43. SUDDENLY SO MANY QUESTIONS

Busier than a beaver. That's what Dad’s been for most of the evening. Now the living room’s unrecognisable with moved about pieces of furniture, ornaments and knick-knacks everywhere but where they should be, the floor awash with brown cardboard packing boxes and big rolls of plastic bubblewrap in a variety of sizes popping now and again under misplaced feet.
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I note: It's a satisfying sound... like snapping the rubber-band.
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If I’m still up when he comes home I’m going to put these questions to him. Straight and blunt. What in God’s name is going on? And: What’s with all this sudden change? And: Why the big hurry? Can’t we just slow down here, take stock, discuss things… Jesus, Dad - why can’t you just talk to me?
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If Life’s a dolphin, as UB likes to say, what’s the porpoise? Good question. From time to time, like all the other poor slobs stuck to this life by the soles of my feet, I find myself returning to this dastardly question. Pondering the fundamentals, I probe into this ball of wool with curious fingers, trying to untangle the malleable threads that make up my own personal fabric of reality. Wanting to know. Just the basics would do, the fundamentals.
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Fun mental ads. Fun sad lament. Flame nut sand. Fun Da? Mental!
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Who am I? Where am I? Why am I here?
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Where is here? If there’s a here, then there must be a there, so where is it?
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Why do I feel like a stainless-steel orb shooting around the shiny surface of a pinball machine?

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Why is here filled with so much random chaos? Is the grass always greener on the other side? Will there (if I ever get there) be just as chaotic?

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If I’m the pinball, who’s operating the flippers?
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Contrived guesses are the best I can hazard. Faith says: God.
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Faith says: He knows what He’s doing.
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Zappa says: He made us in His image, so if we’re dumb, then God is dumb… and maybe even a little ugly on the side.
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And if that’s true, you’re a lot like God: dumb all over - a little ugly on the side.
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Thanks. What comes around like the chicken goes around like the egg.
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At times, right now for instance, I wish I could be out of that loop. What I mean is, I guess, deep down beneath all the stuff I’ve swallowed and continue to hold down... if... I could get out of the loop if I could harness better my ability to make-believe a place where things like that don’t exist, and, of course, my uncanny skill of being able to stop thinking all together Now! when
ever the impulse moves me. Sometimes I feel nothing at all. Funny thing is, though – the irony, I guess – is that at times when I feel like that, when I feel nothing at all, I do feel something, one thing, underneath all the numb nothing. I feel like dying. Or maybe I feel like I'm dying. I can't say which. Could be both. But not in a sad or tragic way or anything like that. Just peaceful and dignified and an enigmatic smile on my face. Dead to this World. The Sandman visits and I am sent forever on vacation.
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So what is it that keeps me here, tangled up with flesh and bone, unwittingly subject to piddly little theories about Space and Time and the sequences we find ourselves trapped in, the unrelenting chronology of the weekdays, the months, years, decades that roll out and roll on in a spinning circle of Christmases, a scheme within a scheme, a wheel within a wheel, in the windmills of my mind? It looks 3-D sure... but if feels 2-D to me, more and more as the numbness ebbs its way back in on the rolling tide.
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What is it that keeps me going – keeps me getting up every day, even if most of the time I’m an Auto-Pilot just going through the motions?
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Think! Come on, think, damn you.

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I’m still a tad rusty for that right now. Like, so far. Here at this jucture. On this page. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it. (Or is it ‘with’ it?)
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Must be Faith. Blind Faith, ‘cause I can’t see where I’m headed.

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I can’t’ see clearly now.

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The rain hasn’t gone.

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I can’t see all the obstacles in my way.

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Perversion

Aversion

Inversion

New version

42. DISCUSSING WRITING WITH DAD

Dad’s back on his writing-trip harangue, a needle stuck in a scratch skip-skipping. Guess he’s never really been off it. The more I listen to him, the more I fear for his slip-slipping grasp on reality. Save for writing, the only other thing he talks about with any passion is that new country they’re starting up called The Principality of New Utopia. Don't ask me who they are. It’s supposedly going to out-Cayman the Cayman Islands. And for some reason this excites him. Something he found on one of his jaunts into the World Wide Web. Talks about the ‘Y2K’ bug a lot, too. I’m aware of the bug and the possible effects it could wreak (like, who isn’t?) but Dad seems to think it’s the end of the world as we know it. It’s already the end of the world as we know it, I think, but say nothing.
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Just tonight, as we watched Wheel of Fortune over dinners balanced precariously on laps, Dad grabbed the remote without warning, shut the set off and started in, sporting that obnoxious brogue of his.
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‘Sure, you could be the next Wilde, or Joyce!’
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‘Dad,’ I said slow and clear like, ‘I am not going to be a writer. And even if I was, I wouldn’t want to be another Wilde, or Joyce, or anybody for that matter. I’d want to be me.’ (I suppose, if I really had to be like someone else, like if a gun was held to my head or something, I wouldn’t mind if it was Salinger, or maybe even Vonnegut. Irving wouldn’t be too bad.) ‘But as I’m not going to be a writer anyway, it doesn’t matter.’ My voice was measured, sincere. He smiled and tried to fake me out with a you’ll-see-I’m-right-one-day expression. The very same expression that so often betrays a bad poker hand when he’s bluffing big time.
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‘You can’t say what you’re not going to be when you don’t even know what you are going to be.’ A belch escaped him, immediately followed by an ‘excuse me’. I laughed: he paid no attention, changed direction and asked about the journal. Wanted to know if I’d started writing in it yet. I nodded. He seemed pleased.
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‘How many pages?’
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‘I didn’t count them for shit-sake! Maybe 40 or 50. I don’t know.’
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‘Mmmm-hmm,’ he sighed, like a doctor all over you with a cold stethoscope.
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‘So, what are you writing – an essay? A short story maybe? A novel?’

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‘None of your business, actually. What a person writes in their journal is their own private business.’ My wink was intended to let him know that if he was trying to wind me up it wasn’t going to work.

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‘Mmmm,’ he hummed again thoughtfully. A hundred pages you say? Well, that’s a lot of pages, son. They say a writer writes, and that’s a lot of writing.’

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Amazing. His teasing would be infuriating if it weren’t so funny.

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‘No it isn’t,’ I protested. ‘And anyway, I said, like a 6-year old, ‘I have big writing,’ I lied. He had me feeling like a kid again.

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‘Still…’ he sighed patiently, as if big writing made no difference.

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‘Plus,’ I added, ‘I leave big gaps, too.’ Of course, that was also a lie. I hate wasting paper.

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‘Don’t say plus, it’s bad grammar. Now shut up and eat your dinner before it gets cold.’ He was obviously trying to be a wise-guy because we were eating salad drowned in Paul Newman’s dressing and gazpacho soup piled high with freshly grated parmesan. He’s changed a lot since The New Year. Not big changes or anything remarkable, but a whole bunch of small ones. Odd ones. One thing that hasn’t changed, though: he still has to get the last word in. The ‘don’t say plus, it’s bad grammar’ remark was his last word on the subject of writing for the night. And that would have been that, but, seeing a chance to steal it from him, to slip in a last word of my own, and feeling a tad adventurous, I went for it.

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‘See,’ I said, as if it were a foregone conclusion, ‘I can’t be a writer, Dad, my grammar sucks.’ Gotcha! I thought, pleased with myself. For once I'd gotten in the last word with the old man and it felt pretty good. He swigged from his beer bottle and shovelled a forkful of lettuce into his mouth.

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Could this be a new trend? It isn’t often I beat him at anything. Even poker. I’m thrilled with myself. For about a nano-second. Should have known better: Dad’s highly competitive.

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‘Well, now that I think about it, having good grammar isn’t necessarily what good writing is all about. Look at Brendan Behan, for instance…’

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‘Okay, you win, Dad. You win. Jeez Louise.’

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We finished dinner in silence.

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And all the things that we aren’t saying hang in the air like floating shadows and bad ideas.