she asks, Why do you have to drink like that?
eh, bc i hurt. bc i am a disappointment. it’s rare that i drink. it’s not even once a week, it’s like once a month. i dont know what to tell you. i’m still angry. this life is leaving me. i’ve accomplished nothing that i ever wanted to. i am not a writer. i am not a fantastic husband. i am a bumbling father. you said it yourself: what have i done to make our kids extraordinary? nothing. bc i am not extraordinary. and i wanted to be. i wanted to be so much. i wanted to do so much. and i’m not talking fame. i’m not talking money. it’s like when you write a sentence: the first word is impossible. Where to begin? Infinite possibilities, so many to choose from. But then you choose one. Half of the possibilities are gone. You start with one word and you cannot start again. You choose one word to begin with and the next word cannot be so many others. And with each word of this life sentence, your options become fewer and fewer. Each choice limits what can come next. Until everything is exhausted. Until you get to the end. Full stop.

My Dearest,

Things have not gotten easier. I promised that they would but the ebb and flow of life and work tug and push me around like flotsam in a storm. If I claim to be the rock of this family, it is only to be clung to in times of severe weather: else you are smashed.

You however are the shore. You however are the land in which we can find peace and lush forests in which to live. You are the beauty that life brings and the bounty that safe harbor promises.

How I wish to always be on your shores.

What have I done with my life. Burning through it. Harder than ever before. Is it passion? Is it escapism? Am I avoiding all the things I’ve built up in the last years? To go from ever present, ever caring father, to exhausted and diligent company man? I think of it and feel nothing, only the drive to push harder. It gives me perspective. No that’s not quite right. It gives me value? Sure but to whom? Turning 45 this year. Halfway mark at best. This life lived so far, has it been very long? At 12 it seemed like forever. The last 12 have seemed like a blip. My father warns me on the one hand, don’t work so hard, you don’t want to miss out. A month later he scolds me for not answering his texts within 15 minutes.

To be continued, conjured up from the previous attempt, the last try never being the last, a resuscitation, a recitation, a mantra, a belief, a prayer.

I asked io if she believed in God and when she said yes, I asked why. Mz was livid, said later, why put that in her mind?

Because I am full of it. I am full of the yearning for doubt. I have no doubt in my mind that the terror I feel in the night before I pass out exhausted is that this is it. The be all end all end game and my options have run out.

The new worry: I can never go to school again, I can never fall in love in again, I can never be new again. Even worse: australia will never happen for instance. Sky diving will never happen, living abroad will never happen. What I have seen and where I have gone amounts to 90% of what I will see and do in this life. This life, as if another. I will see and do in life. My life. Period. End stop. End all.

How nice for something else, for something more. For religion, for science fiction, for fantasy. For magic. There’s so much of it around us, and yet, and yet.

No, this is it. End all. Full stop.

Later, night. Almost there. For a brief moment. The singular. The alone. The only. What peace. What worth do I really have at this point? Manhattan’s a mad house, a fun house, batches of people who desperately want to lose their minds in patches of darkness and stone. Only this. All the time.

Silence, break it. Ha. It escapes me, the potency of it is there and but no longer waiting. Leaving me. You’ve all left me. All my old lovers are now old. Even the despair, even his death, old and thin and  emaciated. Worn through, see through, abandoned. Yes, abandoned but not condemned.

He said this to me, remember this. It’s all habit, all of it, everything you think you are, it’s just a memory, muscle memory of what you should do, how to be.

And I think he’s right. I think how as I move I am thinking of my mother, how she would sort of the dishes, how she would open a kitchen cabinet while stirring a pot, how she would wipe her brow with her while on her hands and knees scrubbing.

And I think of how he spoke, always a smile on lips that whispered violence. They way he held my hand and graced my cheek with the other. How he lied, staring into my eyes, how I lie staring yours.

So long, so so long.

He holds it close to himself, this idea of himself, this bleeding maw of himself. This thing that once was, the who he had been. And what now? What’s left now? A husk?

Nononononono

So much more than that. It’s all trivial. He’s come to realize it’s all trivial, even the children, the woman, the mother, the father. He walks through the night, empty streets of suburban arrogance, it’s all so trivial. Only the air, the silence that is not silence, that is empty of them and their jostling, only the air matters. Because you need to live. You need it to feel alive. He laughs. He sounds so stupid. He walks through empty streets and relishes every step forward where another living person doesn’t cross his path. It’s so easy to disappear. It calls to him. Like it did to this father before. And perhaps before him as well. Being present doesn’t necessarily guarantee presence. The being there, the being wholly and relentless there.

Nononononono

Being there but nowhere to be found. To  be looked at and not seen because you’re a figment of their imagination. You said it didn’t you? At best, you said, at best we’re an impersonation of ourselves. At best, you said. At fucking best. How have you not lost your mind?

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?

[?9/?19/?2016 9:44 AM] Manny Savopoulos:
ya, right? it’s nerve wracking. i ever tell you about the time during the blackout? when mari was pregnant with our first born?
[?9/?19/?2016 9:44 AM] Paul Ponzeka:
oh man, no
that must have been nuts
[?9/?19/?2016 9:45 AM] Manny Savopoulos:
so, i was working for a systems integrator, doing a job for an office on the upper east side
mari was working right across the street from where abacus is now, the chrysler bulding, credti suisse
[?9/?19/?2016 9:46 AM] Manny Savopoulos:
she’s about 4, 5months in her pegnanacy
if you remember the entire eastern seaboard went down
so we had talked about this, since 9/11, antyhingn nuts, get out of the city. just head home
[?9/?19/?2016 9:47 AM] Manny Savopoulos:
so that’s what i do. i walk down 79th to the 59th and across. find a payphone, call the wife
“where you at babe?” still at the chrysler building. “What???”
[?9/?19/?2016 9:49 AM] Manny Savopoulos:
so i start haeading back, sun is setting, every one’s looking at me like i’m an idiot, heading in the wrong direction. by the time i get to the crysler building it’s getting dark and people are whopping and hollering
[?9/?19/?2016 9:49 AM] Paul Ponzeka:
oh god
[?9/?19/?2016 9:50 AM] Manny Savopoulos:
mari’s gone the reception tells me. i try to find a phone, after a dozen calls i get a hold of her: she’s a penn station. where there’s no power. with her coworker who was going to wait it out.
so i head over cross town. by the time i get there there are people literally pissing out in the open. hot, angry and increasingly frustrated
[?9/?19/?2016 9:51 AM] Manny Savopoulos:
so i turn to her and say, we need to bounce, like now. her firend frank says, we should wait it out. i tell him let’s go, stop fucking around
so we haed for the 59th (again) and it’s getting you can see the stars but not 10 feet in front of oyu
and peeps have been drinking and going “boo” for the lulz
[?9/?19/?2016 9:52 AM] Paul Ponzeka:
i can see the rage building
[?9/?19/?2016 9:53 AM] Manny Savopoulos:
o yeah, but keep in mind, i got a preggers wife, so that’s minus modifier, that makes us very vulnerable
so i hail a cab, tell the guy, $200 bucks, long island.
frank says, “wait what?”
i tell him shut up and get in
[?9/?19/?2016 9:54 AM] Manny Savopoulos:
it was crazy. i couldnt believe how she broke the plan. she wouldnt again, i’m sure of it, but that was one sketchy night
[?9/?19/?2016 9:55 AM] Paul Ponzeka:
oh man
i would have lost my mind
[?9/?19/?2016 9:56 AM] Manny Savopoulos:
nah, u wouldnt. u’d lose it the next day when they’re safe
[?9/?19/?2016 9:58 AM] Manny Savopoulos:
i hated that guy frank afterwards. i thought what a pussy. wtf is wrong with you?

i am riddled with fears. just at the edge. how different than ever before, careening into the dark, in to the light.
they’re getting older now. she breaks my heart, she toes out into the age where everything became a disaster for me. where i was ruined. and i want to clutch at her, to yank her back, drag her by her heels. tell her, you don’t want this, all that’s before you is mortality and helplessness. all that awaits you is the relentlessness of time.
and him, the rascal, the one off. his own man, his own beat and drummer. the drummer and the drum, the beat and the skip. o beautiful son, you delight me and vex me. you are impossible to understand already.
when did all this happen?