sarcasm… without it we’d have nothing to say
The Long Goodbye (for Michael Regan)
I hate goodbyes. Especially workplace goodbyes. They’re too long, too sappy and tired. They’re an excuse for people to eat free food and get their buzz on.
What’s even worse, you’re not really leaving the company. You’re not moving on into a higher paying position or being snapped up by a competitor. You’re relocating for Christ’s sake. Instead of this side of the Atlantic, you’re going to be on the other side: all that much closer to the origin of the sweetest nectar God has given man.
We’re just going to see you less. So what?
So I won’t say goodbye to you Michael Regan. It’s superfluous and unnecessary. I barely knew you anyway. A kid from Garden City that I took the train with a couple of times. Left Abacus for a while and ended up coming back because he got bored. Or the other thing didn’t work out. He didn’t like the other job. Or the other job didn’t like him. Whatever.
But I will say this: you’ve changed man. You went from six foot plus floundering goof ball yakking it up in the build room to competent semiprofessional professional. Still yakking it up in the build room. Still six foot plus, but with a goofy beard now. Sort of. Oh, you started coming to my side of the office more often too. Before, you did it because there was “footy” on the TV. Or you wanted to drop up some bad news about a client. Now you’ve started wandering in just to bullshit. That’s some stones man.
No more of that. Thank God.
I will say this however: I’m glad you came back to Abacus. I’m glad that you came back if only to leave again, if only to be that much closer to those fountains of Scotch that I dream about. If only to bring the same sense of semiprofessional professionalism to the UK. With the same goofy smile. And beard. Sort of a beard.
But yeah, I’ll miss you.
So what.
Happy Holidays (Abacus)
With the ins and outs of commuting and work and deadlines; our ECI migrations and Trader Tools dilemmas, it’s hard to be jolly. As we get older, the magic of Christmas wanes. For some of us, we’re lucky enough to reignite that spark vicariously through our children. For others, I’m just coming off like a loon: Christmas is practically every day for you.
You get my point.
But for me, it’s all about the tree. Getting it, lighting it, putting stuff on it and when the kids fall asleep, cramming stuff under it. It’s about them dragging us out of bed the next morning. It’s about sharing a glance with my wife as these sweet children turn into vicious monsters tearing through the piles. It’s about knowing there’s a dozen moments like this already behind us and hopefully dozens upon dozens more in the years ahead.
I hope something similar happens in your homes this weekend. I hope it’s filled with awe and peace and a kind of happiness that only a child really knows.
Happy Holidays.
Father’s 60th
Birthday’s change over time, don’t they? As very young children, we don’t get it. People standing around us, balloons, clapping, everyone’s staring. This cake that’s on fire. No, not fire, candles. And we blow, we’re supposed to blow them out.
Then we start to get it. We get presents, we see cousins we haven’t seen in months. Maybe our birthday is close to our brothers. We start to share the parties. Maybe it annoys us, but most likely it doesn’t matter. There’s this cake and the whole candle thing. Easier to blow them out with our brothers. Maybe we just let them do all the work and still get the same amount of presents.
As time goes by it becomes less of a family thing and more being with our friends thing. Maybe we start a night with our friends and end it in the company of someone beautiful. Maybe we laugh and tease our brothers, maybe we go out for a long drive and say goodbye to summer since our birthday comes so close to its end.
And it goes on like this for many years, the faces change, our face changes. It gets to the point where maybe there have been too many birthdays and they wash themselves out. It’s just another day. Maybe it’s a day we really don’t want to think about anymore because there have been so many and we don’t want to count.
But today, today there’s children all over again. And they’re hugging us like it’s their birthday instead of ours. And they’re seeing aunts and uncles and cousins they haven’t seen in awhile. And they’re teasing them just like we used to our brothers and sister and cousins. And maybe, just maybe we’ll let them help us blow out those candles.
On one condition: we keep all the presents.
Mother’s Day
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
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
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.
It’s all habit
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.
maw of himself
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?
here again, hipster to be
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.