The Rebound

What a strange few weeks it's been. Since I last posted I've been given another three years until my next biopsy, which was good, and which I interpreted as a clear sign that I should take a certain job which had been offered to me and which was set to pay me ungodly sums of money.

To this kid from Flint it was an obscene amount of cash. After I verbally accepted the offer I walked around repeating the figure in my mind. It seemed like the kind of number that only one of life's real Winners would ever bring home. Yes I was one of life's real Winners.

I went to Houston on business, for my "old" company. I was just waiting for the final letter from the new job, the letter which wrapped up all the details, the letter which would serve as my conveyance to the new land of riches and professional conquest. All week I felt sorry for the people at my "old' job. They seemed slothful and ashen; they went around making mistakes. The coffee cups drooped in their hands. They had pimples and bags under their eyes and after lunch their cheeks filled, like tiny sails, with oniony belches that they stifled behind clenched fists.

Thursday came. The recruiters from the new job assured me that it was only a matter of getting the paper into an email and that the arrival of my final offer was imminent. I congratulated myself for my talent, my brilliant negotiations, my all-around pluck. I went into my boss's office at the old job and, as gently and carefully as I could, trying to spare her feelings, I let her know that I would most likely be moving along to greener pastures.

As I drove along Horatio Alger expressway to the airport, my cell phone rang. It was a strange lady from the "new" job. She wanted to know the terms of the deal I'd struck. I told her. She replied that such a job was impossible, that it didn't exist, that the deal, in a word, was off. And just like that, my new job was gone, the bright chiming fields of rotating Mario Bros. coins in which I jumped with maniac glee, evaporated. My sense of invulnerability, my understanding of the rightness of the world, gone.

Suddenly my old job became rather charming, quaint, and comfortable. I asked myself if the faults which has seemed to obvious before weren't instead shortcomings on my part. This was the first step in my long preparation to re-claim my old job before it was too late.

From one crisis to another: that's how I roll.

Birthday

It was my birthday yesterday. I turned 36. I felt 49. My birthday fell in the trough between an endoscopy and the biopsy results. So naturally I was in a reflective mood.

What did I do for my birthday? Sat in five hours of meetings. Went for a walk in the evening. Played with my son, put him in the tub and then yanked him out. Felt old and frail. Thought about the pictures of my esophagus, a pink cone whose tapering interior was etched with livid red stripes. In my mind it was something tender and beautiful, this esophagus, this place where despite my best efforts the fear and rage had manifested as fiery tendrils. It seemed like poetic justice to me that my lifelong (and mostly successful) effort to be tough had been undermined by this soft little tube inside me.

As I pushed the stroller in the blustery evening vague thoughts of transformation flitted through my mind. Now and then my reverie was interrupted by my son's emphatic nomenclature: "bird", "flag," doggie."

I fell asleep reading an essay by Pushkin about a Cossack rebel. Pushkin's prose is pretty awful but it was the only Pushkin the library had. The library also has no Grass, one Hesse, and two Nabokovs. Presumably they have an entire shelf of Steven King. So ended the 36th.

Docent

I have literally one person who on occasion reads this lousy blog and he chimed in with the correct word. It was "docent" yes, that is correct sir.

I'd been fasting today in hopes of obtaining a spiritual revelation. The jury is still out on that, but the low blood sugar sure did mangle my synapses.

So thank you, lone occasional reader!

Synonym for Guide

This is killing me. I know there's a term to describe a guide in an art museum or perhaps a neighborhood, and I know it sounds like "bosun" or "dosun" but I can't for the life of me remember what it is, and the the tenuous relationship of the word to its literal definition makes it impossible for me to look it up. Damn, this is driving me nuts. I have a story where this word would fit perfectly and I simply cannot go on until I find that word.

In related news, I'm in the library and I just annoyed a homeless guy with the sound of my fingers on the keyboard. He glared at me, snapped his paper shut, and left. Interesting on several levels. For one, I'd imagine that, if you're homeless, there are all sorts of annoyances and indignities with which you must learn to live. Rain, for instance. Or snow. Or poverty. Perhaps the unfettered freedom of the homeless life makes up for these sufferings in some way. Perhaps my companion in the library had achieved a perfect but tenuous balance between suffering and freedom, and perhaps my fingers on the keys put him over the edge?

Or it could be simpler than that. Maybe he's learned to just walk away from anything that annoys him. Maybe that very ethic, the refusal to remain in a situation that is in any way uncomfortable or negative, is in some way responsible for his current homeless state. Or maybe I'm just an idiot who is looking to reduce a complex issue to a single cause that just happens to justify my underlying prejudice against the homeless. Guilty! But it's not prejudice! It's jealousy!

I might enjoy that freedom. It might be fun out there on the streets. God knows how many times I've wondered if there's really a payoff for all my hard work, the constant egress of monies to various creditors, the stress, the sleepless nights. I might find the homeless life congenial. I might enjoy indolent days swaddled in my own funk, defecation behind trees, grass-rolling drunkenness, the furtive hammering of some leathery harridan in a creaking shelter cot.

Aagh! I still can't think of that word!

To the New Father

So the baby is born! As George Bush once said, "Mission Accomplished!" That was really the most difficult part. As I recall it's was pretty much a walk in the park from here. Baby comes home, you giggle, cuddle, and nap together. Once in a while they cry. True. Usually when they're not asleep, which is about 12 hours a day. But it's a soothing cry. They're not really upset at all. They just kind of coo at you in this outraged glass-breaking voice while waves of panicked heat radiate up your spine and into your brain.

So, you run around in a frenzy, going through the mental checklist: What Could Be Wrong With Baby?
Diaper
Bottle
Burp
Rock them
Walk them

Something else? In your exhaustion you often forget an item on the checklist and wind up making things worse. When the situation is finally resolved you look at your spouse and the two of you break into gales of laughter and it's like the end of a sitcom episode (credits, applause, fade out) except the next episode has already begun.

So, you find coping mechanisms, which is fun, too. For instance, I got a calendar and started marking off each of the 6,570 days that would elapse before Jonathan turned 18. That got depressing after awhile, so I turned to sullen disenchantment. This felt better for me, although my wife didn't enjoy it. We had an argument at about six weeks that went something like this.

Wife: "You're not a good father."
Me (wiping face): "Yes? Why not? I change diapers, I bottle feed, I stroll the baby, I clean up the vomit."
Wife (thinking): "Yes, but you're not enjoying it!

But...but...something happens. That baby becomes the most fascinating, the cutest thing in the whole world and pretty soon, almost before you know it (almost but not quite) you're actually rather proud of the vomit stains on your shirt, you're actually okay with leaving the house having forgotten to shower, and you can't wait to get home and see them again, you can't wait to start the madness. Rock stars might have exciting lives but it's nothing compared to parenthood.