Commut-ication

(wrote this in my car during my commute)

I've been watching, feeling and thinking about mortality a lot these days. A lot even for me, and I've always kept a wary eye on that marker.

A big part of it is media, and the awareness it sustains that time marches on. Celebrities make a fair meter. It dazzles my primate brain to see someone who is "here with us" one day topple over the Great Horizon the next. I'm thrilled to have survived long enough to have a grown nephew who looks at me quizzically when I mention popular shows or artists no longer in existence. He looks at me like the dog does when I juggle. By simple extrapolation I know that there were artists before my time whom I'll never know or appreciate, although I'm making a few small efforts to broaden my musical appreciation.

Beyond the pop, I think of my mother, and now my brother, lost to the pantheon of memory and infinity. Now that my temporary blessing/curse of invulnerability to loneliness has dispersed, I am left with all too-keen an understanding of the need for human contact and interaction, with none of the social skills necessary to make it happen, and a wife who loves me but doesn't understand my need for communication to foster intimacy, nor harbors the communicative skills to make that happen.

In my teenage years, when my mom was still alive, she would get so lonely, trapped in the house by her illness and feebleness. Sometimes I would spend some time with her, but her illness was hard to witness, and I was a not-unusually self-centered teenager with a head full of madness and my own problems. I wouldn't mind spending some time to keep her company these days, and she could do the same for me.

I'm grateful that I get the chance to wake up every day and take another shitty run at life, although I feel that I'm still doing it incorrectly after thousands of chances to get it right. I am still baffled that so many people mortgage their souls to a full-time job, and yet I haven't discovered an attractive alternative. Then again, I haven't really put the time and research into it, have I?

Usually by this point I would write: "Maybe someday," but once past life's halfway marker, phrases like that don't come as cheaply or wistfully as they used to. If "someday" doesn't come with an earnest plan, you might as well use the word "never."

I look forward to the day I can converse with my son as one man to another, and I hope I do things right enough in between that he'll still talk to me when we get there. Wouldn't that be something.

I don't know what to tell you about my daughter. The whole story between me and her has been an epic case study in poor planning and human apathy, and we quite obviously don't know what to say to each other, and haven't since she was four, it seems. Our entire relationship has wobbled on a knife's edge for years, with neither of us wanting to sever it, nor do we know how to improve it. It all smacks of failure and disillusionment and regret; what a mess.

Who writes these things in a place like this? Someone with nowhere else to turn. Words seep out of me like tears, or pus, a natural by-product of life. The lack of an interlocutor is beside the point, like complaining to a geyser that "all this water could be put to some use, you know."