Laid-Off Dad

Rage against the dying of the light

The onslaught of middle age can make you downright distraught. In the eighties, you rough-housed like a mighty middleweight prizefighter, but now, as you approach twilight, you're overweight and overwrought, thighs weak as spaghetti, eyesight decaying. And all the youthful, Foghorn Leghorn-like pontification seems like self-righteous, haughty pigheadedness.

It's a frighteningly ghoulish pain in the bunghole.

All right, that's enough.

Yesterday was my birthday, and I had this idea that I could write a post with a lot of "gh" words in it, because "gh" upside-down looks a lot like "46." Which is how old I am. But in the end, it was taking too much time, and there has to be more to life than wondering how to fit "gingham" and "boardinghouse" into an autobiographical narrative, right?

It's an odd thing to celebrate a birthday in a town where you don't know anyone yet. The kids were there to tackle me with their affections and help me make the cake, but apart from that, all the wellwishing was from afar. And it was fine, because that's exactly what I expected. I got about a dozen phone calls (starting with my mom, who always calls at 9:10am), and a bunch of social-media shout-outs from friends all over the country. And that was pretty cool. It's all part of how all this relentless connectedness, for all its drawbacks, is making this transition a helluva lot easier than it would have been five years ago.

I think my favorite part of the day was when one of my best friends told me that 46 is when a man gets interesting. Which is the perfect thing to say to a man who's slaloming down the slope toward 50; it reminds you that aging is a lot less ghastly if you can focus on the highlights.

Where I was

Do you remember where you were when you heard that R.E.M. broke up? I was right here, at my desk, panning through my Twitter feed for news nuggets, when someone tweeted something like, "Wow. REM sure is taking this new Facebook thing hard." Which made me think, "Um, what now?" And I had to sift backward through the timeline to find the original news that Buck, Mills, Stipe, and Whoever Plays Drums Now had hung 'em up. This is the nature of news dissemination now. Too often, we get the commentary before we even get the news.

Today, I am digesting the demise of R.E.M. by wearing my "Green" tour t-shirt, which I sincerely hope is the oldest garment I own. I wasn't surprised to see them finally pull the plug, because they've seemed mostly rudderless since Bill Berry's brain blew up and he decided he'd rather spend his days hauling things around his farm. The band still means a helluva lot to me, though, since its rise corresponded almost directly with my college years, starting when my first-year roommate (Hello, Diddly!) used Murmur to slap me out of my Billy Joel obsession, right up until fourth year, when my friend Kermit let me work stage security at an R.E.M. show, and Peter Buck almost stepped on my hand. So for those keeping track of my life's accomplishments, you can add "Nearly maimed by Guitar Magazine's Guitarist of the Year 1985 and 1987." *

* Plausibly. Dude got a LOT of superlative press in the 80s. 

I'll also always remember where I was when I learned that fatherhood is turning me into Cinderella. Or at least, that seems to be the over-reaction from fathers who were distressed to learn that their testosterone levels might be dropping. The study is chock-full of flaws, but its headlines make great clickfodder. And despite all that, I hope a lot of it is true, anyway. I wrote a piece about it on Babble Voices here.

And since my plans for Sunday include 1) watching football and 2) sewing badges on my kids' new Cub Scout uniforms, it's quite possible that my testosterone is going to have a stroke.

Then there was the piece I read in Huffington Post's Divorce section, about women who cave into pressures and walk down the aisle toward the man they know is Mr. Wrong. I sent it to my ex-wife, and she wrote this, which I characterized as the Bull Durham of posts: it knocks you down, but then it helps you up and buys you a beer afterward.

And men: Did you know that Bull Durham is a chick flick? If you don't tell your testicles, I won't tell mine.

Locked doors and drawn shades

Thanks, everyone, for your vociferous concern that I have become a hippie dolt who traipses among drum circles and takes doors off their hinges because "doors divide us, bro!" I did leave my door open that one time, just because anyone who wandered in would be confronted by several dozen boxes of godknowswhat strewn everywhere. If anything, I would hope that person could take a moment to rummage through them and help me find all the pegs for my goddamn bookcases, which the movers helpfully *cough* dismantled while I was out switching trucks.

Believe me: When it comes to home security, I'm still as shut-down as an arthritic oyster. This town ain't shucked me yet.

Of course, I could still go on and on about the 5K my kid wants to run, or how I ride my bike to work every day and just joined a beautiful gym for $220/year. But I've seen this movie before, and we're still in the first act, before the charming Dutch Colonial at 112 Ocean Avenue whispers "GET OUT." A lot of this is just whistling past the graveyard, letting the honeymoon linger while I resist thinking about how different my life has become, and how far in the rear-view mirror NYC already seems.

Speaking of which, I'm sort of happy to say that I spent most of Sunday blissfully unaware that it was the 10th anniversary of 9/11. After my bones stopped vibrating from the last-second mayhem at the Michigan/Notre Dame game, I spent most of the day out and around. And later, as I was writing a post about this ridiculously sudden crying jag I had while driving out here, it dawned on me that over the last decade I don't think I've ever cried over 9/11. Part of that may be because my family and close friends were mercifully spared, but I think most of it is because I went straight from shock, to fear, and to anger over the senseless waste that the human condition had inflicted upon itself. It was completely life-affirming to see people coming to each other's aid, in many cases without regard for their own lives, but utterly deflating that so much hatred had put us in the position in the first place. 

And then it wasn't long before the goodwill wore off, to be replaced with bickering, postering, pig-ignorance, profiteering, and pointless wars that have inexorably helped lead us into the shithole we're in now.

The idea of all the networks competing for ratings by trying to pluck the right heartstrings sorta made me sick. I still remember it all, plain as yesterday, watching it all happen from my grimly perfect vantage point. I remember thousands of people helplessly wandering from hospital to hospital, perusing the makeshift message boards along the sidewalks. I remember the bitterly pungent smell of burning that lingered for months. I remember going back to work and watching from my office as truckloads of rubble were offloaded onto barges bound for Staten Island, and the baleful brightness of the hole in the skyline right outside my window. I may try to draw the shade on that window in my mind from time  to time, but that hole will always be there.

I'll make you a deal, TV: I'll promise never to forget, if you finally stop telling me how to remember.

Have your vomit bucket handy

It's been four days since I arrived in Ann Arbor, and if you follow my Twitter feed, you may know some details of the ridiculously wholesome turn my life has taken. You may know, for example, that when my neighbor's kid in New York helped me load my truck, he and his slacker shitwit buddy charged me two hours for practically nothing, whereas my neighbor's kids in A2 unloaded my entire truck in about 45 minutes and wouldn't accept any payment.

You may know that when I drove the truck down to Toledo to drop it off, Grandma Jellyspoon greeted me with a tin of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.

You may know that when I got back to A2, that same neighbor had cut my front lawn. 

You may know that, on the first day of school, the boys and I woke up at a time usually reserved for cursing at lunatics hurtling themselves down the West Side Highway. And that the walk to school took 8 minutes.

You may know that, about an hour later, Dave the Mailman rang my doorbell to introduce himself and welcome me to the neighborhood. And he didn't even look inside my house to see what he could steal later.

You may know that when I told my landlord I had signed for a package for her, she told me just to leave it on the front porch and she'd stop by for it later.

Take a moment. Have you processed this yet? I know I haven't. I mean, having a specific place to park my car without driving in concentric circles for half an hour was weird enough. But this? We've gone beyond concentric circles. We're now on one of those human gyroscopes that NASA uses to train cadets for zero gravity.

Have you kept it together so far? If so, excellent. You are made of hardy stuff and are ready to hear how revoltingly carefree my life has become:

Today, while I'm sitting here at my solar-heated, convection-cooled, cork-floored, bioswale-stormwater-filtered library branch, my kids are going to walk home from school by themselves. And if they get there a minute or two before I do, they can walk on in the front door, which I have left open for them.

Is this how people really live? If so, I think I can get used to it. After I work through these last few waves of nausea.

Go west, middle-aged man!

[Publisher's note: The author has peppered this post with metaphors of a specifically suggestive nature. Caveat lector.]

I think I can safely place August 2011 in the God Laughed folder, since just about every plan I made was plan-apulted right back in my face. It began with the Ten That Should Have Been Seven and was soon followed by the Four That Became Six, when my site visit to Austin was extended two days by Hurricane Irene. (At least I got to rent my Texas Taxi and hang out with top-shelf hosts and hostesses.)

And now, there is Moving Day, when I learned that the truck I had rented was too small. I knew it was too small. I sat there and looked at it and thought, this thing can't take all that I've got.

[See? --pub.]

But I listened to the nice, young fellow who Didn't Know Dick and skeptically drove off.

Normally, it wouldn't be a big cock-up. I could just drive back and switch it. The trouble was that I live far away from everything, at the tip of where Manhattan is long and slender. In fact, my soon-to-be-ex-apartment is on Seaman Avenue, not far from Dongan Place and even closer to the under-famous corner of Cumming:

And since trucks are not allowed on the West Side Highway, I had to drive 182 blocks along Manhattan's Urethra Broadway, about 45 minutes each way. So the early start I had planned now ain't so much.

Soon after the movers arrived, one of them mentioned he was going through a "panoply of emotions." And I thought 1) wow, tell me about it; and 2) wow, this recession is a bitch. Truthfully, though, I think I've made my peace with all this. And I miss being a dad. I haven't seen my kids, or made Chockfula Burgers, or washed Spider-Man underpants, or made a LEGO ninjacopter in more than two weeks. It's unfamiliar. And it's boring.

My home was here, but really, my home is with them.

It's time to go. I'm going. Off to ejaculate myself over the bridge and around the bend.