Time again, here again, hipster to be.

Bought myself some glasses, I’m insane. 400 bux? That’s bananas.

But another part of me says, no, do it, you deserve it. Grow up. It’s time.

This could’ve been your life, in another life. This could’ve been you everyday. In coffee shops and a tablet, a laptop, a notebook. You would scribble in a book, mad minute dashes of random thoughts that were brilliant. Or at least you thought they were profound. And they were, because they were you, at that time, trying to catch something, trying to make it mean something by writing it down.

And now, now, years later, were you foolish? Does my desire from then to capture it all, to make it precious, does it come off as futile? Painfully infantile?

I work with this fellow, Aaron Perlstein, graduate of Stuyvesant HS (RIVALS!) who is very very liberal. He reminds me of who I once was. He reminds me of that mad writing, small uppercased scrawls across half a dozen books (and that’s all your writing amounted to isn’t it? Little more than half a dozen, if at that)

She dresses me up in pearls (why pearls? Why the vomit of some mollusk?)

I want to live.

Arent you alive now?

Yes, no, maybe. I wanted more.

But you have everything.

It’s not everything though.

We were talking about this article that we might see immortality in our lifetime. Not invulnerability, I mean you get hit by a bus or fall off a skyscraper, you’re done. But some serious life extension if you keep the machine well oiled. We talked about how cool it would be to dial our ages up and down.

“Think of it, we can go to Asia like twenty year olds with sharp eyes and sturdy backs”

“But what about the kids?”

“O we can scale our ages up to what they expect us to be, for the grandkids at least.”

I then I told her if I had a choice I would want to live forever. “I want to see how it all ends,” my eyes got teary, “You don’t understand I want to see the sun go out.”

And other twisted thoughts like this. Like wanting to bury my children when they grow old and die. Everyone thinks I mean I want them to die young, how can I be so brutal, how could I live through that?

What they don’t get is that no one will ever love my children as much as I will. No one will care for them in death. No one will take care to see that they have a proper burial, they are not taken advantage of. I want to see my children go off into peace.

Who will take care of them when I’m gone?

This little tribe of mine. Perhaps it’s too much, maybe I’m asking too much of myself, expect too much, but I want to be there for all of it. I want to hold their hands when my daughter gives birth to a child. I want to brush the tears off my son’s cheek when his first born first goes off to school. I want to pull her close to me when the last breath leaves her.

I want the pain and madness and horror and joy of it all. I want it to go on and on endlessly. I don’t want it to stop.

She puts me to shame. Io just read the first paragraph to an essay she writing and she’ only 12 but it sounds like something I would’ve written in high school, college even. And this was something she did not want to do. Faced by the challenge of it she wanted to shirk it. To let it go, to let it slide. I told her, this is what I had done, I had become afraid, of being crushed by the possibilities of what I could be. She’s writing an essay for a program that sounds like a cross cultural exchange thing, where a cohort from her school will be a bridge to another in Uniondale. And of course she is afraid, of course she think she can’t.

She told me once while we driving, that she thought my demanding nature instilled a lack of self confidence in her. It still bothers me, but then again, her competitiveness, her yearning to do well, the fact that she also recently said she found middle school a lot easier than she thought it would be, tells me in the end I was right. That I put her on the right path. Yes, she might always be a little shy, might always think she hasn’t done enough, but that has always been the point: a little bit of self doubt goes a long in way in ensuring you are right, that you can always do better.

I listen to David at work, who praises his son but curses his daughter. Rebellious and artistic, his daughter confounds him. I hear him on the phone sometimes with them and the gravitas I have always praised him for attains an edge of harshness that is palpable if not down right smothering. There is only authority in his voice, no compassion. And yet when he speaks of his son, it is almost as if he is baffled by the boy’s temerity, the boy’s lack of spine? That’s not quite right. David is proud of both of them, even his daughter, but it’s almost as if he is worried for his son.

And there we were, Io and I, brain-storming, which she didn’t want to do, “We don’t brain-storm in middle school daddy.” And suddenly, while I was ranting about how privilege we were, how despite her privilege being born a woman gave her a disadvantage, the next thing I knew she was writing, lost in the keyboard. I shut up then, I recognized it. She found the voice of the piece she wanted to write. She found something interesting in that voice and was having a conversation with it. Who was I to interrupt?