The children of our fathers eat sugar. They eat sugared treats and go to fight their courageous, child battles. In our homes, they fight. They throw the LEGOs, the yo-yos, the flying discs. The flying discs which are yet to be invented and called Frisbees®. The children break glasses. Glasses of whiskey spill, pouring out our lifeblood, leaving us weeping for unbroken glasses of whiskey.

The whiskey never comes. Only eggs. Eggs, and more cracking children. There is a long drive ahead. We leave with the dusk.

“Oh! Your son is amazing. We all just love him, and he is clearly brilliant. He has picked up reading in just the week he’s been here; we figured out exactly what the problem was and now it’s solved. And you were absolutely right – his math skills are much higher than first grade, so we are giving him a special curriculum to work on while the other kids do their math class. He should have no trouble settling right in here at school. It’s clear that you’ve done an exceptional job of teaching him at home. These issues of his are nothing you could have helped.”

What it actually looks like:

“Welcome to your child’s IEP meeting. Here is a list of goals for the coming year, which include writing his first and last name from memory 75% of the time, and writing lowercase letters with 75% accuracy. We have made accommodations for homework, which means he can dictate his answers to you and you can write them. He will have a picture schedule to help him know what is going to happen. He is allowed breaks when he gets overwhelmed, which is often.

“What’s that you ask? Yes, it’s possible that he will one day not need an IEP, but it is a good idea to always have one anyway, because even after high school he may need continued services.”

I turned my eldest son over to the public school system. There are some things I just can’t do by myself, I guess. The relief I feel is palpable, but so is the sadness of the boy who comes home after such a long day, so tired. So drained.

And I am sad, too. Sad that the plans I had, the amazing things we would do together, now have to be set aside, and sometimes understanding that you are doing the best thing is not consolation for the pain of failure.

1. Permission to read the internets is only granted while standing up.

2. Netflix can only be streamed while washing dishes.

3. No one buy a new laptop charger for me for my birthday so I have to continue to walk up and down the stairs to retrieve mine, which is never on the same floor (defying laws of probability).

4. Lock keys in vehicle when within two miles of home, forcing me to walk to avoid confessing that I did that. Again.

5. Drink too much, forcing me to walk to avoid…(see above).

6. Throw up the following day. This makes up for excess drinking calories, and forces me to clean the toilet and take a shower. Winning!

7. Run over a gypsy with his grandfather in sight so I get cursed to be thinner.

8. Ask Stephen King to write a story about hitting a gypsy and getting cursed with the cleaning type of OCD. Run over gypsy, etc.

9. Write more words. Their weight is killing me.

I am split, now. Split between a future I can taste and the reality of here and now, split between hunger for new information and the hunger of the people around me always in need. I began reading Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid a few days ago, and I see the ideas solidifying before me, explaining the unexplainable, or at least shifting the perspective. And then I dream of my childhood home, now also split, a local running shoe store on the main level, apartments upstairs. I dream of the basement where my brother and I spent hours playing in the damp, musty air; the canning room is still there, Ball jars lining grey wooden shelves. The playrooms, which would have been maids’ quarters when the home was built, are still there just as we’d left them, the painting my mother allowed on the walls still intact, boxes of our possessions lining the edge of the room. I go through them, making piles of things to keep – my baby clothes, christening gown, photographs I don’t even remember. Each thing is a spark, a neural connection of recognition, as I rummage through the past in my dream world and in my real world, looking for the key to why I am this. 

It was nice, looking back and seeing familiar sweaters, drawings, things of childhood when it was something good, still, and not something corrupt. I don’t know when the shift happened, but the evidence is clear. My computer got a virus, and no matter how aesthetically pleasing something is, when it doesn’t function properly, people get frustrated. Angry.

Is there a Geek Squad for people? Someone take me apart and rebuild me, make my strange loops not so strange.

The angel topper I have for my Christmas tree was purchased many years ago. Like probably about sixteen, which, as glittery things from China go, is a pretty long useful lifespan. The damn thing, though, sheds glitter like a burlesque dancer sheds underclothes and feathers, which is to say, indiscriminately, and fancily. You don’t want to find that shit in your briefcase, am I right? And you certainly don’t want your wife to find it there. Plus it makes eating a rather unpleasant experience, what with the crunching and the sparkly teeth. I’d hate to be called a Twilight fan, and right now, with the pallor, the bloodshot eyes, the insomnia and the blue black hair, glitter is the only thing missing.

So I told my children it was time to find a new angel.

And then I remembered: angels are horrifying creatures! I mean, parts of them are beautiful, sure. The “sparkling vault” over their heads, the twankie dueces with the eyes all over them. I mean, super cool, right? But then you get into the split lion/ox/eagle face thing, and the the fact that they move all creepy and stuff, and are attached together in fours. I mean, I’m not exactly feeling warm and fuzzy and watched over. Hallmark? She lies.

Then my mother made this wonderful offer of letting me raid her boxes of Christmas ornaments because she is moving soon and she can’t move all seventeen boxes of decorations. You read that right. SEVENTEEN. And in there, there might be a decent tree-topper, but since my mom hasn’t had small children in so very long (let’s see, I’m forty and my brother is about to turn thirty-seven, so it’s been like ten years now), she has had “theme” trees every year. Different ones. So instead of normal stars and whatnot, I’m more likely to find a giant peacock, or a miniature of a Dwell apartment, or something that could possibly injure someone. Like me.

So I’m thinking: star. A star on the top of the Christmas tree this year. Cardboard, aluminum foil, recyclable. Something we can all be proud of to cover that empty, phallic spike gracing my living room. If you have one to suggest, please send it on the back of a prescription for Valium and ship it to me overnight. Thanks in advance.

So I eat the words youthful, vibrant, and devour the pleasure of being told I smell good. They fill me and mediate the perceived lack, the  hollow spaces in my heart where the waters didn’t quite reach when I was being raised. These are the dried up places, where doctors put pills and counselors put tools (talk, listening, living skills, at worst – occupational therapy), and I turn and reach for the sounds of those words.

It lasts for a while, then the sun comes up and the soil dries to crumbles again, my soul withers and droops.

I’ll revive. Throw some water on me, feed me words, read to me on the sidewalk some night. It’s enough to last a while.

They’d bought out two Walmarts of canning jars, stacked them inside the kitchen door. Our assembly line team set them up, added the crushed garlic cloves and a sprig of thyme, sliced cucumbers, filled jars, while a brine heated on the stovetop.

I went, thinking I was passing up time I could have been home, alone, with no children, which lately seems to help my mood as much as any medication ever has, and I broke down and cried much of the way there. I wondered if I should call in my regrets, even after driving forty minutes and being almost there, already nestled in green, farms, dogs wandering country roads.

We walked the farm for an hour before the work started. The land there is inexplicably sandy, isolated in the land of red clay, and my feet grew dusty, pricked by nettles, kicked up damsel flies. The sun burned me. Then we were inside, and the job kept me from thinking, kept me from imagining I was needing anything, from the emptiness inside.

The work quieted the voices.

Something inside me lately is sprung free, clawing its way out, and its needs are devouring me. I feed it books, art, music, even wine, but it won’t stop pacing, demanding more. It’s eaten me alive before, and I intend to stop it again, but I’m getting tired of this old battle.

I see a writer say, “Hell, some don’t publish until they’re fifty years old!” And it’s so close, too close, really, and at fifty I’ll still have kids here who need me and hammer at me until I can’t think, and all I want is to run away, which I almost did, though that’s not what the obituary would read.

I had a lover who walked into the bedroom to see me lying on his bed on my stomach, one leg bent, head resting on my hands, and he said, “God that is so sexy.”

One walked behind me as I swayed up steps and told me I walked like a dancer, so beautifully (and damn well I should, after thirteen years of lessons, performances, blisters and hammering pointe shoes into perfection).

Gone are the days when I could hock my body as art, gone are magic spells cast by slender limb and singing lilting Cowboy Junkies songs in bed with a lover beside me, now all I have to woo is typeface on white screen, with little reach and even less influence.

I am hungry, have always been hungry, and though I’m faulted for it, cursed for it, even, it’s in my cells. My mitochondria make of sweet talk and infatuation what my neurons never could of serotonin and dopamine. And now, with no time for building the fires that draw in prey, what will I do? I’ll never string enough words together to make my trap, now.

I waver between throwing it away, and telling everyone to fuckoff (and sacrificing my family’s wellbeing) and saying, “I have to do this now.” I live with the equivalent of hundreds of pages sitting crumpled in the trashcan. I’m afraid to throw them away, but no one’s pulling them out for me, straightening them and brushing off the crumbs, either.

And what difference does it make, in the end? Who cares? I won’t, if I can just get out of here soon enough.

Could be it’s a day to fall in love, or to fall out, or to fall, into a pool a palette a palace a palindrome, to paint pretty pictures of whatever floats, hovers, fails, flies, to be told you are great, good, or just enough.

It’s a beautiful day to be read to, coveted, told that you are 15% prettier than you think you are, that you are just fine, okay, more, any time, not a bother.

It could make everything better, it could chase these lonely feelings out of the dust and make you blush and start you being reborn once more.

Or it could drive the loneliness home like a nail, sure and swift and true.

He was in and out of jail when I dated him, and I was thirteen and he was eighteen, and now, of course, it seems all wrong and out of kilter, but at the time it was love and beautiful, and he looked like John Lennon, and I was desired, and it’s all I wanted.

Then after jail, when he was in Arkansas in rehab and was working in a program for drug addicts in the office of the then governor, a certain William Clinton, he wrote to me often, just as he always had from hitchhiking all over and from jail, and one day sent me a package made up of photocopies of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Bukowski’s The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills. The paper was riddled with letterhead and I loved the thought of the double steal – the intellectual property, the stationery.

I hadn’t yet read either of the authors yet, but I think now they colored in empty lines we all have at that age, causing me a certain curve in trajectory I might not otherwise have had, blending a perverse love of violent imagery in words and film with the romantic notion of poetic prose about the natural world.

Or maybe these things were in me already. (I know they were, violent images have haunted me always, always.)

But now there is this relationship to these writers, and others whose discovery or introduction came with equal measure of story, who stir me like no others, who bring up the murk from the bottom of my gut, which some might mistake for a soul, whose fire is my own, tempered by a creek or lit by whiskey.

Read it to me, I’m yours, I’m yours. Fire it up, love, and let’s burn to the ground.