What a drab, barren place the moon must be. Cold and grey. Black skies. I’ve always wanted to visit the salt flats and the tundra and look out onto the vast emptiness. I would pay money to see Mongolia or Siberia and ride a horse through the meadows and sled through the snow and ice. Ride the Bering Sea until I’m lost, or walk the endless white sands of a Pacific island. To stand on the edge of a plateau looking over a red, clay canyon. Climb the green, rocky mountains in Peru among the ruins. All under an ice-blue sky with the willful wind trying to blow me over. You can have the moon.
When was the first time you really felt like a grown up (if ever)?
It’s not to say that I haven’t tried to grow up, because I have on several occasions. The best I can do is pretend, and I’m super good at pretending. There is only so far I can go with it, though.
The world is just going to have to deal. But honestly the only complaints I’ve had are from my immediate family.
What was the hardest personal goal you’ve set for yourself?
Lately I’ve been acutely aware of my timeline: where I’ve been and where I’m headed. The frame is so small when I step back far enough to look at the span of my life. Small and sparse. I thought I’d be more accomplished by now, or at least have more experiences under my belt. More tales to tell.
Alas, there are no new tales to tell <insert rest / repeat>. Certainly not enough old ones to fill a book. I asked my 90-year-old dad where I go from here. He told me to write a book about my life. The problem is that much of what would go in that book is not shareable,.
I have a reputation to uphold.
He also said that the book didn’t have to be about my life but of some made up one, which is interesting because I would have to make much of mine up to fill the gaps between the acceptable moments. He appears to know more about me than I thought.
School wasn’t terribly hard, so that doesn’t count as a particularly difficult goal. I enjoyed pushing a lot of weight when I had a trainer, so that wasn’t difficult in a psychological sense. Physically, yeah, but I was so motivated by the idea of pushing more that I didn’t feel each personal record to be something nearly insurmountable, which is what I interpret “the hardest personal goal” to be.
I’ve experienced awful, difficult things, and I suppose I set a goal to overcome them. But those sorts of things are not a choice to overcome, hence not really a goal to reach. I guess I could have given up. That’s a choice. But I didn’t see it that way. It was sink or swim. Survival was not only instinctive but necessary.
My greatest goal is likely ahead of me. What do I do with my life now that my kids are raised? Teach? That’s it? Teaching is a lot, I know. It’s a noble profession. I know, I know. But I need something more, and I need that thing to be meaningful.
I thought this would be a semi easy prompt to answer.
I was deeply inspired what seems a lifetime ago by a writer who for some reason thought I was a decent read. I reread a couple of his posts tonight for old-time’s sake, loved them, said so, and then reading through the comments saw that I had already expressed my love for them when they were written and posted in 2018. I laughed when I saw my alter, alter ego–the 3rd (?) iteration of me. Why I hold on to nothing and resurface now and then like a turtle in a pond is a mystery. I try not to read too deeply into myself. Not much good comes of it.
Writing is different for me now, mostly because I have no time for anything but an occasional blurb in response to a prompt that catches my eye. Prompts are easier for me to write a response to than for me to follow up on an original thought. I feel like I’ve run out of those. In fact, that occurrence, the one when all the ideas were used up, likely happened millennia ago and the ideas keep reincarnating and mixing around with other stuff in people’s brains to make new ideas that have also come and gone. All of everything has been written already. It’s just most of the words have been forgotten. Or they’re in books I haven’t read. There are a lot of those, some of which are in a stack on the shelf over there under the ones I’ve reread multiple times. Whatever the case, deep, existential thoughts evade me.
My efforts have detoured the past few years, the last two in a similar direction those efforts took two decades ago when I pursued deep thoughts of a different nature. Ones that require lots of weird math. This blog has been my attempt to hold onto the writer in me. But the space has become an occasional, quick escape. Makes me sad. But time is a thief, and I have so little of the bits between later and now when all the big stuff happens, like work and life-altering events, that writing seems wasteful use of my time. I’ve reached an age when everything I do matters because the clock is ticking faster. I remind myself I have a good 40 years left provided genetics and avoidance of major disasters holds up. That’s almost a second half of life, one whole chunk of time nearly equal to what I have already lived. But less happens in the second half, which makes the clock more noticeable. The ticking is louder these days, and life is slipping by. Do I have time for the tiny details anymore? My sense of urgency to fit the expectations I have for my life in the next four decades overshadows the whimsical world I once lived in my head. Social media has replaced brain space I reserved for the reinvented original ideas I once conjured. I don’t like that word, conjured. I feel its meaning has been altered, though it hasn’t really. I have just allowed it to lean toward a more sinister meaning, the consequence of being led astray by mindless entertainment. Media has contributed to the bastardization of word-craft. Memes have replaced prose, condensing ideas to a single image. We immediately absorb what was once savored, then scroll to the next random (or not so random) tidbit that an algorithm has decided would entertain us. My attention span is not what it was once, and that has had a profound effect on how I spend my leisure time. Hence the neglected stack of unread books under the stack of read ones that, themselves, are gathering dust. It’s not really that I don’t have time for them, it’s that I choose to give in to the instant gratification of social media. Soon I’ll forget my words altogether.
I miss my writer friend who helped me nurture them. I think he has slipped into the ether. Or is buried in a book. Not writing where I can find him, anyway. Who will inspire me now? I need to read those books. I need to reread Bluebeard.
What details of your life could you pay more attention to?
I work too much. But I have to do a good job to earn my pay (and, let’s be honest, their respect).
I had a dream two nights ago that I walked into the home I grew up in. The floors were torn out and the walls were stripped. Everything was concrete and dry wall. White and bare. Workers sat at a table near the door and ate their lunch. They didn’t know who I was. I looked over and saw my dad sitting in one of the chairs on the other side of the room. He was staring into space with a look of gloom and despair. He built that house. Even laid the wood floors tile by tile. And now all his work was gone. The home was gone. He was totally alone. I haven’t felt so deeply saddened in a long time. I frantically asked, “What is happening?! Dad!”
My alarm went off in that moment, and I didn’t get to hear his response. I didn’t get to comfort him.
He’s 90 now, and he lives in a different town. He’s sad and alone, and it makes me sad thinking about it. So I took off work Friday, and I’m going to stay with him a couple of days.
Another Writer, Another Blog 