I'll Make This Quick
Since my son was born I had been turning over the idea of leaving him something of me for him to look at. To see where my head was when his Dad was raising him, and in case I don't make it as far into his life as I would like.
I turned 40 about ten days ago. That in mind, if I last another forty years he'll be able to read this stuff even long after I'm gone. It's not that I think that I won't last for a good piece of time, but just in case. No one wants to be their father, but my Dad always told me "Jus', I didn't think I would make it to be this old" and he uses that to explain why he never saved up, or never planned ahead. I don't think I'm doing it for the same reason, I just think that my Dad has a lot of regrets and if he ever looked at them candidly for very long they would eat at him, the way an old relationship that didn't work out hits you on a night where the air and the heat and the light outside lines up just right. Certain things you can't have back, and despite the knowledge that everything you remember is happening right now, some part of you is aware that the fullness of that experience isn't quite captured.
At least for the moment I wholeheartedly agree that, if there isn't an afterlife, you live on long after in the memories you left behind. They won't be completely accurate, of course, but it's something to ease the idea of oblivion and nothingness that I presume exists when your brain stops talking to itself.
I intend to write more here, so I'll try to keep this entry short. It is momentous and a little star-crossed that one of my old passwords actually worked and I didn't have to run in circles to my cell phone and back again to recover it.
One thing unusual about this short tract will be that it is not compelled by an alcohol flung disgorging of a forgotten closet. It has been a little more than a year since I stopped drinking. I suppose I'll have time to cover it here at some other point in time. It's not honestly something I think about on a day to day basis like some of the people I've talked to about it, but the experience and the span of time it influenced is hard to avoid, and one of the biggest things about me not wanting to continue to be an active alcoholic was that I didn't want it to be the north star by which I orient and contextualize all of my past goings about. Although, as much as I would like to, it will be impossible not to acknowledge it.
Usually I end up on livejournal at the bottom of a box of Franzia while Sida is asleep and I have quiet time to myself to go completely off the rails. Maybe I open up some old emails from Melanie and I want to try to open a wormhole to those intense feelings from when I was young and still learning myself and even more unaware of then even I am now of the wanting urges that make you persist in following desire paths in your head where the grass never grew back to cover your path. oblivious of the color-by-number you are carefully trying to fill out because you didn't really have a hand in creating it.
And maybe that's where I'll end this tonight. In the past I got the feeling of looking years behind and thinking how awfully stupid I was in retrospective. You get to the point where you think of it while you're doing it and spoil your own fun. Cresting half-way through my life expectancy though, I think you become almost urgently aware of limitations that are drawing in around you. Your body, the trajectory of your life, the idea of what is possible shrinking fractally around you.
When you're young the idea of missing out on something is something I always felt most acutely. I think that had a lot to do with the trauma of my early childhood friends who would frequently try to ditch me or not involve me when I was in high school. Then you get to a point where you just don't really care. Weekends can slip by you so quickly. I like to say that it's not as if life with a child makes time shrink and evaporate, but that you have to be much much more adept at scheduling the time you have because there is ALWAYS something to do.
My parents are getting older and starting to have health problems. Ted is getting surgery on his eye because of a gaping cataract that is making him see mirage-like things. His prostate was removed early in 2020 for cancer. My Dad has just had some large rectal polyps removed and they were also pre-cancerous.
I started lifting after a major tennis elbow injury on a fire call last August just recently and I'm doing well with it, but dear lord everything aches. I'm so glad that in my earlier years I made it a point to exercise because God knows how decrepit I would feel as someone who has no gumption to do that sort of thing until they are told that they must.
We took Auggie to bed tonight after dealing with the sniffles (possibly we have the Delta variant of Covid) and pushing through the thick mud of getting through a day with a 2 year old. He says, "Heyyy" and it's like his version of "I love you". I kind of like it more than I love you, it's quicker and says everything in its intonation.
Well, anyways, that's enough for tonight. Covid is going on. I am a volunteer firefighter. I have a free-wheeling new job with lots of latitude. There is a lot to talk about.