I’ve been a lot of thing I’m not and I’m
pretty sure I can be something I am again.
My Dad died a few years back. He wasn’t well and what made him unwell was
only going to get worse. Ironically his
coy ability to check out a mere day after yet another doctor prescribed tethering him to an oxygen tank came as a relief. It was obvious to all of
us that he was way past having fun with the ageing process and magically he just
conjured up the ability to turn the light off.
Not having him around though is surreal. It strikes me at the oddest times. I can be doing anything and the obscurity of him not being here floods over me – that the one guy who was seemingly enamoured to listen to whatever bullshit I was dealing is no longer available, no longer sitting stoically in his chair, devoid of any demonstrative indication of how he felt save for the occasional subtle glint in an eye or tweak of his quiet posture that made it ridiculously obvious of how proud he was to have me as his son and somehow even more importantly, his friend.
Not having him around though is surreal. It strikes me at the oddest times. I can be doing anything and the obscurity of him not being here floods over me – that the one guy who was seemingly enamoured to listen to whatever bullshit I was dealing is no longer available, no longer sitting stoically in his chair, devoid of any demonstrative indication of how he felt save for the occasional subtle glint in an eye or tweak of his quiet posture that made it ridiculously obvious of how proud he was to have me as his son and somehow even more importantly, his friend.
I
really miss him but it’s not that overtly emotional - oh my god he’s gone and
I’m never going to see him again - emptiness.
It’s more the idea that I’ll never have the chance to just look at him
and feel first person the sense of pride he exuded toward a guy he loved
who continually struggled, sometimes succeeded and yet somehow always flushed
him with pride.
Yeah I know that I tie his existence
directly to how I feel about myself but oddly this appears to be how some of us weaker humans have learned to evolve. All I
know is that words, in my hands, are too weak a tool to convey the importance
of this intrinsic human bond.
Dad loved what he “did for a living”. I’m pretty sure he was in a perpetual state
of professional happiness, contentment and fulfillment.
Dad was a builder. He built houses primarily but other things
too. I can’t tell you how many times
when we worked together that he would arrive on-site, brimming with piss and
vinegar in possession of a solution to a situation that seemed inexplicable the
day before. In his typically reserved
way he would explain that while he slept, the solution came to him. Never did he intimate that he spent the night
gripping it or tossing and turning in search of an answer - it just came to
him while he slept. Since these days
I’ve always just assumed this is the basic difference between loving what you
do and doing what you think you need to.
So the two things that lend me similar
happiness and contentment are writing and building shit. The writing comes with the fallibility of
subjectivity, so one never really knows if the project is completed in the way
it was initially designed. That’s a good
thing really, even if what's been penned is trash. The objective is merely the process.
The building shit thing though is much more
clearly defined. It comes with
conclusive design. Even if it’s created
on the fly, its rightness or wrongness is immediately apparent. Clearly it’s impossible to trick physics and
structure into being anything but deterministic. The beauty is in the simplicity of the
precision and it immediately kicks back an objective reality should one choose to
leave it wrong.
So after being a whole bunch of other
things I’m not now I’m a construction Project Manager. I work on really big sites that have a
million balls in the air, that possess manifold minutiae and an absurd level of
bureaucratic hoop jumping. I make “good”
money doing this and make great money for the owners of the company. This current and hopefully final project
means I have an apartment in a small town two hours away from my home where I
live during the week in order to do it.
I don’t hate my job. In fact often times I
get a sense of gratification or pride from a job well done. I just resent the fact that I have to fritter
away so much time on it. I just always
assumed that once I achieved this level of maturity, after all the minute
detail juggling and concurrence in the bureaucratic mating rituals, it would
get easier.
This unfortunately is not the case. As a young man, just at the very beginning of
my career development and in conjunction with a pair of merry pranksters it was
decided that we would spend our weekends undergoing prolonged periods of
rigorous medicated training. This type of training exemplifies to those with their eyes open, a different world. At the conclusion of this experiment I should
have been appropriately educated to changed course and explore a more
obscure career path, something that better suited my recent learning, something
with a more broadly conceived idea of social scheme. I apparently decided
against this concept - no doubt for the same reasons that lead me to hide inside
the medication in the first place. Ultimately
this has rendered me somewhat damaged when it comes to playing by the rules of our present paradigm and these rules tend to eat me up. At 59 it’s not a good idea to allow there to be
crap in your life that eats you up. If
one lets that stuff continue to get to you it won’t be long till there are
mutating cells literally eating you up and therein lies the basis of my
resentment.
My wife retired in May after thirty years
with the federales. I’m scheduled to
leap gleefully from the hamster wheel in September of 2021. The retirement countdown clicker, a virtual
device usually enlisted by members of the federal public service, recently turned 600ish days. Twenty months to fend off the
development of mutating cells. Twenty months
till my daughter and son-in-law purchase their handy man special in the country
in need of my tinkerage. Twenty-two
months till we board a plane probably to India to begin a third world
exploration adventure and to capture it in words and pictures.
Twenty months till I am.
