ehhh it probly woulda sucked anyhow
Interruptions compounded! Defeat ensued! Same as it ever was.
I wanted to read something in an E.B White collection. In looking for it I discovered instead cat puke (I spare you, reader, the comparison I wrote between this feline effluent and a certain foodstuff; here as so often I know you will be ungrateful and yet I still serve your best interests, unthanked and unadorned). I cleaned that up then discovered that I have completely misplaced the White.
Ah well, I know some of his work is online, I think as I open the laptop, but no the battery is too low! The plug is in the case which is… where did I leave it? It’s not under the kitchen table where the speakers are plugged in, I often leave it there. It’s not in my backpack by the front door, I often leave it there. It’s not on the dining room table, I often leave it there. I hope it’s not at work, I often leave it there.
Grumbling the whole time, after a few minutes I manage to ferret out the missing case, moved - no doubt by one of the many detractors and conspirators working to sabotage my best efforts, which are frankly half-hearted, to use my limited time well on occasion - to a bit of floor next to the broken decoupage chest, the one full of hard objects I sometimes lay upon to force the tightly wound yet weak muscles of my legs and back into uncomplaining submission (there is a metaphor or several for my life in this, I think to myself, living a narcissism layered like an onion, self-absorption upon egotism upon self-centeredness all the way down to my hollow core), near the patio door.
I pick up the black case ready to finally read that bit of White only to find, beneath the case a small team of ants heaped up like they’ve just tackled a quarterback. Presumably there is food beneath the mound of their spindly bodies. Sighing I check there are no ants on the laptop case and finding none I set it on the dining room table. In that instant the thought crosses my mind to stomp on them, but I am barefooted and the thought is just too gross; the disgust pauses the impulse long enough for my conscience to declare that I would of course never do such a thing, and in the moment it almost feels convincing.
I walk to the kitchen for the broom, thinking of how the difference between a social worker and a prison guard is largely one of context hence my smugness is unearned (in my heart, and I truly mean this, I don’t really believe in earning, at least not most of the time; there is mostly only chance and failure and unequal distributions of both), then return to sweep up the ants. I dump the dustpan of insects into the toilet and flush, then see two left floating at the top. My bladder, apparently growing in sadism as it shrinks in capacity, awakens. I piss on the surviving ants, flush again, check that no witnesses have been left alive, put the broom and dustpan away, retrieve the laptop case, return to the kitchen and plug in the laptop. (For some reason I am typing on the kitchen counter, squatting low an exercise ball. This is, I think, as with so much else in my life, inertia. I often hold the baby here, wearing her asleep in a baby carrier, bouncing gently to keep her asleep while I read and make jokes on social media while my wife gets our middle child to sleep, the middle child to whom I am unacceptable for bedtime since the baby was born. So the kitchen counter has become a laptop place in my mind. We are all deranged by circumstances eventually.)
And now, to read White’s essay! I had in mind that I might, with a bit of luck and effort, find in the essay a model for talking about my outing today with my oldest child. We ran together for a short while by the river, a second for both of us, my second in this latest return to running (I am hoping this will mean I die a bit later), and her second distance run ever. On our run we saw a turtle and a kind of milkweed with lovely bright flowers and another with pale pink flowers and red-winged blackbirds. On our first run two days prior we saw a bullfrog, multiple families of Canada geese totaling nine goslings, two turtles, and a great blue Heron. On today’s run she told me that she has figured out that with hard work she can run as slow as me, and that the way she knows she is going slow enough is that she can make herself take slow deep breaths. She told me about her hopes and plans for our backyard obstacle course and what she feels is the fairest way to allocate use of our computer given that there is a new season of American Ninja Warrior starting soon, and how she planned to write down all of our wildlife sightings in her nature journal. The milkweed will appear, at most, she said, as ‘some flowers.’ (Later this evening she will have seen a raccoon scaling a neighbor’s tree - she burst in the front door declaring this followed by ‘Where is my nature journal?!’ - and then just before - and frankly, causing a substantial delay to - bedtime stories she along with her sisters and me will have stood out on the sidewalk in front of our house for about twenty minutes watching bats swoop and chase each other. My middle child called out ‘hi!’ to all of them, calling them by names she made up on the spot, mostly names for brown foodstuffs - Cappucino, Brownie, Chocolate, etc. The bats too will be recorded in the nature journal.)
I struggled to hear most of what she told me on our run, as starting I think late on Friday my ears have gone whatever the audio equivalent is for dim. I suspect it is partly joint disfunction in my jaw causing pressure on my inner ear plus some, well, compacted ear wax, a term that tests even my tastes for recreational self-deprecation. I hope it is so because I hope it is nothing more serious. I couldn’t get to urgent care today because it is Memorial Day. Perhaps nothing better commemorates the world’s ocean of war dead than healthcare inaccessibility. I worry I am in fact going deaf. It’s an upsetting worry; I have managed to regrow for myself something of a musical life again, of fucking course my ears would give out now, isn’t that just how it would go, I tell myself in delicious self-pity.
I had imagined I might, taking, as I said, a work of White’s as model, contrast my child’s vibrance and energy with my own decline and decay - maybe through jump cuts: the wonder in her voice at seeing the turtles, the flatness of my internal monologue at facing another work day, the energy in her tone and the smile on her face as she tells me about the new ways she has found to climb the boulder at the park, the exhaustion I feel as I count the repairs our house needs and guesstimate their costs against the paycheck or two we have in the bank then remember again that I need to renew my student loan repayment plan.
But instead of finding and reading White’s essay and perhaps making a bit of an effort, I get on social media, say nothing of consequence, repeatedly, then remember there was something I got on here to do… I wanted to look up that new Dan Vapid record, was that - no, wait, it was - oh yes, White’s essay… the name of which I have now forgotten… and I have forgotten as well whether I ever in fact knew its name back when I first began tonight’s mental three hour tour.
A google search for ‘E.B. White essays’ turns up far too much but also not enough: I can’t recall the name of the collection I had in mind but I can see it somewhat in my mind’s eye. If I had it in hand I’d read the table of contents and leaf around, and maybe that way remember the piece. I could try doing similarly in an online copy, but “it’s a slim paperback, with, I think, a mostly white cover with a bit of blue, very shiny glossy cover” are not google-able terms. (I now live a life where I look for books in ways detached from how I live them - their physical size, shape, and color have always been front and center in the attempt locate books I habitually misplace, a habit that led when I was a kid to chain reading five or so books at a time, one for each room of my childhood home, each room having a book I accidentally left there when I got up to do something in another room - and that detachment feels like being subjected to a world organized by the wrong sort of nerd, not the nerds of the book store and record store and library but crueler, shallower, better paid nerds. Perhaps it is that subjection that makes me now feel tired at the thought of reading five books at the same time.)
It’s getting late and I begin thinking of how the children wake up so, so early. I realize that I am no longer entirely sure that there is in fact any such essay of White’s like the one I set out to find. The line begins to blur in my mind between situationally produced interruptions and character flaws as, once again, as usual, I give up.