Fuller Wiser

Midway through Joss Whedon’s Serenity, Mal and the gang find a dying Shepherd Book amidst the wreckage of his slagged outpost. In his last breath, hands bloodied, he grabs Mal by the lapels and hoarsely whispers, “I don’t care what you believe in, just believe in it…”

At first glance, it’s the sort of thing you find in Unitarian and Humanist circles, the idea that the very act of believing is sacred and important, less important than the specifics of the belief itself. Yet a grade-schooler who thought about it for a minute could knock the premise down. What if you believe that everyone you know should die by your hand? What if your belief entails stamping out other people’s beliefs? What if I believe I don’t have to do homework? Et cetera, et cetera…

But for quite a while now, I have been in a place where if pressed, I couldn’t actually tell you what I believed. And it’s damn near impossible to live that way.

Recently I’ve had some successes that ten years ago would’ve made me jump out of my seat and go have a celebratory dinner with friends and family. Because ten years ago, I believed that it was possible for those sorts of successes to take me somewhere.

As I’ve mentioned eight million times on this blog, the 21st century has worn down my belief in the potential for good things, both in my life and in the wider world. False starts, bungled second acts, dead ends, recurring themes, bad timing, hours upon hours of ignominy and obscurity, these things accumulate. They collect around a life, blocking the view, as the windblown newspapers smother Harry Tuttle in Brazil. And like Tuttle, I’ve had a hard time keeping the accretion of unfortunate events from actually becoming me. In fact, I’ve completely failed to do so.

A consciousness is in part a collection of experiences. We know how and why to laugh and smile because we’ve experienced laughs and smiles. I see that from the change to my little blank slate during the two years since I brought him home from the hospital. Some tendencies and temperaments came with the package, certainly, but experiences either heighten or diminish those predispositions, and add emotional memories of attempts, punishments and rewards that reside in memory long after the event itself passes from conscious memory. This process doesn’t stop in adulthood. Those who haven’t realized their dreams frown as they test hypotheses developed in childhood, editing and rewriting in desperation like Garry Marshall before a shark jump shoot. Those with successes write their pasts into a seamless story arc, committing crimes of omission along the way to further frustrate observers in search of a successful third act.

I visited the forum of a favorite author recently, one Dan Simmons. I’ve enjoyed his work for many years, and he makes himself far more approachable than many authors in his sales bracket, commenting frequently on the forum threads and offering writerly advice.

Bio-combing is something I am guilty of. From a young age, I studied the lives of those I wished to emulate, and have fretted many times when my own course has lacked the crucial milestones that my heroes document. Certainly, all courses vary, but there are, let’s say, Behind The Artist moments that permeate most bios.

Simmons is a bit of a special case, in that he didn’t have anything published until he was 34, the age I am now. I’m already ahead of that. Five years later, Simmons was able to pursue writing full-time. Dare I believe that such a thing is possible for me?

Fear, of course, is the driver here. To have hoped deeply and then failed is a far more raw hurt than to have vaguely aspired and gotten lucky. But as in love, it seems the greatest rewards arise from the highest risk, the exposure of the heart to something that could either bring utmost joy or scorching pain. The effort can save your life or ruin your soul, and no amount of statistical analysis can bring you assurance as to which it will be.

But a life without such risks is no life. Orwell noted that he would rather be in a war zone than dying the slow death that many resign themselves to, devoid of all highs or lows. A Prozac life, even and uneventful. The old curse wishing the recipient to “live in interesting times” carries weight, but its reverse curses equally, if not more.

In Fooled By Randomness, Nassim Nicholas Taleb makes what should be an obvious point, that the quality of lifestyle enjoyed by your neighbors directly affects your satisfaction with your own lifestyle. Someone with a solid 3-bedroom house in a neighborhood with dilapidated 2-bedroom houses feels like they’re doing pretty well. Move that house into the middle of an upscale 4-bedroom-with-a-study neighborhood, and there will be a corresponding drop in the homeowner’s perception of their own lifestyle.

I know this to be true, because it doesn’t just apply to houses. When speaking to people whose paycheck comes directly from their writing, I feel like some slacker dumbass. Whereas if I’m talking to Sue Ellen McDinglewampus about how she just got her 50th rejection letter for her Cat Who Solved The Mystery novel, I feel positively brilliant.

As I’ve written here before, Buddhism covers this, the recognition that pain arises from the chasm between expectation and result. It’s not new information. It’s not hard to understand. But it hides at the periphery of my vision instead of in the crosshairs, unseen until I bother to look for it. It isn’t intuitive, and even if it were, I don’t know how to not want what I want.

At this point, those reading this may throw their hands up in frustration and exclaim, “Well, quit your bitching, get up off your ass and DO something about it!” Well, I would, except walking away from my desk here at the big corporation would result in a pretty quick termination of paychecks, followed shortly thereafter by eviction in the absence of the rent.

I do work on my non-dayjob projects during the business day, but of course it’s necessarily piecemeal in between calls, copies, faxes, and filing. Inspiration and flow can get lost in such stuttering bursts, and thus most of what I feel I can safely finish are things like these blog posts. Which are useful, but ain’t nobody paying for ‘em.

Which brings us back to belief. What has driven me to finish any of the projects that have gotten any success whatsoever has been a belief that once finished, they would bring rewards. It’s a terribly crass, capitalistic viewpoint, but monetary reward is something that does seem to matter to me. Particularly since God and Divine Fate have been tossed into the chipper. Artistic expression is all very fine, but by itself is much like chasing one’s own tail.

So in a world without omniscient design and karmic moral management, what belief can one have that good will come? What I’m beginning to lean towards is the idea that rather than having belief in a positive outcome, I should have a belief that there cannot be an assured negative outcome. My new belief is that I’m not doomed to failure. Why? Because there is no God. If there is no God to assure my success, then neither can there be one to assure my failure.

All options are open, and there is zero evidence to show that the odds will tip either towards me or against me. I simply don’t know, and in the absence of certainty, I can choose belief in the better outcome. If I’m proven wrong, nothing will have changed. I can either be depressed now or wait until later.

Sounds good on paper. Can I believe? Well, I’d better. Without it, I create the certainty of failure. With it, at least there is no certainty. That’s probably the best anyone can ask for.

Every so often I get this urge to wipe the slate, start fresh in some new life, make a clean break with the life I’ve lived thus far. The fantasy usually involves a move away from Texas, either to another U.S. locale or elsewhere in the world. My NYC move was the only instance in which I gave in to the urge, and while that was very good for me, it didn’t provide the sort of fundamental life change I’d hoped for.

In fact, my NYC experience and subsequent return to my home state taught an important lesson: My problems are not necessarily location-based. While changing the scenery can shake up ossified perceptions and catalyze change, the new scenery eventually becomes familiar, and old behaviors return, prompting yet another urge to move and start afresh.

It’s tempting to think of this as the manifestation of my nomadic Native American genes, and not just someone running from his problems. Honestly, I’m not sure which is more disturbing. If indeed I am predisposed to wandering, I have lent myself to life habits and commitments that will keep me rooted and frustrated for the foreseeable future. If I’m feeling the instinct to seek greener pastures because I am unable to effectively face and correct more fundamental psychological barriers to happiness, the outcome is largely the same.

I have this notion that life in the modern United States is a sick thing. There is opportunity, but only for those willing to work within the system, to learn where the ladders are, and climb them to a higher perch, from which the next forward motion can be best plotted. But the journey changes you. Ten years spent inside the system, learning its geography, finding its handholds, it’s impossible not to have absorbed some of its morality, its logic. It’s the sort of thing that turns people like John Kerry from idealistic revolutionary to milquetoast bureaucrat (take issue if you want, but watch his 1971 Senate testimony and tell me the guy wasn’t sincere; compare and contrast to name-your-2004-press-conference).

It would seem the logical thing to do. Work the system, get your winnings, and with that fortification, set out on a path more to your liking. Cold logic upholds it, but passion cannot. To put aside yearnings of the heart for years on end, in hope of a future day when they can be put to use, that requires a constitution I certainly don’t possess.

But this assumes that the U.S. model is the only one available. What opportunities may lie outside this country? True, the options are limited. Third-world oil-holes, Asian globalized manufacturing hubs, Iron Curtain mob-run industrial scrabblers, most nations would hardly be an improvement over Middle America. The EU, of course, offers some of the highest standards of living, but with corresponding levels of taxation and high hurdles for entry. They don’t want disillusioned Yanks moving in any more than Canada does, and what a waste it would be to go to all that trouble and realize that guess what, the problems are still in yer own head, me bucko.

My wife and I have investigated alternate lifestyles such as commune farming, and while they are logical responses to the resource problems this country faces and may be the sort of fresh perspective on life that could help us, I have a nagging sense that we wouldn’t, in the end, be able to cut the cord from our suburban comforts, meager and inconstant as they may be.

Worse, a factor that will complicate our lives until at least 2024 is that both my son’s sets of grandparents live here. Non-family childcare can be an expensive thing, and though they only see him once a month, I’m glad he has some connection to them. Moving out of state, not to mention out of country, would mean he would see them maybe twice a year; not an arrangement conducive to building a real relationship.

But is that more important than his parents keeping themselves from going stir-crazy, from feeling stuck in lives that make them at best indifferent, at worst miserable? And is that state of affairs at all related to location, or something that will persist, with the added problem of separation from extended family?

I have a little dream in my head, of being the steadfast salaryman and artistic hobbyist throughout my son’s childhood, then at age 50, embarking fully upon my life’s work, armed with decades of experience in Real Life. It doesn’t sound altogether bad on paper, but of course it’s a check written on Swiss cheese. Between 2008 and 2024, I could contract a major illness, suffer a stroke, be involved in a life-changing accident, or even die. There are reasons for lofty maxims of the carpe diem variety, and they are very real. To be within sight of the goal and be stricken down, few fates could be crueler. And though I’m not a Person of the Book, the image of Moses standing helplessly outside his promised land contains enough brutal truth to make me grimace in recognition. Even if I believed in heaven, I have to think that the old man was pissed as hell.

The journey is important. It may be more important than the goal, and the goal may change because of the journey. Mine already has, though whether for good or ill is impossible to say at this point. So what happens when the journey is making you crazy? Change the journey, of course. But to what end? Happiness. And what is that? Doing what I love, and having it pay the bills. Odds: Improbable.

I’ve touched on this before, and it’s a problem philosophers have grappled with over far more sleepless nights than I have so far put in. But I’m catching up.

These recurrent problems I’ve mentioned, the ones that come back after the new car smell of fresh scenery fades, are of a circular nature. If they weren’t, they wouldn’t seem so daunting, because one-time problems can be assessed one at a time. But a cycle suggests a nature, and the more my behaviors reveal my nature, the further I recoil from the image, like Dorian Gray before his mottled, scabrous portrait. I begin to think that the molecules and trajectories I inherited from the Big Bang are traveling a path that I cannot change. More and more, I feel like an observer of my own life, a passenger in this body that does as it shall do, my will be damned.

I compensate. And I compensate in the stupidest areas of life. I know, for instance, that by bringing my own lunch, I would have $35 extra dollars per week, $100 extra per month. I know that forsaking my Starbucks would bring me $45 more dollars per week, $180 extra per month. $280 extra dollars per month could be used to reduce debt and advance my non-dayjob career. But day in and out, I am convinced that my crappy life needs compensations for how crappy it is, so I allow myself a few perks. Which turn into a few more perks, which becomes a lifestyle that eats away at the acceptable profit margin until suddenly I’m tied to a certain income to maintain that lifestyle.

Part of that is due to disillusionment and loss of belief in a positive outcome for my non-dayjob efforts. If I create what I create and no one gives a shit, then all time spent ascetically in hopes of reward is fruitless. Might as well have a good time if you’re going to get ignored anyway. Except of course I’m not having a good time. Certain days I am, and certain times within those days, but overall there is a sense of waste, of frustration, of regret.

The last time I seriously challenged myself to remake my life was when I moved to NYC in 2002. At that time, I hadn’t gotten around to ditching the sky fairy, and I was still under the impression that there was a Way which I would find if I simply regimented myself and worked hard. I was on the Atkins diet at this time, and lost 50 pounds, dropping below 200 for the first time since high school. I was a drill sergeant when it came to that diet. No temptation could get past my vigilance, I had come to meet my destiny, with work ethic and iron will in hand.

It took a while and many ego-beatings, but by late 2004 I was done. The world was a much shittier place than I’d ever imagined it to be, and became more shitty the more I saw of it. And this wasn’t a New York thing, this was New York experience piling onto Texas experience, creating such a gigantic pile of shit that its meaning couldn’t be ignored any longer. Upon seeing such a pile, many start looking for the pony, but I was too tired, and anyway it couldn’t have been a very healthy pony even if I found it. Seeking Pegasus and unearthing a diuretic mule is a real letdown.

But none of this gets me any closer to improving my journey. Delusion is helpful in seeking happiness, but I have a hard time believing it’s essential. And I really don’t seek happiness anymore so much as I seek less unhappiness. I seek meaning.

It may be that I really am too self-centered to find my meaning in fatherhood and marriage. I still seek to create vestibules of meaning, works that contain it, leading to a life lived to pursue it. But what if this is it? What if this, what I mean to my wife and son, and to my friends and family, is a greater meaning than anything I could achieve professionally?

The bastard part is that I’ll never know for sure. No one but the deluded ever has ironclad confidence in the quality of their decisions. I may have passed the point of no return before I even knew it was coming. But I have to think that in a world without a Plan, destiny can be put in the hands of the destined. My molecules may groan, but it has to be possible.

What does that mean? Damned if I know.

Relationships are weird. The ones you have, the ones you once had, and the ones you’re not entirely sure you’re having.

Despite my mostly unconventional ways, in some areas of my life I’m a ritualist. One of these rituals is the morning workday routine. Though the food portion of my breakfast can vary, the drink never does. As soon as I’m off the train, I duck into my local Starbucks and get a tall mocha frappucino. Been doing it for months now, and the staff there knows me.

The staff. It’s usually the way I think of the people who take my orders at restaurants. I’m not one of these who strikes up relationships with the staff, because I see my activity in food establishments as very businesslike, something to get done so I can go do something else. It might be the fact that I’ve never worked in food service. I chat far longer with booksellers and grocery store clerks, both of which are members of my former professions. But with food, I’m very much hi, gimme the food, see you later.

Now, this is not to say I don’t think of the staff as people. I believe politeness is a necessary component of human interaction, because really, we’re all just trying to get through our day with a minimum of high blood pressure and resentment, and why the heck would I want more stressed-out people in the world?

And of course, I am a heterosexual male, so some members of the staff may get slightly more attention from me than others. This is the case at my local Starbucks, where I not-infrequently share a shy smile with a girl we’ll call K.

K is my kind of girl. Quiet, cute, got a bit of meat on her, and a little shy. And I have been able to infer, both from her behavior and those of some of her co-workers, that she may be attracted to me.

Flirtations between quiet people can be sweet, but often frustrating, especially if your only interaction is in a work environment, and your relationship is that of customer-employee. Were I a chattier sort, I might make offhand remarks about something my wife and I did over the weekend. That’s worked well in the past, when a spark flew between me and another woman. It’s tactful, difficult for onlookers to decode, and is utterly devoid of rejection. With the right body language, it says, “I like you, too, but I’m already taken.” The recipient of the message then gets a charge from being desired, and a signal not to focus their energies in a direction that will end up being fruitless and disappointing. It’s worked that way on me in the past, anyway.

But since I’m not a talker, saying something like that at the Starbucks counter would call far more attention than would be comfortable to either me or K. And since I lost my wedding ring some years ago and haven’t gotten around to replacing it, there are no obvious signals that I’m married.

Last month, I noticed that she started taking extra care to call me by name, rather than by the drink I ordered, and since I’m far from the only regular there, it seemed significant. A question about how I was spending my holidays was out of character for her, and could have been an opportunity for me to derail the train with a wife comment. Unfortunately, it was a morning in which the kid had woken up periodically all night before, and thus I wasn’t at my mental best. Vague holiday references were all she got in return, and then I was out the door, fishing in my bag for an ibuprofen.

This was apparently a fairly significant event, because after the holidays, her interactions with me were unusually terse and devoid of smiles. I had obviously pissed her off, because other customers were still seeing K’s friendly grin.

In what may either have been a foolish or wise move, I doubled my efforts to be friendly to her the following week, and gradually I saw the smile come back. It’s very awkward, though. Expressing friendliness without stepping over into flirtiness is very difficult, especially when the target considers you to be on the market. But I was glad to have the old K back, even if the riddle of the guy who wouldn’t advance wasn’t solved.

Today, though, was very interesting.

As I’ve hinted at before, I’m not as skinny as I used to be. Not fat, per se, but certainly not trim. I know I could look better without the paunch, and it’s my intention to address it one day. My plate’s just too damn full at the moment to even bother with it. But someone else is noticing, too.

I thought it was odd last week when I gave K my order, and she repeated it, saying “no whip, right?” She makes my mocha frappucino every day, she should know I go whole hog. I corrected her politely, and her eyes fell visibly. At the time, I wondered if this wasn’t a message. I’m under no illusions that the whip is good for me, I just like it. But she sees me drink this stuff every day, and knows where at least part of my gut is coming from. Very thoughtful of her to help, but no thanks.

But this morning, to a smiling K, I gave my tall mocha frappucino order, and heard it immediately called back to the prep area as a “tall light no-whip mocha frappucino.” I thought about contesting it, but K, her shy smile peeking out from shaggy bangs, stopped me in my tracks. This was an intervention. She was trying to help me. For her own reasons, perhaps, but also in my own interest. K had issued her own coded message: “I like you, but you could stand to lose a little weight.” I can hardly deny it. And the light no-whip tasted just fine.

It’s hard to say what’s next for me and K. At some point, I will find the opportunity to reveal my marital status, and some of the tension between us can dissolve. But for now, I can feel a little warm inside that someone I don’t know very well cares enough to help me take care of myself. I’m unsure how to reciprocate, but even in taking the time to think about it, I’m paying more attention to a restaurant staff relationship than I ever have, and it’s making my life better.

There’s probably a lesson here. Lessons can be hard to extract from ongoing situations, but it’s worth doing if you can. Because life is an ongoing situation, and me and K are just trying to figure it out.

Midway through Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, a scene takes place in the fictional London Below, at Night’s Bridge. Richard, the main protagonist, is holding the hand of a little girl he’s just met as they walk across. Crossing the span, both Richard and the girl sink into black shadows, full of dark apparitions and emotions that threaten to pull them under. Upon emerging from the darkness, Richard finds himself on the other side of the bridge. Looking behind him, he sees only the girl’s necklace on the damp stones. She didn’t make it; the darkness took her.

I recall this today because I feel as if my wife and I have been making the journey across Night’s Bridge for quite some time. Two years, really, though we not-infrequently found ourselves bumping around Below in the preceding seven. But our childless years were difficult in a different way, and the struggle of parenthood is so alien to anything we’ve weathered as a couple before that it has threatened to tear us apart on a number of occasions.

And in this darkness, it has been hard to find comfort in the one place it has normally been plentiful: Each other. Our hells have been very personal, very internal, and the knowledge of how bad our partners were hurting has kept us from seeking help from the other. Even when we tried, we were often rebuffed by our respective No Vacancy signs, no room for any more grief here, move along, stranger. And of course this would ignite more pain, throw us deeper into our lonely well of despair, which may well have been the same one, for all that we could see. Like crabs in a bucket, we flailed, scratching for purchase, oblivious to whether that was a branch or a hand we had just stepped on. In our solitude, we were killing each other.

I’m not entirely sure what happened this weekend, but I hope it lasts. For the first time in a good while, I was able to communicate with my wife. I think, like most developments, it had to get worse before better, because last weekend was a carnival of mental breakdown, mostly for my wife, who after a long time of pushing down a certain range of emotions for a variety of reasons, finally let them take her. It was painful to watch, and more painful still not to be able to help, but each day has been progressively better between us. Not back to normal exactly, but at least bearing some resemblance to the open communication we’ve enjoyed for most of our marriage.

When we first moved back to Texas in early 2006, while my wife was still looking for a job, I temped in a very bleak former strip mall for a very shady company, mostly stuffing their unmentionable documents into nondescript boxes. One fellow temp, a woman my mother’s age, found out I was a new parent. She pulled me aside one day before lunch, and said, with immense gravity, “You should know that your marriage will never be the same. My daughter is grown, and my husband and I get along well, but it’ll never be like it was before. Ever.”

At the time, I thought it was a bit extreme, not to mention presumptive. Relationships vary, as do the dynamics that power them. But really, it was a very tactful statement. She obviously knew that she had no idea how my marriage would change, that it would be in different ways than her own. What she understood, as I eventually did, was the sheer mass of the change that parenthood would bring into our lives.

As science tells us, any object with great mass will affect everything in its path, bending space and time around them even as they are pulled by other massive objects at the same time. Two human beings of equal mass can form binary systems, each orbiting the other peacefully, enjoying the pleasant gravitational pull from their partner.

Grim as it may sound, a birth in the family is like a black hole opening between two stars. Energy and mass are pulled towards it, disrupting the original orbit. The new arrival grows, gathering what it needs from its surroundings. There is no malice in this need, it’s simply nature. But it is powerful, and it is destructive, and it can be fatal.

This, of course, is where my astrophysics analogy breaks down, because a black hole would indeed destroy all stars in its path. What actually happens, though, if you’re lucky, is that pressures equalize. Orbits become stable, and soon there are three massive objects, each in the pull of the others.

It can end this way, but it doesn’t always. And I have been very concerned that our little system would not be one of the fortunate ones, that not all of us would make it across Night’s Bridge, if you’ll pardon the mixing of metaphors.

Of course, we haven’t really made it yet. The kid’s only two, and as I recall from my own childhood, some of the worst is yet to come. But I have to think that we can take heart from surviving this period, and use it as a lesson that as tough as things get, we are indeed strong enough to make it through, and make it through together.

I don’t know, and I can’t know. But I have hope, and that’s something I’ve been missing. The hope I have is that hope will be enough.

I read an article in the New York Times this morning about starting a small business. And of course, as I feared, the pangs began.

When my wife got pregnant back in 2005 and we started making plans to move back to Texas from child-unfriendly NYC, a major component was me staying home with the kid during the day and running my own business at night. I knew people who had been successful running the sort of business I wanted to operate, so I figured I could pull it off.

Well, a few things happened to that plan.

First and foremost, the birth was a disaster. The short version (I’ll likely reveal the long one in future) is that a natural birth turned into a botched c-section, which turned into major post-natal complications, which turned to post-partum depression for both of us, which to be quite honest, hasn’t completely gone away. Its effects, such as weight gain, chronic sleep deprivation, and the resulting fatigue, are lingering, and will be a factor in our lives for the foreseeable future.

The second obstacle to our plan was the business model. The friend whose business I used as an archetype of my own had gotten his start in the early 1990s, at a time when the industry in question was rather different than it presently is. The thing he got paid decent money to do then was the sort of thing one can do oneself for very little money now, and I hadn’t realized how prevalent the cheaper option had become in the intervening years, and worse, I actually believed experience added value to my offering. Pfft.

But the third stumbling block was in fact the hardest to take, and that is this: Put in a situation to pursue my own business, at long last, after years of corporate subservience, I discovered that I am a slacker.

Not the egregious kind of smokeout slacker, the couch-surfing sugar-momma bait, or the mom’s basement Hutt. But the sort that, when presented with a few open hours, stands a 50% chance of using that time to do completely unproductive things. Even when he knows that his income is dependent upon him using that time to drum up business. How the hell did I become that guy?

I’ve mentioned this before, but I used to think of myself as someone with a very powerful work ethic. That’s the sort of person I wanted to be, the kind of thing people always said about my heroes in interviews. I believed it about myself, and a good deal of the time, I acted as if it were so. I certainly worked harder than a lot of people I knew, and that work contributed to the body of knowledge and experience I currently have, despite failing to derive any financial success from those efforts.

But in amongst all that hard work were large blocks of what could easily be seen as wasted time. I wasn’t a drinker, nor a smoker, nor a womanizing raconteur, but I did enjoy a good party, as described by me and my dorky friends, anyway. Late nights of pizza and RISK, cash-draining road trips, movie outings, aimless drives out in the country searching for inspiration and solace, these were the stuff of my unmarried twenties.

Marriage brought more opportunities for unproductive time, and this is the first time I’ve ever admitted that in writing. I certainly don’t hold my wife responsible, as I am quite capable of driving my own slacker bus, but having a significant other hanging about the house very naturally expands the possibilities for your free time. Fun possibilities, but not productive in a career sense for most of us.

As my twenties progressed, the system breakdowns lurking in my genetic grab-bag began taking hold: Slower metabolism, intestinal trouble, sinus issues, bum left knee, and so on. Who knows, my aforementioned thyroid deficiency may have gotten its start ten years ago. Whatever the case, I still had the same amount to do, but less energy with which to do it.

Add to that state of affairs the regular ego-beatings attendant to an unsuccessful stab at an artistic career, and the available energy begins to slip down the graph southeasterly, year by year. Which brings us to the present, in which nearly all of the already diminished energy left to me is spent taking care of a toddler.

Well, obviously I’m a fool. Attempting to start a business from scratch while learning the ropes of parenthood and simultaneously battling a downward spiral of emotional state and energy level is about as stupid an enterprise as I can now imagine. I have no idea why it seemed sensible to me at the time, but mind you, “at the time” was before the birth of my son, and in the cocoon of idealistic inertia, before any rubber ever touched road. “We’ll make it work,” I said. It’s the sort of thing people say when they don’t know what the hell they’re doing.

Because of course we didn’t make it work. It didn’t work at all. What we’re doing now is what I hoped we wouldn’t have to do, albeit on better terms than I feared. And I can’t see a way out of it, not really. Idealistically, sure. But the numbers, that’s where I always fall down. Making A plus B equal C. I’m a perfect expression of the old formula:

1. Idea
2. ???
3. Profit!!

I’ll be 34 soon. Given my genes, that’s a little over a third of the way to Beulah Land. Not old enough for midlife crisis, nor for wistful hindsight, but just old enough to start looking silly as a 6-foot-4 man behind a receptionist desk.

I know. I KNOW it’s sexist. I’ll be the first to complain about that, since I know women who have been trapped in assistant positions well into their dotage without meriting a single consideration that maybe they should be promoted. But the fact is, I really don’t know how much longer I can do this. In the rather likely event that I will experience another layoff in my adult working life, would a 40-plus man applying for an assistant job get laughed out of the room? 50? 60? The prospects get worse year by year. Yes, I’m now making more than I ever have, and have more experience than the little sprouts who I generally compete with for this sort of job, but at some point people just get uncomfortable with an old man making their copies for them.

I saw it in action once. I was temping in an NYC finance office, and my agency sent us a new temp to help out during the busy season. The guy was 50 if he was a day, and all of us, including the middle-aged supervisors, felt really weird about giving him the shit jobs he’d been hired for. I mean, the poor bastard. He’d probably been somewhere for a good while, maybe since he was a young man, but just hadn’t felt compelled to climb the ladder. Then wham, they pull the plug on him, like they tried to do to my old man at least three times in 30 years, and he’s up a certain creek without a certain implement. And now he’s doing the best he can, getting work where he can find it, and he gets a damned pity party from the youth brigade.

That experience has stuck with me, obviously. What is the endgame for me, assuming my artistic projects (stuck in the hobby arena for the foreseeable future, as previously reported) never provide me a living?

A couple of years ago, I thought I had a handle on the answer. But then some slacker showed up. A very tired, disillusioned slacker, who might once have been a true believer, who knows. One thing I’m old enough for is forgetting who I once was. I can give you a rough sketch, but how much of it was artifice and how much foundation, I really have no idea now. But I’ll tell you this: I don’t like it, and I don’t know how it’s going to end up. None of us do, of course. There I go, dragged back down to earth with the other mortals. I grieve.