It Hurts a Little Bit

Hey, take a look at this idiot.

I went to my friend D's book launch the other day. He had asked me to do the honor of interviewing him at a local bookstore about his novel and writing process and I had, of course, agreed to do so. After work, I drove into the city, through the spring rain during which I was dazzled by the sight of an eagle, fish in its talons, cruising over the roadbed, on its way home for dinner. Once arrived, the scene was grand - small urban coffee shop vibe with Mexican inspired tapas and beer on tap or in cans. D was on the small elevated stage, signing books. The place was packed, young and old, with friends of D's and those of his son who's no longer bodily among us. Soon, the event's hour came and I joined D on the stage. I felt a total fraud, sitting up there with him and asking questions about his book and recent run of publishing success. After the Q&A, D read a chapter from the novel and I watched him, reading in his characteristic way, the same way I read his words in my head, in his voice. There was something to it, and I stood at the back, taking in the reality that doing such a thing was possible. The reading concluded, I retired to one of the only two seats left available to guzzle beer and people watch, overcome with the deep knowledge of eventual death, but not in a necessarily bad way. The event ended and I drove home to my quiet town, my sleeping house, to sit with myself for a while. 

At work I got a promotion of sorts. The new jam is titled "Career Counselor" and I'm supposed to advise students about their career path and how they can be successful in the workplace (laughable, I know, given my highly non-linear track myself). What I really end up doing is inputting student's time off requests and providing haphazard, at best, mental health counseling that runs the gamut of topics - grief, stress, relationships, substance abuse, crushing existentialism (also laughable due to my inability to grapple successfully with those issues). It's a pretty good deal. I have my own office. I come and go much as I please. I'm generally left alone unless the world is burning down for one of the students. I don't have to put on the song and dance fuckery of entertaining/managing a classroom full of disaffected, low socioeconomic adolescents who would rather be just about anywhere else committing all manner of abuses of the flesh. It's a thing to watch them and to realize that I'm in the pull of a temporal black hole, approaching the event horizon, and speeding farther and farther away from where they are now and where I once was and that soon I will cross that boundary (or may have already). It's a hell of a thing.

I sit here, at home, surrounded by books. Sometimes (lots of the time really), I find myself in a state of wonder at how things have shaken out for me. I'm a skinny white kid from southern Mississippi who grew up in a trailer and somehow I've managed to never work, not really, a day in my life. By rights I should have been a day laborer, gone to prison, been hooked on methamphetamine, trailer park denizen, domestic violence champ, Bud Light swiller, serial bum, homeless, any of the futures that I know could have existed out there. Yet I reside in relative ease and comfort, watching my youngest play with a Melissa and Doug play pizza set as I listen to streaming Lofi beats and watch the world outside turn green once more. I spend my days writing away at things, at whatever shape my life has occupied. Nights I'm currently enthralled with ice hockey even though I've never been in ice skates and have only attempted, once, those of the roller variety. I've somehow managed to get married, three times even. I'm going to have a novel published this year. The entirety of my existence is a mystery, one unsolvable, and I'm drawn to the line from Blood Meridian when the kid spends a night with the hermit in the desert when the old man imparts this wisdom to him.

 "A man's at odds to know his mind cause his mind is aught he has to know it with."