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[kingtycoon]

I have to admit that I have a pretty strong conservative streak - a piece of my Self that hates to accommodate change. I think it's to do with having brief but significant periods of sublime bliss in my life. I have these moments in time & I can't let them go, I don't want to. I want things to stay. They do not, the world is that river that flows over and past you - the Time Dragon. Holding on to things for too long - that's kind of my way, not wanting these things to depart I dwell on them and let them crumble to dross and that is when I'm left without a thing & have to accommodate change. I put off adapting until I have to & then the adaptation is sharp & painful & difficult. But also it's revelatory & profound. There is the new me, at the end.

I didn't want to not go to college, so I kept doing it & doing it, and then I couldn't really afford or justify it anymore, so I had to make a break and do a new thing. I didn't want to find a different job so I sold movies for ever and ever until I got pushed out by... a succession crisis? I hold on until I can't and then make a reckless leap. That's me. My kid makes me think about time in a wholly different way. Your kid grows & is change - but it's all external to you - you see it happening and it's such a focus - you can't look away so you don't see the change happening, there is transformation going on but when you're staring at it, it is invisible. But sometimes a thing happens that draws your attention back and you see the picture, bigger & real.

On Mothers Day... Oh thank goodness my sister took my mother away - they went on a trip together so I didn't have to face it. I don't have, like Ill-Will toward my mother, but our relationship profoundly resists the 19th century romantic vision of the Mother as... feminine hero, ideal of nurturing & blah & blah. She's a lady who whipped me all the time so that I'm broken under the skin & who wanted me to be a way that I'm not so bad that it broke her when I wasn't. Just a lot of bad history, a fair present, but Mother isn't a title I consider mystically significant. But on Mothers Day, A wanted to go to the Creek - the little almost secret woods by our house & I didn't. I did want to go outside, but we went to this place & weren't really dressed or shoed for it properly. She wanted to and wanted to - and she's so reticent about wanting to do things that I'm very indulgent toward her when she actually wants a thing. She's in a My Side Of The Mountain phase where she wonders about the woods & life there. So we went.


I grumbled about going down here, though it was pretty. "improper shoes, not a good idea, and blah & blah" I did it though, to do. A few moments after this picture I slipped in my flip-flops and went down in the water - glasses flew off and floated away - probably, I couldn't see. Muddy all over & wet. And grouchy. Mothers Day - I get grouchy. Luckily, you know, $8 chinese glasses, so that's fine.

walking home in the nice-high heat, wanting & wanting a shower, I am reminded of a famous story - part of our family mythology. We went to the forest often, back when I drove & lived on the west side- back when I was holding on to a time & place I should have abandoned - and the signs point out that there is a horse-path. This delights here, horse-icons. She insists on the horse path. My move is to indulge her whims, in the hopes that this will foster courage, that it will help her learn to really want & pursue the things she wants without timidity. The horse path is a path for horses, treacherous & muddy to people-shoes. She goes down in the mud, and she's 4. She used to have this hangup about having a wet sock or a wet pant-cuff. She went down in the mud. "Oh! Poor little kid!" It's a tearful thing, and angry. You know that childish thing where it's assumed that a problem is the fault of someone or something. There are no accidents. Not that I help, because you have to laugh, carrying your poor kid back to the car - you have to laugh & say: "Oh you got a soggy bottom!" So tearfully enraged - and sweetly pitiful - now with a target to blame or accuse - "Don't laugh at my soggy bottom! Don't laugh! Youuuu! I wish it was youuuuuuu that got the soggy bottom!" And you know, jesus kid, I'm carrying you here, if you're not careful I'll drop you from laughing. It turned out sweet - in the end, you know, that day, summer almost a decade back. fluffy towels & cup-cakes at home, tender y'know?

And then there's me - sunday, grouchy and rough, blinded by accident and here I think - "I wish that it was you who had a soggy bottom." Not because I wished it, but just because of the symmetry. It's impossible not to love the symmetry.


I worry that I hold on too much to these old memories. We talk a lot. We walked to the library & back on Saturday - she ran her own D&D game for her own friends. I lavish my accessories on her, blessing this enterprise - and then forget to even bring my stuff to work on. We walk home and talk. So much of our experience together has been so formative to me, so important. She doesn't remember it - and it's not disappointing - of course she didn't. It's an accident of human consciousness, no blame, but still. These were things, between us, things we had together & yet it's only me that remembers. I imagine that those experiences are marked on her psyche indelibly, maybe in a profound way that informs he whole life - maybe. And yet there's just me, holding these reminisces, thinking back to those moments that were sublime & blissful but which are just for me now. It's a lonely thing. Hard to explain but lonely.

Comments

[mimerki.livejournal.com]

Nothing pertinent, I just loved the way you put words together here.

Also, your pic looks like a wizard, and I say that as a girl who actually reads big fat fantasy novels and not one who has seen one of those LoTR movies once and thinks Legolas is pretty. You are about to suggest a grand adventure, and I want in.

[kingtycoon.livejournal.com]

Ah, I like that enthusiasm!

Adventure is such an amorphous notion - I get lost thinking about it- what constitutes adventure for you and for me?

My move for a while now is to robin for prospective batmans. I'm a good heavy, a solid partner in activities. My motto is "Sure, that sounds cool."

On my own I'm all - Maybe I'll just work on writing a book today. Maybe I'll drink some beer too.

Do me a favor willya? When you say adventure - what do think is the kind of adventure I should go on? Like, what do you imagine?

[mimerki.livejournal.com]

What do I imagine? My imagination is a pretty big place.

Let's go on an epic road trip to slay a dragon (which may or may not be metaphorical, and whose slaying may or may not be similarly metaphorical) and find the true loves of our youths (which probably aren't metaphorical but may not be exactly literal) and, while we're at it, stop for truly epic ice cream.

Let's run off to Paris to lay flowers on Oscar Wilde's tomb and while we're there fight off the extraterrestrial vampire invasion. It's worth noting that I don't speak French. We may have to communicate entirely by wild gestures and relying on the kindness of strangers.

[kingtycoon.livejournal.com]

It's you on FB that posted that thing about Wilde & Whitman right? is that you? I don't understand my relationships to people - anyhow that was fun.

The road trip is on my To-Do list soon. I'm organizing it for sometime this summer - I need to travel the earth in a car - though that is a bad way to go - it's also best? It's weird, my things about cars. We planned, some time ago, our journey - the Robo-Trip in which we'd take the greyhound to the minor cities of all western canada while sipping szyrup (or however you write it - 3-6 Mafia for your records). But then the interested parties started having babies... Bah.

I think this week I'm going to Niagra Falls - for laughs, it's with my one youthful life-love, now, tragically tragic & with reversed emotional conditions - at least she's up to taking trips to Buffalo tho.

Okay - I am down with your vision of adventuring - I'ma get my passport in order. That's sensible right? What am I doing with an expired passport?

[mimerki.livejournal.com]

That was me on FB with the silliness about Wilde and Whitman. I didn't expect it to be popular (who cares about dead gay poets? my friends!).

What are you doing with an expired passport, my friend? I have my silly passport card, only really good for going to Canada and Mexico, in my wallet right now, just in case. Who knows what madness may strike when I leave the office? Maybe I will just not go home at all and run off to Canada to take up a whole new life. (It seems unlikely, but it is a possibility as long as I have my passport with me.)