WEEKLY WTF
06-10-24 Edition
Shine Motherfuckers!
Don’t hide your light Mofo’s!
It’s Ok to Not Be Ok
The way out, is through
Latin Lovers
Well, I’ve taken a few Latin lovers down here in Peru… not like that, don’t be fucking gross. I really do love these Abuelitas though. No one grows very tall at 11,000 feet apparently, I suspect it’s the lack of oxygen. These tiny Mami’s shuffle about under uncountable layers of stitched cloth and upon hardened but tiny feet across Incan roads like mythical creatures carrying strange shifting bundles on their bent backs. Occasionally a hoofed leg will emerge or a bleat can be heard from within their colorful misshapen burdens. They seem as old as the Andes mountains themselves. Cracked stone animated and made into wrinkled flesh. Able to toil and endure unknown hardships yet always offering a tired but enduring smile. Ancient eyes that when you are swept by them all your petty modern problems turn into so much dust. I’ll miss them. I like to think that at night they gather and raise their heads to moan towards the Southern Cross, harmonizing with the night like the Skeksis on that old movie “The Dark Crystal” Humming to their ancestors like the last sentinels of a proud and powerful people, perhaps fortifying themselves to wake again with the sunrise to resume their mysterious shuffling missions or to sell their woven goods to tourists. They can be extremely fucking persistent by the way, mumbling soft, sweet but incoherent incantations whilst placing tiny Llama keychains in your hand or wrapping about wrists and necks and heads all manner of bracelets and headbands and whatever vibrant bits or bobs they intuit you might be inclined towards. If you look into their eyes you’re fucked and you’d better have a few Soles handy for their ancient magic drains you of resolve and you find yourself unable to resist their strange and frighteningly persistent charms. Like gentle human gargoyles in fanciful Abraham Lincoln hats haunting impossibly narrow alleyways and guarding old weathered doorways set deep into Incan walls. I’ll miss having a strange and intimidating Grandmother at hand around every high stone walled corner to look into my soul and make me feel 5 years old again. Such strange magic is made manifest here in the high Andes.
Culminations & Graduations
I try to expand the small. I tend to elucidate the obscured, expound the unseen and amplify the subtle. I’m really not sure how the fuck to unpack the last 18 compacted days. 15 richly condensed days in Peru that, due to the runway lights going out it in Lima, turned into 17 days culminating into a mad dash of dragging our wheeled boxes into cabs and through airports and customs lines then 12hrs total hurdling through the earth’s upper atmosphere and finally a barely remembered ride from SFO to Guerneville to arrive home head on pillow around 2am yesterday to sleep 4hrs so that we could get to what really matters, so that I could take this rare selfie with my Daughter at her high school graduation.
I have a tendency to bury myself so deeply into my own examination of existence that outer reality feels very far away and as a result I probably present as being stoic or distant myself. Being in Peru pulled me closer to the surface of experience but sitting through my daughters graduation, ass numb on the cold aluminum bleachers and the discordant sounds of the high school band tickling my mixed memories, I found myself surfacing further and suddenly confronted with the enormity of it all. I don’t mean the vastness of space or anything existential. Nor the strange long days and short years of the temporal parenting paradox. I mean the enormity of a single life closely related to, but not my own. I realized that my own Daughter is also the center of her own universe and that she dances through a rich tapestry of experience of which I am utterly ignorant and are but a flapping peripheral strand myself. The hidden truth in my middle is that she and my Son are a more central thread to me than anything else could be in this vast array of experience called life. Perhaps it’s the gravity of such a dense love vs memories of: “woulda- shoulda- coulda”, but my wife and I often think we could have done much better. Sometimes we think we downright sucked as parents but I have to remind myself, as I remind her, that actual shitty parents don’t think they’re shitty and people who want absolutely everything for their kids always perceive a lack of what was given.
You don’t often see my kids on social media because, in part, I don’t want thousands of fucking eyes on them but mostly it’s because they refuse to be- they are clearly way smarter than I am But My Daughter gave me permission to post this one and I decided to do it because it seems incongruous to never talk about what they mean to me here. To constantly tip toe around my own heart.
It’s such an odd experience to watch your own DNA unfold outside of yourself. The proud and giddy delights when observing one of your more positive attributes manifesting in your kids and also the worried foreboding when the more challenging of your aspects percolates to their surface and pops.
I am both elated and melancholy. Yesterday was a day of culminations. One of the more impactful trips of my life ended, but the very most important trip, that of miraculously helping to create a chubby little meat potato and ushering them through the strange vacillations of experience, occurred. Hand in hand you climb the parental trail up their mountain of adolescence, often stumbling, then at the peak, with reluctance, you let go of their hand so that they can then pick a slope to slide away from you to begin their independent lives then choose their own mountain to climb, leaving you alone and windswept with a hand already growing noticeably cold. A hole appears in your heart which is instantly flooded with well wishes for the tiny human who grew and became your own massive mountain, a mountain of pain and joy, love and despair, effort and self examination, hope and worry, whose peak you shall plant your flag into and selflessly forever guard so that your kid always knows where to find you should they need you to point a finger thisaway or that.
I love my kids more than I love anything else in this world. In fact, without them, I would never have known the depths that love could be. Like a molten emotion that erupts and fills you beyond the border of your own skin. Something that both burns and delights then cools and hardens and becomes a part of who you are, the pumice stone of the immutable past. Thank you Maisie MoonBird, you make my old eyeballs sweaty just writing this. Thank you for letting me love and thank you for being you, just the way you are, “love” and “proud” are not big enough words for what I feel. If you read this, I hope you know that as spacey and distant as I may sometimes seem and as often as I am away working you are always in my middle, my heart is yours.
I could expound upon both of my kids forever but they would likely consider it the ultimate “cringe” and get pissed so instead, to my fellow parents who have or have had or will have a kid graduating congrats for keeping your meat potatoes alive long enough for them to grow through the terrible 2’s and into the inherently rebellious teens and into who they are now. Hopefully all of our successes and failures will help to build their emotional bones to go forth and learn, even better than we, how to live a full life and come to know love themselves and in their own unique ways. A spawning of another experiential center of an entire unique universe only truly known to them. A spiral that stretches and unfolds into another spiral, then another, then another. Congrats one and all.
