Just In Case

My wife reminded me this morning about Our Last Shopping Trip.  You know, before she popped out Twins A & B.  She had read in numerous (really, there were numerous) pregnancy books that, prior to opening up the bomb bay doors, please, Hal, one should go on a shit-crazy shopping spree, purchasing seven dozen rolls of toilet paper and sixteen tubes of Mango/Orange Tom's of Maine Mint is the Antichrist toothpaste, just in case the creation of twins results in a chaotic situation that does not enable one or one's psychotic spouse to ever go to the supermarket ever again.

So, we did that.

And it's a good thing, too, because, while we were eventually with it enough to venture out of doors (it took us approximately two months or so) on an errand or two, you don't want to be brushing your teeth with a twig covered with old shoe polish or wiping your ass with the Anthropologie skirt you got your wife for her 24th birthday.

As hurricane or tropical storm or nor'easter or federal pound-me-in-the-ass storm Sandy approaches my 'hood, which is thoroughly unaccustomed to bracing for meteorological events any more fierce than a couple days of swamp-ass inducing humidity, I felt the need to write.  Just in case the power goes out for a week.  Just in case a tree limb falls on my head as I go out to check the storm drains and I incur a traumatic brain injury that turns whatever remains of my writing prowess into apple sauce.

Just in case.

Facebook wants me to confirm my phone number.

The computer wants me to restart so the latest version of Norton can self-install.

Richie Havens wants me to come downstairs and listen to him sing to the babies on my wife's iPad.

"Don't mind me, 'cuz I ain't nothin' but a dream."

Everybody wants something, don't they?  Narcissists must have it real easy-- the only thing they're concerned with is what they want.

(I'm jealous.)

I want my family and I to make it through this storm okay.  I want my supervisor at the hospital to text me and say, "Don't be crazy-- don't come in tomorrow", but she's not going to.  She said, "If you can make it in, great, but if not, I'll be here, so no worries."  But that's not explicit enough.  She's basically saying, get here, but, if you can't, don't sit at home fretting and worrying and brooding.

Which is, you know, what I do besides eat, digest, breath, and excrete.

On Saturday, we went to Longwood Gardens to celebrate six years of marriage together.  The babies stayed with my father, but we weren't completely untethered-- my wife had to pump in the Longwood parking lot, and then driving home on Route 1, which must have been quite a sight for anyone pulled up in the lane next to us.  Autumn puts on one hell of a show, as does my wife at a red light, and being out in the crisp air surrounded by amber and gold was just right.

Just like our wedding-- just right.

Today, we shut ourselves in with the babies.  During still moments of naps, I watched some old interviews on YouTube, because I'm weird.  I enjoyed William F. Buckley telling Noam Chomsky he was going to "sock you in your goddamned mouth".  I wish he'd done it.  I guess people talk a lot more shit than they actually sling-- especially people in neckties.

I've been looking for jobs, for around half-a-year, and I spent some time doing that last night.  This non-profit and that non-profit.  Time to be a desk-jockey again.  I'm done getting assaulted and slammed up against walls and fighting for my life for no reason, and a pittance of pay.  I wish someone would pay me to write-- I think that's really what it all boils down to, in the end.  Every wish takes a route, however circuitous, back to that.  Back to where I feel most at home.  Behind a monitor, hitting keys, making them dance for me.

Dance, you qwerty motherfuckers.  Dance.

Either it'll happen or it won't, and I expect I'll be alright either way, really.  The winds are kicking up out there and the rain is coming down.  A storm comes and then it goes.  People try to outwit each other on Facebook-- where everyone is Oscar Wilde-- and my trashcans are tucked away inside the garage.  I'm rambling, of course, but you knew that.

Don't mind me.    

Getting On With It

I was talking to my therapist last week about acting, which I sort of do, and he and I were exploring the possibility of it one day (far, far away) becoming more than just an amateur, "sometimes" pursuit, and making it a professional, bread-and-butter pursuit, since it's really the only thing I'm reasonably sure I do well, and it's definitely the only thing for which I'm qualified.

"How do you reconcile, though, what I think is your core belief about acting," he asked me, astutely crossing his legs and cocking his head slightly in the manner of an inquisitive Border Collie, "that it's vainglorious and indulgent?"

"Well," I said, "it is.  But, I suppose, if one is going to make the decision to pursue it professionally, you kind of have to just get over that and get on with it."

I feel that way about writing, too.  It can be purported to be done for the writer's own demon-wrestling purposes, but I think we all know I'm after the comments.

(Gimme.)

While the twins are napping, there are other things I could be doing.  I could be dusting the... thing in the dining room.  I could do dishes, wash bottles, clean the high chair trays, prepare lunch, organize... things.  But here I am, at the computer, writing.  Writing for the first time since we put our sad old dog to sleep.  That pain and that loss has subsided some over the weeks-- has it been months?  I don't even know.  But, after I'd dressed the babies this morning, and we were playing around with toys on the bed, as I was tickling my daughter's foot, I caught myself thinking about Finley.  My wife gets triggered when she sees a dog, who maybe looks like him, or maybe doesn't, around the neighborhood, or when she sees a "Science Diet" commercial on TV.  That stuff doesn't strike me in quite the same way.  Finley comes to me at random, quiet moments, times where his rough panting would have been the background noise, times where I wish that the babies, who are far more interactive, could have spent more time with him.

There's a lot of things I wish for, and most of those things center around time, and wishing I had more of it.  More time to spend with my wife and children.  More time away from work.  More time for writing.  I've been working every other weekend, that's Saturday and Sunday from 7am-3pm, friends, for more than two years now, and I'm so tired of having my weekend family time halved like a grapefruit.  I'm so sick of cramming things into my weekends "off" (you don't really have time "off" anymore when you have children, for those of you who don't and consequently don't know) and I'm fed up with disappointing my wife, who, good fortune be praised, actually likes it when I'm home.

That fact is part of what's stopped me, incidentally, from writing more-- either on this blog or as part of something else.  When I'm home, and the babies have gone to bed at 7:00 and I know we have to be in bed by 10ish or I'll be a drooling idiot at work the next day, and there are lunches and bottles and wash to prepare for the next day, how can I reasonably justify excusing myself from my love's presence while I shutter myself away in the office for an hour clacking away at the keyboard?  To be honest, I know that, if she really believed it was important to me, she wouldn't mind, but I can't justify it to myself.  I guess it's too vainglorious and indulgent after all.  I even feel guilty doing it while the babies are napping and there's no dog to walk anymore.  If I close my eyes for a moment, though, I can visualize all the dishes and bottles in the sink, and they're calling to me.

The babies are probably going to wake up soon.  There's so much in my head that I want to talk about-- no, write about.  I hate talking.  My voice is flat and heady and boring, and my words come out in a jumble of sleep-deprived fits and starts and half-cocked ideas and trailing off sentiments.  I want to write about politics (sort of) and George Takei Facebook bullshit and memories and dreams and my family but I don't really think I know them anymore so what would I say anyway and the mess in the basement and the crawling and the teething and the changing and the graying and the rolling and the tolling of the bells bells bells and I want to connect-- with you, I suppose-- and that's what we all want, isn't it?  Your time, your thoughts, your attention.  If you give me your attention, I will tell you what I am:

I am the very model of a modern major-general.

I am the monarch of the sea.

I have a song to sing, O!

I am a writer, I suppose.  One who writes.  I string words and thoughts and phrases and ideas together and I give you paragraphs and periods and you make of it what you will, and I like that.  I think I do.  I really think I like that.  If you give me two numbers and ask me to put them together, I will give you a fucking mess in return.  But words I can cope with.  I'll take words for eight hundred, Alex.

No, a thousand.

Give me a thousand: I have twins to feed.