Tagged: relationships
A Dinner Scene
“Speaking of people sounding black or white, I just watched this thing on back-up singers-,” the family matriarch began, steering the conversation in a new direction.
“Yeah, one of my friends mentioned that that is just a fantastic film,” the no-good smart-ass disrespectful-though-very-funny adult middle-child added.
“It really was!” she said earnestly, taking back the floor. “And the surprising part was that a lot of the singers were black and got their start in churches as little girls.”
“Ha. That’s exactly what my friend shared about the film. Funny.”
“Well, what I was going to say was that there was one scene where the girl said that she was singing back-up for Ray Charles. And she told a story about a time when Ray Charles stopped the concert and just played one note over and over again telling her that that was the note to sing. That note,” she said, repeatedly pressing her finger into the table with her eyes open wide in a reenactment of the scene. Laughing, she continued, “And the singer said that after that moment she never missed a note ever again. It was so embarrassing.”
“Crazy,” said the middle-child, voicing the sentiment he felt was expected.
“I mean just think of it. With all that noise and the sound of the crowd he was still able to pick out her voice,” she said, letting a natural pause emphasize her child-like wonder of the skill involved in such a feat.
He lived for moments like this one. Unable to withstand the opportunity, he timed the punchline perfectly as he inhaled with about-to-speak force and added with a tone of disbelief, “And he was deaf!”
“Blind!” the son-in-law corrected forcefully, coming to her defense.
“Blind!” the mother rejoined, happy to be defended but wishing she was faster to correct the constantly instigating know-it-all smart-alec.
Not only quicker on the draw, the son-in-law was also the first to shake his head and leave the table mad at himself for ever believing his brother-in-law had anything of value to say. Everyone else just laughed and laughed. The middle-child just smiled.
As for our storyteller? Her face red as a beet she laughed until she could not laugh anymore as she wondered what she ever did to be treated this way. She would have thrown something at him if everything in the room wasn’t so darn nice.
The Morning That She Didn’t Put Up A Fight
They had finished bathing the baby. She was asleep in the pack-n-play. The dog’s constant pacing made the temporary apartment feel smaller than it was. Not that it mattered now. The seller had accepted their latest offer on the house, so only a month remained until they closed and would be reunited with their own stuff.
“I care about you,” she began to answer. He couldn’t remember what question he had asked. “But I don’t like you,” she concluded.
She wore the same resigned look he had grown tired of seeing for the past two years. Ever since the stripper.
“I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with this information,” he said. “Why would I want to live with someone who doesn’t like me? I’m glad you care about me, but to me that’s not as noble as you just made it sound. I’m taking the dog to pee. Is the trash full?”
Without their separate beds he let her have the covers and slept in his sleeping bag. Sleeping bags added a level of fun to any night so he didn’t mind. He was all out of fight himself as well, especially over something as trivial as sheets.
The closing was uneventful. He tried to stay positive about the new job that didn’t pay as much as they hoped. She tried to not stress about shift work on the weekends. With each passing day his walk to the bar seemed shorter; her options, fewer.
She went out with a co-worker after he returned from happy hour with a friend. Waking by himself at two-thirty he figured she was on her way. At three his worry hardened into a decision. He was never going to feel knots like those in his stomach again. Never. Four am will forever sound to him like a door handle, the bathroom fan, and the plop of vomit into toilet water.
After the baby went to sleep the next night they were finally alone. He raged. She sat as he lectured. With each non-response he raised his volume.
The following morning she behaved as if the fight was over. For her, the cycle was complete. For him, the marriage was. Some cycles should never be repeated.
She followed him out of the house for a few steps after he said divorce. He answered the phone thirty minutes later. She told him her parents had two attorneys ready to schedule a consultation.
He now lies to himself that the hurt has decreased since that morning–the morning that she didn’t even put up a fight.
The Fastest Roughneck
His name is Becky. I mean Becki.
“See how fast I did that, Peter?” was one of the first things he ever said to me. Then settling down to a serious mood, he continued, “You gotta be fast out here, Peter.”
I could see in his eyes that he cared. That he took extra time to teach me (he’d probably say being fast creates extra time) made me care. Effort is contagious.
“People are always watching out here, Peter. Anytime something needs to be done you gotta do it as fast as you can. I’m twenty-one and going to be a driller soon. It’s ’cause I’m so fast.” Then he would smile and say, “I just love saying your name, Peter.”
Becki should’ve been named a word that means “potential” or maybe “talent.” He was raw potential. His memory was uncanny; his attitude, without burden. He loved his mom and his daughter. And he could swing a sledge hammer as fast as any man. He was not a large man, which meant you had to look close to see that he was all heart.
One of this lightening bolt’s favorite jokes was: “After I’m done I always tell her, ‘I don’t know what the problem is. I mean we started at the same time’.” Like I said, he was fast.
A member of a generation struggling to find their purpose in life, Becki knows he was born for the oil fields. I don’t think Becki’s vocabulary bank accepted struggle currency. Carrying on the binary communication tradition began by previous roughnecks, Becki only recognized the concepts “done” and “one more second.”
In the end, a man like Becki hails from a long tradition of makers. Cormac McCarthy would say these men carry the fire. I say they are the ones who attract our attention, deserve our admiration, and win our affection. Becki just does it faster.
Update: What I Look Like
A lazy and depressing morning without H- resulted in a 1/16th mile walk to the local gym. While navigating bushes along the narrow sidewalk, which is dangerously close to a busy street, I saw a woman in fitness gear approaching. “Hmm…maybe she’s cute,” I thought. As the distance between us closed and I proceeded to verify my hope, I heard a car slow beside me. I turned. In the car was a sixty-ish year old woman with her window rolled down, also in fitness gear.
“Do you know where G- park is?” she asked.
“Yep, it’s right before the light that’s a half-mile behind you on the left.”
A confused look slowly began to subside, but not completely. “Where?” she asked again.
“Just make a U-turn here, and right before that stop light back there, take a left. It has a purple playground.”
“Oh. Thanks,” she said, still not confident that she has the skills necessary to make the half-mile journey.
“Actually, wait,” I said, “that’s not G- park. That’s P- park. My mistake.”
Losing color in the same pattern as a water ripple extending from a dropped stone, a new terror spread across her face.
“No worries. G- Park is just across the street from P- park. It’s through the stop light and on the right. It has a lake with geese. Just as easy to get to, though I’m not sure where you’re going to park. I always walk there since I live so close.”
The woman was in a state of despair usually reserved for cataclysmic events like city-wide black-outs, tsunamis, or terrorist attacks. She then asked, “Will you just get in and take me there?”
I think this means I’d make a good confidence man.
What I Look Like
Tall. Dark. Handsome. Ken doll. Rico Suave. Fabio. No, I don’t have anything in common with any of those descriptors–especially not Fabio’s luscious locks.
When I write I want the word’s feeling to be the only thing that is measured. I don’t want to be stuck in the horrible situation where people only buy my books because they like the way my face looks. But some of you have been reading for a year now and I know the feeling of “I know it doesn’t matter, but I wouldn’t mind knowing what this person looks like.” So we’ll compromise.
Growing up around bodybuilding, the value of the mirror over the scale was ingrained in me. Rather than attempt to translate mirror-speak into English, however, I think it’ll prove more useful to share what others see. Have you ever noticed how some men just volunteer to the world what they see? Well, it happens to me frequently–especially on the rig. And as you’ll see, I think simply passing these descriptions on to you should give you what you want, while allowing me to retain a level of writing purity.
First up is, “Peter. You’re so innocent looking man.” That was my personal favorite until the more direct, “Peter, how’s it going tonight? Man, you just look like a virgin.” That guy even knew I had a child. Can you imagine how it feels to be complimented so highly, and yet not? Oh well, like I’ve always said, “Once a virgin, always a virgin.”
Still don’t have a clear picture? Try this one. Picture a small rectangular metal room with two doors, one on either end, that normally seal walk-in freezers. There is a loud air conditioner blasting a nearly cool, steady current of air from one end to the other. The four men standing in the room make it seem like adding one more would be impossible, yet it frequently houses a dozen or so. Next, you notice a sudden story-killing change to their mood. Faces start scrunching as searching eyes pull heads along a comprehensive scan pattern. Breaths are taken in through the nose in patterns that echo a hitman’s double-tap. Finally one of the men asks another, “Did you shit your pants?”
Shaking his head no, the accused man looks to the third man whose eyes are already wide as he, in turn, shakes he head in denial. They can’t even imagine I would do such a thing, so I don’t even get asked. That’s right. I have the face of a man who doesn’t fart. Now you know.
On Breeding
Everyone knows that Mormons and Muslims make babies with world domination as their goal. But what about the rest of us? Why do we end up breeding?
If magazines with the word “journal” in their title are to be trusted, then there is at least one well-documented theory. We breed because we’re dumb. That came out wrong. The data doesn’t show that breeding is dumb, it shows that the less educated and lower paid we are, the more children we have. Want the same sentiment in a more positive tone? Try “children are the wealth of the poor.” Aww.
If we put stock in casual conversation, middle-class couples have children because they bought a dog a couple years earlier.
Back on the research front, we know that foreigners who are new to this country breed like bunnies, but that only lasts a few generations. By the third generation (statistics show) they only want one or two children. And those little guys probably won’t talk funny anymore anyhow. Yawn.
But these sweeping generalizations are only scratching the surface. I want specifics. I want to know how individuals make the choice. More than that, I want to know why this topic seems taboo to me? If I tell you that my parents told me that I was “unplanned”, it feels like they wouldn’t be happy that I’d shared that information because it makes them look “bad”. (For the record, I’m pretty sure that my older sister was the reason for the wedding, my younger brother was unplanned, and that I am a gift from God.)
It seems that in the past people had a lot of children because children meant workers, which meant wealth. Adam Smith (of 1776’s Wealth of Nations fame) wrote that a widow with a bunch of kids was very attractive to men back then. Seems like that couldn’t be further from the truth these days. And then in the past babies died a lot, too. So there’s that to take into account. Today, with not so many youngsters passing while on the trail, couples just don’t seem motivated to risk pregnancy’s dangers as much. Or some such reasoning.
And we can’t forget birth control’s far reaching consequences. How many people wouldn’t be alive today if latex was self-lubricating?
I’m curious how many of you have ever asked individuals why they had children? I have. Well, I’ve asked men. (Where are you ladies hiding again?) It’s shocking to me. Tied for the number one reasons are “it felt too good to pull out” and “We(/I) were drunk.”
Never experiencing it myself, sadly, according to locker room tales I’ve heard that some women have an ability to really make mixing the baby batter together seem desirable as the last of the sweat forms. And I know a few fellas who have described their primal finish to be the same as how a shark’s eyes roll back when they go for the kill. Where do these men and women learn this behavior? Maybe it’s genetic?
It feels weak to admit that I want more children. I think that’s because if I admit it, and then don’t have anymore, it will be known that I have an unfulfilled desire in my life.
Why did I do my part to create H-, you ask? Because it was what married couples do. It was time. You know, the dog thing.
Why do I want more children? Because when we were camping the other night and alone in the tent I awoke to the sound of her giggling while in a dream. I just pictured her brain creating fantasy images of her stuffed Twilight Sparkle tumbling through the air; no on a rainbow! Yeah, Twilight Sparkle would likely be around a rainbow or two. Maybe Pingu was there too. And then, later that night, as I started shuffling around to see a man about a tree, H- wakes up and says, “Daddy, if you’re ever scared-” pause “-if you ever need anything, I’ll be there for you.” Good to know. And I hope so H-.
Mel Gibson was in a movie about depression called, “The Beaver”, a few years back. One of the previews on the DVD was for a movie centered around immigration whose title I can’t remember. But in the trailer there was a scene where a teenage son asked his father why he ever had him. The father said, “To give life meaning.” I’m with that dad. What else gives life meaning? Work? My passion? Writing? Spreading the gospel? No, when all is said and done, life is about people. That’s why we keep creating them.
Why $30 Per Day Is Not A Deal
As most of you know I am divorced and don’t see my daughter for half of her life. The same goes for her mom. That can’t be changed. But expectations between her mom and I can be changed.
I bet you’d be surprised to learn that her mom reads these posts. I was. I think she hopes she’ll be able to use them against me someday in some melodramatic legal battle. It’s a great feeling, hammering in your own nails.
Most recently, we were in a mediation which had a moment where the mediator gave a look that was accompanied by a primal utterance that betrayed that he thought that paying her boyfriend’s mom $30 per day to watch H- was a deal in today’s “not my responsibility” childcare market. Here’s why it isn’t a deal.
I took H- camping last week and while we were in the bathroom she volunteered, “I saw a man lick a woman’s face on TV.” H- is four. I think at least a few of you can imagine the expression I nearly successfully held back upon hearing this.
I asked if this was at her mom’s house or “Grammy’s” house (not her grandparent on any level, to be clear). Another parenthetical–(now I know you’re not supposed to play detective as a co-parent, but I’m human.) She answered, “Grammy’s.”
“So you watch TV at Grammy’s house, eh?” I continued.
“Yep.”
“Was it while she was flipping channels?”
Even at her tender age H- has a way of seeing through any attempt of mine to pretend that I’m really not interested in the answer, so she simply resorted to, “Nevermind!”
What the fuck? Television is a poison beyond measure. Does anyone doubt this? And yet a wonderful feature of my choice in ex-wives is that now my child is being raised by it when I’m not around. And I’m supposed to be happy about the financial savings. Whatever happened to the phrase, “There is more to life than money”?
What am I supposed to do? The other option is to track down some fantastical daycare which allows her to attend only half of every month. My experience in this realm is that this is not likely. And daycares that don’t cost a fortune usually are religiously affiliated. Keep in mind that as the father, I’m paying for childcare not for when I’m at work, but for when her mother’s at work. I’m paying other people than her mother to raise her. So my options are face licking or bible stories. At this point I think I’d take bible stories, but I have a difficult time understanding why a television is ever on. I know I’m not alone on this. I spoke with a stay-at-home dad (still married) a while ago, and he said he was at some function where they were discussing how many hours of television they let their kids watch a week. He said, “An hour.”
The others said, “Wow. An hour a day. That’s great.”
And he said, “No, an hour a week. Maybe.”
They said, “How do you fill the time?”
He said, “How do you have the time?”
How do you have the time to watch television with a kid? Why would you put a kid in front of the “boob tube?” Or the “brain drain?” I know why. You do it because you’re lazy. You do it because you rush to help people that behave in a way that seems like they need help when they are really just lazy. I’ve said it so many times I’m sick of hearing myself say it, but I’ll say it again. I grew up thinking the opposite of love was hate. Then I heard the notion that the opposite of love is not hate, but selfishness–and I preached that. These days, however, I’m with M. Scott Peck who wrote that the opposite of love is laziness.
Do you love your child? What’s it like finding out that she’ll admit these things to me?
It should be Miss P-, by the way. P- is not her grandmother. Words have meanings. Why your mom doesn’t care is beyond me.
Anna vs. Emma, A Joint Review of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Nothing motivates me to write better more than sentences like these.
“As if tears were the necessary lubricant without which the machine of mutual communication could not work successfully, the two sisters, after these tears, started talking, not about what preoccupied them, but about unrelated things, and yet they understood each other (Tolstoy 125).”
“It showed him the eternal error people make in imagining that happiness is the realization of desires (Tolstoy 465).”
“In order to undertake anything in family life, it is necessary that there be either complete discord between the spouses or loving harmony. But when the relations between spouses are uncertain and there is neither the one nor the other, nothing can be undertaken. Many families stay for years in the same old places, hateful to both spouses, only because there is neither full discord nor harmony (Tolstoy 739).”
“As it was almost empty she bent back to drink, her head thrown back, her lips pouting, her neck on the strain. She laughed at getting none of it, while with the tip of her tongue passing between her small teeth she licked drop by drop the bottom of the glass (Flaubert 24).”
“And he at once took down from the shelf Emma’s boots, all coated with mud, the mud of the rendezvous, that crumbled into powder beneath his fingers, and that he watched as it gently rose in a ray of sunlight (Flaubert 174).”
“Emma was like all his mistresses; and the charm of novelty, gradually falling away like a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony of passion, that has always the same forms and the same language (Flaubert 177).”
“We don’t speak on the first floor as on the fourth; and the wealthy woman seems to have, about her, to guard her virtue, all her bank-notes, like a cuirass, in the lining of her corset (Flaubert 215).”
“They knew one another too well for any of those surprises of possession that increase its joys a hundred-fold. She was as sick of him as he was weary of her. Emma found again in adultery all the platitudes of marriage (Flaubert 268).”
So here’s the scoop. Anna and Emma commit adultery. And when they discover this act didn’t end their unhappiness, they kill themselves. These novels are often classified under “realism”, which seeks to be just what you’d expect–realistic. (This, of course, comes in response to the unrealistic stories which rued the day up until writers like Tolstoy and Flaubert (can’t not mention Twain) couldn’t stomach any more of it.) And right up until the ending, I can’t find novels which more accurately describe the human scene. But the suicides struck me as unrealistic. Was I being too literal?
Maybe the suicide is a metaphor? Maybe women who commit adultery long to commit suicide, but lack the courage to do it? Is that what these guys were arguing?
Or are the stories warnings to women? Are they a kind of “cheat on me and you’ll probably want to kill yourself” thing? They are written by men after all.
Or maybe there is something more going on?
Always returning to Tolstoy’s wisdom, I’ve decided that these books’ adultery-leads-to-suicide motif is a warning to everyone. Tolstoy, especially, tips his hand in the quote about about happiness not being the realization of desires. That these books sit on so many shelves across the planet proves we recognize the truth they contain, whether we can verbalize it or not.
If Tolstoy and Flaubert were alive today they might have chosen to write about men ignoring their family in favor of email, or mothers working while strangers raise their children so that they can live in a house that would make the Jones’s proud. Or maybe they’d write about women who wear make-up and men who have hair plugs. But then, I wouldn’t believe men and women would kill themselves after finding their cosmetic choices didn’t bring them happiness. But a spouse watching his or her selfish action destroy a family? Yep, I could see how that might make someone want out of this life. And since it is Tolstoy’s Anna who chooses her lover even when her husband is ready to reunite with her, Anna Karenina wins the better lesson presentation battle. The lesson being happiness is. No fill in the blank, no requisite. Happiness just is.
****
Flaubert, Gustave, Chris Kraus, and Eleanor Marx Aveling. Madame Bovary. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005. Print.
Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Toronto: Penguin, 2000. Print.
A Woman Distracted
“It’s true,” he told himself, “she could be more beautiful. But then that more beautiful female would no longer be the woman sitting across the table now, the one called Noa-.”
“Noa-,” Pete said, as he noticed their hands almost bump while reaching for a chip, “if our hands touch while grabbing a chip, you know that I’m going to read into that, don’t you?”
If only for a moment, Noa- shook her head and cast her eyes about. She was smitten. She then found the strength to rebuff Pete’s subtle, though ingenious play and said, “Pete, there’s never going to be anything to read into.”
Laughing heartily, Pete soon noticed the jaded, slightly-too-terse, and preferring-a-thousand-yard-stare-to-eye-contact server walking towards the trio’s table, meals in hand.
“That’s what I’m talking about!” George said as piping hot fajitas along with the fixin’s were lowered to him.
Feeling the pressure to finish the complimentary chips and salsa before they were gone for good, Pete snuck in a few last bites before reaching out to receive his chimichanga. “Thank you,” he mumbled, unable to hide that his mouth was full.
Finally, the lady lowered Noa- her plate. Noa- didn’t notice. Like a student pretending to be reading her textbook in her lap, or perhaps just behaving like an adult with an office job, Noa- clearly was attempting to hide her addiction.
“Noa-,” Pete said, smiling. “I can’t believe you. You’re sitting across from two of the most eligible bachelors in,” he hesitated, clearly searching for the proper radius, “in America, and rather than enjoy the company, you’re on your phone. This is what’s wrong with the world.” Turning to George, he knew he had nailed it.
“America, eh?” George asked. “I thought you were going to say Denver, but I can’t argue with America.”
Noa- smiled at the attention, but still couldn’t quite pull herself away from the device.
“My question,” George began, turning towards Pete and filling the conversation’s lapse, “is who could be more eligible?” Upon uttering the inquiry, his countenance reached an uncommon gravity, which led to a rephrasing of the question. George asked again, “Or rather, how could I be more eligible?”
“Yeah,” Pete chuckled, his belief in his hastily developed though now affirmed sentiment strengthening with every passing second, “how exactly are we not the most eligible?”
Captain’s Log Is Now A Book
For practice with independent publishing, and because I wanted my own tangible copy of everything I’ve written in the last two years, I published a paperback version of this blog. You can click here to buy it from CreateSpace. Click here to buy it from Amazon. There is no ebook available, as that format just seems wrong for this project for some reason.
I’ve asked myself why anyone would buy something that they can read for free, and there’s only one acceptable reason: because they want to. For me, it was a need more than a want, but I think you get the picture. Buy it because you want (need) to. It begins with “Why a log?” and ends with “A Jaw Dropping Woman.”
Now that this little experiment is complete, expect new books in the future. And, of course, I’ll still be publishing as many posts as I can while I’m not away at work.
Oh, and the book makes a great gift. (I’m pretty sure H- would’ve been mad if I didn’t include that last little bit.)
Captain’s Log 