Turning

Another year is ending. According to one colonial-era source, indigenous people in the coastal region of North Carolina counted their age by the number of winters they'd seen. 

I was born during winter, so this would be my 38th that we're in right now. I think. I'm actually not sure.

Of course, our calendar is entirely arbitrary. It's just an attempt at making sense out of something senseless (time). A calendar, a dictionary, a clock, all of these things are attempts at imposing order on chaos.

But, for people whose cultures inherited the Roman system of time, it will soon be 2024. For Muslims, we're in 1445 AH. 

Without imposing systems of meaning, I think we'd go mad. This is largely because we have the luxury of time to worry about meaning and order. No longer are many of us bound to the desperation of survival that our ancestors faced.

In a miniature attempt at imposing order, many people will stay awake tonight until midnight to see the new year. This observation might soothe the existential anguish that seems to be increasing among Americans. 

We'll turn out the lights and go to bed. We'll wake up to the same life. Soon enough, this new year will feel just as heavy as the old, but we'll sit where we always do. We'll be with one another.

Remains the Same

11 years, 3 months, and 28 days since my last entry. 

There's no use enumerating all the changes, legion though they may be.

What has remained the same is the woman sitting next to me on this bed as she writes in her journal. 

There is a boy who still has a very elementary sense of wonder. 

We still live in the same city. 

There are still books, still music, still the relative fact of my youth - such as it is.

None of these things were ever guaranteed. 

I'll be 39 in less than a month. 

That is not guaranteed. 

But I'm still here.

Back? to Normal

I haven't published since June 15 which is unsurprising considering that the apartment building caught fire on June 27.

That's right my devoted reader(s), the apartment building in which I lived caught fire.  Dashing through choking, blinding smoke while bear-hugging my infant son was not something I could have foreseen.  Still, that was almost a month ago and, after living out of a hotel for a week and then moving all of our undamaged goods, well, I think life is settling out again; though we had a flash flood in the parking lot at our new apartment and our cars were both water damaged for awhile.

So really, there is no normal simply because there is no way to average out the collected experience of each human life.  There is no normal, not because Angus said so (though he was right there, too) but because even though we hold so much in common we still experience life so differently, even from our neighbors and those closest to us.

In a little more than a month I begin graduate school at East Carolina.  I'll be working on this. 

Is that normal?  It probably is for me. 

I'm not saying anything new here and, to be sure, I don't think I've ever used this blog to break open new philosophical possibilities. Most of us can parrot (not to diminish our belief, though) that everyone is different.  It's a sort of existential libertarianism that's incredibly common in our American life and, I would hope, to life worldwide.

For me the apartment fire was red letter.  For State Farm it's just another claim to be dealt with quickly.  For people living nearby it was rubberneck worthy.  For my extended family is was likely even more frightening than it was for me and, for billions of others, it was a non-event.

What's universal (though not necessarily normal) is that everything and nothing can be both small and large.  People can hold things in common and apart.  Our lives intersect with other lives and with everything and yet we live apart.  Most of this normalcy requires no work and exists simply by virtue of our being.

But that's normal, I suppose, and I'll slip back into that until something else dislodges me.

Twenty Seven

We spent the day wandering the city.

Oliver fell asleep on my chest as Becky tried on clothes at The Limited.

Men discretely (so they thought) ogled my wife as we walked through the mall.

We ate at Panera.  Becky feasted on her usual.  Her currently red hair blew across her face in the parking lot.  Oliver's hair stood on end in the stiff breeze.

Our hands touched and our shoulders touched, my eyes consistently sought hers or those of our son.  Familiarity outside - even though we were surrounded by everything else.

She was born twenty seven years ago.  Her parents were frightened teenagers or even smaller, even more afraid, being where they were and so far away from home.

Oliver made eyes at people, watched people, all from the safety of our arms.

He won't say "mama" when Becky is around but only when he thinks that she's left the room or the apartment.  Becky has been lucky enough to catch him a few times when his back has been turned.

The young woman at Sephora apologized over and over for the fact that the story did not have birthday gifts in stock; her words were self-devouring shoelaces.

Even though we've been together for some time now I am still capable of gazing at her when she suspects nothing - her green eyes hiding out behind the rounded vogue of her eyeglasses.

Everything that's close is beautiful.

I wrote in each of the books I bought for her.  Gift notes of my hopes.  They are various promises - all of them waiting for her acknowledgement and her eyes.

Happy birthday, Becky.

High School and Huxley

I read constantly as a young boy and all the way through adolescence - encyclopedias, fiction, even a bit of poetry - I was an avid writer as well.  I spent a good deal of time in the middle school library, checking out books of ghost stories, historical fiction, etc.

Yet, teenagehood being what it often is, I lost interest in reading and mired in video games (not that video games are bad, I love them still) and depression - though I still continued to write.  I could not, at the time nor later in life, understand the idea that being a teenager was meant to be the best period in one's life.  The notion still riles me and engenders in me nothing but disdain for its falseness.

A combination of neurological and situational maladies contributed to my deep melancholia and I still have that melancholy disposition to this day, though it is more now a permanent piece of my personality than an impediment to general happiness.

This Is Family

The stillness of morning in Fayetteville.  Our waking, or at least mine, is  due to the increasingly excited grunting of a seven-month-old.  His eyes startle me for a moment with their blueness, something he inherited neither from myself nor my wife.

At 1:00am he had awoken and I'd brought him to our bed to nurse.  We fell asleep before he finished and so he ended up spending the night with us - something I'd figured was going to happen.  I was too tired to take him back to his room, anyway.

So upon my waking at 7:30am there he is: sitting upright with his mother's help, gazing around, smiling, and making small consonant sounds to the morning.

My wife is overtired from weeks of long hours at work and I no longer have moments when I do not smell baby poop - the scent is glued to the sensory receptors in my brain so that, whenever my wife asks me if I smell something in particular I can only reply, "Poop?  I only smell poop."

And I love it.

Becky's Quirks & Quazy Qualities

There are quirks that are endearing and quirks that are forced and not at all endearing.  Becky's are sincerely endearing.  There is a uniqueness to her person that is not created by an effort of will but a soft, gentle honesty.  This posting will be in list-form and will be about a person who exists in my personal life where, outside of that life, she exists as a professor, friend, and family member.  She's always first in my life.

• she craves asparagus.
• she loves Def Leppard and Journey in the way that a preteen loves Justin Bieber.  It is not nostalgia but pure ecstatic joy.
• she adores fairies - figurines, paintings, and murmurs of the little creatures exist all over our home.
• she has seen a fairy.
• she has filled over 100 personal journals since she was 16.
• as a child she spent her nights swooning to a cassette tape of Michael Crawford as the Phantom of the Opera.  At other times, she spent her nights swooning to "Mr. Roboto".
• she wrote and directed plays as a child, most of which starred her friends and were videotaped by her father.
• she was an award-winning Irish step dancer.
• when a preteen she spent a summer day reading "The Phantom of the Opera" and, without noticing the passing of time, earned a massively miserable sunburn.
• her veins flow with the steady bubbling of Dr. Pepper.
• she has the constitution of a character in a Jane Austen novel.
• her belief does not fail - and in this life that is a quirk.
• she remembers meeting Dennis DeYoung and also remembers the fact that he was eating a candy bar when they met.
• she was born in Tennessee but has the accent (or lack thereof) of a newscaster.
• her celebrity crushes are usually men who are far too old for her (i.e. Kevin Kline, Kevin Spacey, etc.)
• she cannot pronounce the word giraffe.
• she loves me.