thirty-something

The dog naps loudly
twitching, grumbling, active
radiating heat

like a boiled hot dog
in a big pot of water
salty, weird, and gross

This last month of school is looming like an ice-crag over which I must haul a 500 pound whaleboat. I have never longed for a vacation so urgently in all my days; I wonder what internal shift is occurring or whether I am simply getting older and more easily exhausted. In preparation I purchased a pair of 80s “splatter paint” short-shorts, immediately after which it began to pour down freezing rain across all the land. It’s okay though because I have stuff I need to do.

When you write a paper and it just keeps being bad every time you revise it you start feeling terrible about yourself. My deal is: I am a good teacher and a good after-dinner speaker, and that’s it, that’s the entirety of my skill-set. These things are valued roughly equally by my cultural moment, with the after-dinner speaking perhaps edging out the teaching under certain circumstances. As a recovering egomaniac, I always thought I’d be good at the things that everybody agreed were good to be good at; this is proving not to be the case, as it turns out. Making peace with that fact shall comprise part of my life’s work.

Another part of my life’s work will involve coming to terms with solitude and death, which await us all, but some more than others (crazy homeless people; the childless). The other day my mother cried on the phone with me about how she didn’t want to go change her mother’s diapers in the nursing home in Texas. I kept thinking, soon it will be my turn to change your diapers, but who will I cry on the phone to? Perhaps a social worker. Still, it’s better to break the cycle, and to give my children the gift of never having to cry on the phone about changing my diapers.

I also suddenly realized this is why parents get so obsessed with grandchildren–because as they become ever-more surrounded by death and decrepitude, they like to see a baby’s smooth face and the promise of life everlasting it seems to bestow. I will not be giving my mother this gift, probably because she did a bad job raising me or something, which I’m sure is what she secretly thinks, even though it’s obviously not true, because she was a great mother and I am a pretty much even-keeled and happy person and isn’t that the point?

I think the whole vague notion that if you have children it’s like a kind of immortality, because your “line” continues after your death, and that’s supposed to be nice or important, is bullshit. You’re just you, which is basically nobody and everybody. We’re all made up of the same molecules. Aryan nation babies have the same atoms in them or whatever as African tribal peoples; I am a triceratops and an eagle and a pile of dogshit. I’m pretty sure that’s scientific fact. If you say “science” that means “better than” and it’s worthy of government funding. Who cares about Virginia Woolf or the history of boobs in art or why everybody thought Beethoven was so great. You can’t make money off Beethoven, unless you’re his descendant, which he didn’t have any because lets face it he was kind of an emo loser, so there you go, what’s the point of being interested in something that doesn’t make you any money? An honest question, posed at many trans-cultural gatherings I have been subjected to in my brief time on this land. This question is why we are all going to die horribly by our own collective hand, mark my words. The decline of the West indeed; our greatest strength also our deadliest achilles heel. Muscling those whaleboats across the ice no matter how many corpses you have to step over, just so that one day somebody can invent global warming.

I made an ass of myself at a faculty meeting because I was so fried from having 20 back-to-back 15-minute meetings with students about their final papers. They’re young and scared, and it’s important, I believe, to do these meetings, where they come in scared and you basically write an outline for them and they leave happy and excited. But by the end of writing 20 paper outlines from 9 until 3:30 without eating or going to the bathroom you feel like the act of constructing a meaningful sentence on any topic is somewhat spectacularly out of the realm of your capabilities, and you can think only of getting home and lying down with some sort of mustard poultice on your face, but instead you have to go to a faculty meeting and you realize suddenly that for the whole first half of the meeting you’ve been staring off into space and it’s starting to look weird so then you panic and start a rambling monologue about Pythagoras (this is a true story) that doesn’t have a point and when you realize you’ve been talking for a long time you literally say “I’m sorry, I don’t have a point,” and everyone politely moves on.

I started my summer reading list and I am very excited. I am going to read some books about science. My new goal. Put my knowledge-base money where my ideological mouth is; the disciplines are too far apart and it’s making us all worse people and worse as a culture. I am going to read more Plato. I am going to read some of the theory I have missed out on. Marx and Adorno and those guys. Gross! But fun, especially because I have my own personal theory-head who lives in my house with meI am going to read novels and I am going to finish my apocalypse novel and start a new apocalypse novel that’s going to be about MOOCs and Monsanto. I am going to wear my 80’s splatter-paint short shorts and slouch around in flip flops and eat popsicles. I am going to write an article and submit a book proposal. And that will be a great summer for me.

Hey, doesn’t anybody need some ADVICE? I am in the mood to ponder someone else’s problem(s) for a change. That link shall show you where to send an email to Yours Truly.

I go to the gym and I stare out the window at the cherry blossoms and I listen to Comedy Bang Bang and anyway everything is pretty much great. Onward to pizza.