinking time, he stood me two of my G&Ts and wished me a good trip home.

Outside of my already established interpersonal relationships, it was the most human interaction I experienced on the island.

At the resort, I continually felt the weight of what seemed to be the entire simulation universe. This feeling was magnified, especially when reflected in the constant undulations of the resort’s pool’s surface. I kept thinking that the waves and their propagation could explain something about the deeper nature of the physical world and were somehow analogous to the early mysteries of cosmology that resulted in the formation of the observable space around us. The phrase “localized space-time distortions” (as if I know fuck all about quantum anything) sounded nice and spooky, so I went with that and felt quite clever.

As I sat, drinking, and baking in the sun, and watching K figure out how to operate a snorkel we'd found in a bag on another pool deck (the bag was marked as being free to a good home), this line of thinking persisted. Despite the mental energy I was devoting to a topic I'd never understand and much like my vacation on the island, these thoughts too were shams, and only existed in my fallible brain because I’ve taken to ingesting things and watching way out of my depth lectures on YouTube as a form of entertainment after my small family goes to bed without me.

You could think it strange, but it's a good way to fill the time when you're alone and trying not to think about your impending death.

While we vacationed in our sham paradise, my friend, D, had an anniversary service for his son, whose funeral mass I attended. Since that heartache, he'd erected a memorial bench on a trail in Eagle River and the event was a trek out to the bench to honor the memory of one gone too soon. I'd been invited to go, via Facebook, but had to decline owing to the Kaua'i trip. In the aftermath of the service, when photo evidence appeared online, I studied the image in the suite where we were incomprehensibly staying. There, in the breeze of the tropic afternoon, was a snow-bracketed and candle-lined bench and I regretted, wholly, not being able to be there for him, or to light a Marian or St. Jude (one of my favorite saints) candle, or to pray in silence with those gathered at the site. My absence from something so concrete as the memorial shifted my perceptions of the island's irrealism into previously unattained levels and the desperate wish to return home seized me with fury.

When the trip was over and we safely arrived in Alaska, a visit to the mailbox found a package containing a Christmas present from D (a book about writers and drinking, obvi) with a personalized encouragement handwritten on the title page. Later, I sent a thank you email expressing my inability to return such a thoughtful gift and received such a kind response that it made me wonder how I'd been so fortunate to know, much less befriend, such a man. His simple act of continuing to exist seemed a massive refutation of all the vacation's apparent falsehoods, a grounding, a vast, calming effect in a world where air travel and resorts and spa visits and lu'aus and shell leis fill our collective brains as something to be sought after and procured, all while abhorring the question of why those such things are desired in the first place.     

{A beautiful, warped, and incomplete family, smiling in a place beyond comprehension.}

Longing for Death

I recently watched a video of Gavin at an orchestra concert. Since he's been into the middle school thing he's doing, he wanted to be a part of the orchestra. He has since he was in elementary school. Chose it even. Wanted to be in the strings. After some kind of deliberation, he went with violin. The video I saw was him in his concert garb: black slacks and white button down shirt. He was up there on the stage where I was not and he played with the utmost professionalism. Serious. Intent. Beautiful.

I don't smile in pictures anymore. If you've got a head on you, you'll know why. Here's one of me and Uly-Bear. He's adorable. He's laughing. He's in his PJs. He's not yet realized the absolute magnitude of life.

I was in the store the other day. I was with one of the SpEd people I work with (for the final time as I've secured employment elsewhere) and I told the guy that as he browsed the DVD rack that I'd be out and about, looking at girlies and such. I left him in Electronics and went out to the flower section. I have a powerful love of cut flowers and I was mulling taking a batch home for A. I saw this one with two faces. I'd never seen one like that before and the Janusian nature of the bud spelled me. How had God made such? How had I witnessed thus? Why the fuck was I the only cogent being in the store snapping photos of this miracle? 

A and I went out to lunch the other day. We frequented a Mexican place in Wasilla that I liked for pre-work beers and we had a wonderful time there. We fed our boy beans and rice and tamales and pico de gallo. There's something about him that makes all sorts of tumblers fall into place. I've been such a bad father to my other sons. I've fucked up so many things. I've overlooked Kiernan, my middle child. In all honesty I've ignored them all and continue to ignore them in all sorts of ways: writing, work, life, selfish shit, drinking, anything else. 

I wish, for once, that I was good. 

I Cause Scenes

ODB, now on display in our dining room.

We sat, my oldest two boys (a distinction I've had to make since Uly came that has not ceased to...perturb) and I, in the Silver Gulch in the Ted Stevens International Airport and awaited a delayed Delta connection to Sea-Tac. It was their last few ticks in Alaska and they were playing Legos on the table while I drank beer and wrote in my notebook. The entirety of the world was so fucked up that I could barely function. There were all these things happening and none of it made sense. Jet travel?  Biological functions? Barley fermentation? Custody agreements? Massive organizational structures? Electronic pulses jetting through fiber optic cables to places I couldn't imagine?

I couldn't get over the fact that just a few hours prior I had kissed my infant boy on his fat cheeks and squeezed his face and tried to transmit all that interior love I felt for him into his tiny mind because I feared that might be the last time I ever saw him. He smiled and I left him with his mother.

Outside the bar windows, I watched jets and luggage ramp crews and ramp crew managers and fueling trucks and airline food employees and miles of tarmac. Inside, I saw tourists and people and myself and my sons and forward moving organic sacks that told themselves they knew what they were doing. All I knew was that I was about to get on a plane and eat some Xanax and drink some of the Jim Beam singles in my carry-on and fade into a pharmacological ether as giant aluminum cylinders ferried me across the continent. 

It was going to be a journey.

When I transplanted this, the tree was approximately 18 inches tall.

After the flights, Felicia picked us up from RDU. I was seriously altered and she drove, quite graciously, the way back to her house where I would be staying with the boys for a week. After a stop at a local and well known roadside pit, I emerged with a tall boy of Milwaukee's Best in a brown paper bag. Back on the road, Felicia and I conversed as she drove the rest of the way into Jacksonville. The subject of the coming school year was broached and I said, "Fuck it, let's go get some school supplies." We arrived at the J-ville Target, store number 1226, and entered. We found the school supplies aisle where I squatted on my haunches and began issuing value shopping instructions to the boys. An excerpt:

Me (to G): Hey, why the fuck you gonna get some big ass lunch box that's motherfucking useless without the the lunch compartment that can at least, AT LEAST, hold some Tupperware or some shit for your lunch?

G: Well, it's big...
Me: Yeah, for what? Look at that shit. It's big in all the wrong places. Don't do shit for storing food. Also, got some huge-ass stuff you don't need. It's all terrible.
G: I don't know.
Me: Use your head, kid. Come on, son.
G: (Goes away to survey better options.)

K: (Comes up to where I'm squatting.) What about this? (Shows a collection of individual subject notebooks.)
Me: How much?
K: 15 dollars.
Me: Holy shit, 15 dollars? Go find some motherfucking shit ain't so expensive. 15 dollars. Get the fuck outta here.
K: (Goes and finds a pack of notebooks that are $4 dollars total that fulfills his school requirement. He returns and holds them out to me.)
Me: (Takes package.) Holy motherfucking shit. $4 dollars. See that? You saved 11 motherfucking dollars when you shop around. Look at that shit. Think about all the shit you could buy with 11 motherfucking dollars.

Target Employee: (Arrives nicely, with concern.) Sir, we've had some complaints about you from this section.

Me: (Still squatting.) Ah, okay, that's alright. Sorry. 

Stranger: (Has been hovering and comes around the corner. Looks at me.)
Me: (Gives double thumbs up to stranger with no comment.)

Stranger: (Proceeds to enumerate all the reasons why I'm a terrible father and inform me it's men like me who talk to their children like I am who are the reason that she doesn't talk to her father anymore and why Felicia shouldn't be with me because she deserves better.) 
Felicia: I'm not with him.
Stranger's Mom: (Arrives from aisle whence the Stranger came.) Children are a gift.

Me: (Continuing thumbs up until the Strangers and employee leave. Collect the boys' supplies and proceed to the checkout where I pay for the items so shopped for.)

The Sandridge Diner bar where I'm spending most of my North Carolina nights.

There used to be a chain, now bankrupt or otherwise defunct, of Southern grocery stores named "Delchamps", pronounced with all the consonants in a wholly American way and not in the way you'd imagine with a slurring of the "ch" or lack of "s" as a Frenchman might. I remember the place for several reasons, not least of which was my old man's affinity for the store. I especially remember him liking the deli section where he would order hyper-thin sliced sandwich meats that, according to him, almost melted in your mouth. This is especially memorable to me as I also remember the awfulness of his teeth and dental health/hygiene in general.

One day, and I'm sure I'm conflating memories as the brain is wont to do, I remember the weather as summer hot, and he was wearing a neck brace (the old, soft kind that resemble the neck pillows one finds in airport shops around the world) due to a work injury that, he later learned, had fractured several of his cervical vertebrae. I remember him hating the thing because it made him sweaty and overtly labeled him (not that he ever admitted this) as someone who was "disabled". In any event, we were in the store, shopping and he brought out a cigarette and began to smoke inside because it was too bothersome to go outside in the heat to smoke while he was in the middle of shopping. There he was, smoking, in his neck brace, with me watching him, as an employee informed him smoking was not allowed in the store.

The old man looked at him with a face that made me afraid for the employee's safety. The old man maintained eye contact with the employee, removed the half smoked cigarette from his lips, dropped it to the floor tiles, and ground out the butt with his shoe.

One of the boys' last summer days in Alaska.

The grand adventure of the boys' summer was suggested by Gavin. 

Their grandmother had bought them new bicycles and I had, myself, purchased a new bicycle from the going out of business Sports Authority. Unprompted, Gavin said we should bike out to Butte, climb the landform for which the town is named, and bike back. It's 7.5 miles from my house, one way, to Butte and the climb itself gains an elevation of 880 feet over a mile-ish long trail. They loaded up on breakfast and we headed out into a grey sky-ed day. 

The trail ran along the Matanuska river, which was up due to seasonal rains, and we took a moment to observe her passing. We stayed there a bit too long, watching the long roiling greyness of the water, and the boys got antsy. I knew it was time to go but before leaving, I asked them if they knew how many bike rides my dad had gone on with me. They both answered "zero".

We arrived at the butte, hiked up, and descended again to bike to a local convenience mart. I told the boys to select a sugary drink, a fatty snack, and water to refuel themselves. They selected Gatorade, roasted cashews, and a giant bottle of water. I paid and followed them out into the parking lot where they ate and drank while sitting on yellow parking bumpers. After they finished, we biked to Klondike Mike's in Palmer, a local bar, where I had beers and instructed the boys in geometry and physics and life things as they played games of pool and slurped at Shirley Temples. There was a man there, younger than I, who watched us with an expression on his face of almost envy or maybe regret, or some other amalgam of feelings about which I didn't inquire.

Out of coins for pool, groins on fire from saddle soreness, muscles achy, me a little drunk and the boys nearly exhausted, we mounted up our rides and headed for home.

Life Attacks

Owing to this being the penultimate weekend I'll spend with the boys in Alaska, here's a collection of pictures that encapsulates the summer I've had with them so far. I fly back with them to North Carolina in a week and a half and spend a week at their place, winding down the summer and prepping for the coming school year. For sure while I'm there, I'll work up a powerful substance haze and hammer out some words for the Russian bots who frequent the site here. For now though, just the pictures of them in various spots and engaged in the goings on we've experienced.

I hate myself and I want to die.