The inherent capitalist in all of us.
My boy turned seven this past May and it's been an insanely stupid and timorous emotional ride as I've watched him through his larval stage. He's at the point where the descriptor 'boy' seems fitting and I see him running about and going on his mind's adventures and kicking soccer balls and hefting sticks and finding out the true nature of his physical form and it all just fills me up with the most intense longing and pride and joy and despair. He's free in a way that I'll never be again and was too puerile to recognize when it was I who was at that critical juncture of my life. It makes a body sad to comprehend the nature of your life and the long, slow slide into senescence.
I've taken up running again, as is my custom in the summer when the vanity of the beach calls one to parade sans shirt. In the mornings, I haul myself from the rack and stumble, sleep-eyed through the house's dawn gloaming and spill myself out into the new day's chill. It sucks. I'm stiff. I'm tired. My lungs aren't open and my hamstrings scream as I reach down toward my toes, only reaching them after some effort and I realize with ever sharpening clarity that I'm shackled to a body that's dying.
It's a hell of a thing.
