"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." ~Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
First of all, fuck Dickens. Aside from giving us Elizabeth G's† brilliance, sometimes I wonder about his ability to influence civilization. But that's beyond me. I don't give the answers, Mister, I only wonder about the questions.
It's not been the best year for me. I heard bad news, twice. Maybe three times. Worst of all, in ways that made me consider it to be my own fault. I know that some deliverers like to do that because it gives them power over the various agencies that in turn decide their own fates, but hey; it burns into the souls of the recievers that it crushes beneath their mighty wheel. And it continually pushes us towards that unknown future that might come up next. Maybe not, but it might.
I'm feeling sprightly tonight; maybe because I slept for an hour between 3:30 and 5. The place is looking bright as well. I spent a few hours cleaning our front glass panels earlier in November, during one of those mysterious 60-degree days that come too late in season as if it were catching up on missed work in the summer.
It's darker now, colder too. The sun went down some 8 hours ago and won't be coming up for another 5. I'm watching bad 70s cop movies* while I type this. Spent some time blasting the dust out of one of my peripheral boxes with some canned air earlier, which is good: we have enough dust in the systems already, and early spring cleaning is never a bad thing. Now, rather than wheezing through the recycled air, it just gurgles like a hungry fish in a basement aquarium.
I have more than a few prospects, and no lack of people who cheer for me. This is not a bad thing. The bad thing is that things are changing in a way that no one can predict.
Maybe I should've spent more time developing my personal brand. I still feel like I did plenty of that. And really, I don't want to do it anymore. I want to work on the work, not work on who I am. Becoming a celebrity, or even a reasonably well-known individual isn't worth the sweat. I don't want to whinge before the masses when I lose at things: it feels like being the smaller man when I could be the bigger one. I'd rather admit failure and move on, even though that doesn't necessarily make for a superior outcome.
But maybe that's just the problem. Maybe I need to focus on seriously making myself appear like some big, glamorous 11-sided, 9-dimensional despot of attention and love. But is that actually what I am? No more than I'm a massive cockroach scrabbling out of bed while the German landlady shrieks and my illiterate family pelts apples at my carapace. Nope, I'm still Just Jack™, the blue-eyed menace that can't remember so many things he needs to stay alive. And I might always be. Missing the overall point of the football game, the plot of the movie, the point of my life.
What I want to do right now is to continue to develop my technical skill and my capacity to say no to the vices of the world. I want to put in the work, to be disciplined, and to care for those who care and cared for me. I want to bring into this world the next generation of those who are to come, and to lay out a path for them: expectations, desires, and hopes. Things of the future. Not clad in glistening chrome, not lifted into the heavens, not returned to barbarous rocks and thundering lizards: but a future stranger and more than anything we previously acknowledged.
And most of all, I want to continue the work.
What work? The Universe's work. My father's work. The creation of a new generation that will one day ignore and forget me. To be forgotten, ah! That most blissful form of obliteration.
We all have a dozen times a dozen ancestors we should be thanking for our rank and position in life. Unlucky bastards who breathed in smoky, leaden air, who witnessed the dry, hungry summers, and who toiled the hard ground of Alabama or New England or Russia or who-knows-where (had they been so lucky to own or operate farmland!), and we don't know shit about what they did or how their knees ached or how their tears and sweat soaked into the red, black, white soil that birthed their cursed hearts and heirs. But they grew, and they begat, and they were forgotten like the dust that blows. And so it goes. And now they know something resembling peace.
At my father's funeral, I thought about the passing of time, and the passing of life. He was lucky then. His life had become a flattened plane, totally visible, albeit only to himself. For us, the unlucky living, there are so many things that are yet to happen, so many nightmares and dreams that have yet to unfold in their butterfly-like fulmination. Dragonfly-like? Predatory and fast and cruel? Or beautiful, and not long for this world? Who knows. God doesn't make things so that we can enjoy them: he makes them because it pleases Him. And we are a part of that enjoyment.
At the end of the day, the architecture of the universe doesn't bend towards the stuff we want to occur. It just occurs; birthed in darkness and destined to return to it. We don't know the conspiratorial, secretive things that hide behind the occult hand that secrets the magic tricks of space and time, although we try and convince ourselves that we do. In our heart of hearts, our most-sacred-space, we have to. The mind will not permit the soul to disobey.
† I refer to Elizabeth Glaskell, author of North and South. Dickens 'discovered' her as older talents often do for younger ones.
*Bullitt, which is actually an excellent cop flick.