Ill get home from work and enter a dizzy stage of tired. It triggers on walking in and setting everything down. The kids run to their rooms after school and settle in. They will call who gets first dibs on the bathroom on the ride back and camp there for a solid 40 minutes. I'm then on the couch digging my feet into the crack between couch cushions and covering myself in a knitted afghan.
This sort of tired does not feel earned like after a day's honest work or a hard hike. Instead its a burst drain, an ice jam letting go in February sun and crashing everything onto the patio furniture below. Anxiety leaving the body where one can be most true? My parents had a tchotchke hanging above the fridge that read...
Home Sweet Home: Where You Can Scratch Where It Itches
Home, where it is ok to cry and kick your dog and scrape the last layers of the peanut butter jar because it was a day. A series of days.
I type often about sleep and dreams. My dreams are furtive and cyclical anchored in the possible impossible. My life if I never moved out of central New York. A day in the life as a journalist. A restaurateur. Watching a new bridge over the Cuyahoga River open. They are rarely titillating but that is because I undress everyone I encounter, just some more than others.
A recent dream had me craft blocks of text into infinite work email memos. This is a deviation of a repeating one from my previous job, jockeying in a warehouse, where boxes fell and nested into one another. A waterwall of interlocking cardboard like my son's frozen Minecraft waterfalls. In the first moments of awakening the dream remains vibrant but it fades away at an impossible speed. Forget faster than light drives. Go for faster than dream decay drives. Trying to unravel cooked spaghetti with a school lunch room spork would be easier.
Sometimes these naps extend into the early evening. Two hours and my wife has gotten home and already lived a full second life while I awaken and think I should note that and put in on the blog.
Over the course of the COVID 19 pandemic I discovered the Katamari video game series thanks to the remaster version on Xbox. I knew about the games like how a film nerd knows about every director's canon (Or The Day the Clown Cried) but just hasn't gotten to it. These were also Playstation exclusives for a while and the last I had in that series was PS2 and I was all about the Grand Theft Auto.
The series is endearingly charming and quirky. In short, each game centers around how your dad, The King of All Cosmos, somehow destroys parts of the universe (In the original game he goes on a bender and destroys all the stars in the sky) and tasks you, The Prince, to rebuild them. Your tool is the katamari (I think it is Japanese for roll up) which is a bouncy studded ball (Looks like one of those back massaging balls) you roll around the game and gather stuff up. Get big enough in X amount of time and you move to the next level. Typing that out sounds crazy and also falls short. It needs to be played and if you like puzzlers or are one of those satisfying meme watchers, its worth a try. King of All Cosmos is also a classic bad passive aggressive dad who brutally chides you when you do just ok (Normal is the new black, I guess) much less don't reach size.
I mention all this because I had a lucid and tactile dream where I found myself in one of those trampoline bounce parks. Instead of launch pads the center was a deep pool filled with silicon gummy letters and shapes. Tiny cookie cutter things in the whole alphabet and running from 0 to 10. These also ran up the wall in curated sequences. This wall is all 1234. That wall is all ATGC, a reference to nucleotides in DNA. And I can swim through these quickly even with the katamari in front of me, getting bigger leveling from a beachball to county fair pumpkin. The goal being to push the ball into a hoop with a pattern. Triangle, G, 4,X or Square, B,3,4. It changes with a digital display that sometimes flickers as it cycles between winning combinations. The goal is to drop your katamari into the hoop and hit that pattern but the combinations are approaching factors of pi and you have little control over who you gather. Its infinite and tactile and without pressure even with the game show atmosphere.
I note this because its such a "feeling" dream and one that isn't about work. If you have read this blog, I often treat this as an ersatz dream journal. Note that this blog is coming up on 500 posts and these kind of posts may take it over the milestone.
Post holidays and the house is slammed with stuff. New stuff, some still unopened, that makes me feel an awful guilt. And not the sort of listen to NPR while driving to the Root Cafe to order a fair trade coffee sort of guilt. Or some holy piety simplistic less is more guilt. I feel dumb for buying my kids stuff they look at once and then dive back into YouTube. Extra dumb for thinking they need more as a way to make up for how much I suck as a father. Also a hurt because I want my kids to be like me with these toys, particularly video games and collectibles, but I need to let them be themselves. My son does not play with Legos like I did. Instead of building your own fleets of vehicles and hero rides (after all the formal instruction sets succumb to entropy. Maintaining Lego sets as designed and built requires a combination of real estate and patience saved for the single, the cat-less, or maybe those monks that make Chartreuse) he keeps piles of specific bricks on the floor. These are used to build hand held widgets of modular geometry. Six long eight stud flat planks joined on top of each other and then snapped to the back end of a Lego velociraptor. Motorcycles with the front wheel pulled out and replaced with a set of two rectangle bricks.
On video games I want them to max them out. Its likely due to the success of the medium (The Fear of the Blank Page is on team video games are art) but its not just the volume (We had volume back in the 80s and 90s just a limit on where to get) but the accessibility. You needed to fork over cash to the guy behind the counter at Babbages or KB Toys and ask for the game. Now, just download or snap onto your phone. Maybe because my experience was so formally procedural (Thank you merchant for this good. This piece of plastic and silicon I will take back home once my mom grabs me from the mall) that I needed to really max these games out. I honestly don't recall ever beating too many games as child but I remember playing them often enough if just to feel they were earned. A great example of this is Mario is Missing a game that is quite the lie.
I bought this game. or, well i made Mami buy it after some negotiation or possible reward. maybe she felt bad to albeit she actually grew up with struggles. And this looked sweet. Luigi is the hero!? No fucking way!
That said, the game is educational. Its a point and click geography game (And I LIKE geography) with a bit of world history and globe trotting. Where in the Mushroom Kingdom is Carmen San Diego kind of thing. The educational aspect is not bad (Oregon Trail was educational. Putt Putt games were educational) but its boring and clunky and slapping the Mario moniker is a betrayal. But, I played it because I had maybe ten games and that was sne and damnit lets play it. And I beat it finding Mario in the Forbidden Palace in China! My kids have maybe 20 Switch games and we have Xbox game pass so I can download games on the fly. Its a bounty that to me and my 90s sensibilities seems still perverse even after years of "modern" video gaming.
However, when we gave my daughter a Switch (Something meant to save on arguing and teeth barring fights over the OTHER switch my son dominates AND the Xbox with the Minecraft game) so she can play Minecraft on her own. And she loved it for maybe two days until know the Switch is missing (like Mario!) and she is just still on YouTube. Steve and Alex couldn't top Cookie Swirl C, I guess.
And this makes me upset. "Do you know how much this costs!"
"Well...its from Santa, right?" Which comes out with a bit more venom than this post can imply.
And then I am "Well...fuck" Maybe the big guy will feel bad then!
There games are played in pieces. Maybe it is because of mobile gaming? Social media? Just progress. My own horrible parentage? Likely it is me just romanticizing my own nostalgia and not wanting to remember I could not get past first few levels of Super Ghosts and Goblins. I want my children to be like me, but only the good parts, and not the crappy part (Which we are all doomed to carry from our parents anyway) while hoping to let them build their own "good parts." I should just let them play.
I once dated this girl who was furiously into journaling. With a dedicated set of pens and drawings in the margin to mimic medieval texts. Dragons hand painted into the margins and embellished flourishes on the starting letter in a paragraph. Stuff like that. And I glanced as it once, something I promised I never would but she had left it open on the nightstand of the hotel and I reached for the light, and saw her describe the place, the island, as a place "she had never seen be so green." This was meant to be a compliment on the tropical fecundity.
That stuck with me even after all this time. The best way to describe something so alive it was just green. I have never seen a space that met that criteria until staring into the roadway berm of a trailhead in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. There, beyond the six inches or so of mowed grass, were spiraling goldenrods and exploding New England asters. Thick mats with tall stalks and lance leaves that tumble over one another. I am sure this was just disturbed backfill two weeks ago. Hit by an errant mower or the digging for a new pathway. Each bloom stood out from a wall of green in varying dips of emerald and then lime. What made the scene was all the movement. The honeybees overloaded on dust and then the bumble bees spurred at the leg with their pollen. Threatening hunter wasps bounding each curling stem. And dusty gall flies slicing open the stems to get to the stalks inside and lay their eggs. Everywhere these is movement and color but it is too fast and too small to be taken singularly. Instead its a mass, hypnotic and humming. There is noise in this scene as the quaking aspen stand behind all this catches the wind and shutters that paper trembling sounds. Its the end of August and this stand is the deep and final sign of all summer against the creeping fall. Finally, there is the weather which is at the inflection point right before a strong thunderstorm. The wind cools from behind so the center of your chest is last to lose the sun's warmth and everything seems to hurry. Race to get inside, to scrape a final bit of pollen, to reach the trail shelter and shelter. The patch moves in circles while also in straight lines as things shoot to get secure and put an end to the moment.
My current work has me often in positions where people look to me for a solution. And not just for things in my scope but for everything. Their taxes. Someone not flushing in the staff bathroom. The rumor on who will get fired. So, it is the kind of look people throw at a bursting beacon on the horizon in the epic fantasy movie.
Behold, there is the light and fury of Gondor! What shall it bring to this Helm's Deep!?
The worse is temperature. It is too hot or cold in my room. Our school is tired pile of bricks going on 90 years with most everything being original save not in the charming way, like a Butterfly Gold Pyrex bowl, but in the annoying way. Like leaded gasoline.
Too hot and there is a dwindling shimmer on the single pane glass above the radiators. I have one teacher with big statement olive wood eyes who will say "I'm so hot! Please help!" and I think it is a trap. "Yeah you are!" I joke and want to drop the cymbal clap bit. Ba Dum Dsh! This works much better over the work chat. Where maybe she will hit me back with a brief heart/like icon and just make my day. Or a LOL face which is fine but anything better than a simple thumbs up which feels so clinical. In person it is awkward and plodding as I bite my lip and try to hide behind the gewgaws on my desk. And she nervously strokes down the end of her ponytail asking "Is there like a thermostat? Can the custodian look?" Does playing with her hair mean she is nervous? Frustrated? Confused? By me perhaps? So smitten is she!? Or is it because she is close to heat stroke death? Likely the latter.
The custodian could look and just affirm that everything is fine. It is not that bad. In that teacher's room there is nothing for him to draw his ire to so its just fine. Across the hall it is the bad insulation I had installed three years ago. Of course, that is it. Always ready with not just an answer but THE answer. Something else. Just deal or do as I say.
Too cold and its weak yet threating rimes of ice forming along the vintage window frames. In some spots the walls are so porous that the draft moves paper around behind you making for terrifying backgrounds on Zoom calls "Excuse me. I'm sorry but I have to ask. What is making that drawing on your bulletin board move?"
"Does this get hot?" And people will send me pictures of their radiator registers via text.
I would hope so, if not dress in layers. If the register is pristine and still painted in the tepid mud puddle brown then likely not. They cut the steam to it. If it is beat and covered in the rainbow of melted crayons then yes, it should get cooking.
If you are too cold maybe I will sneak a space heater in your room. Depends on if I trust you enough to use it, turn it off at the end of day. Too hot and here is a fan or i guess turn on your AC and defy everything. One day the boiler will be at max power and every AC and fan will be on and the whole space, the whole red brick lump of entropy, will collapse into a singularity of the right temperature.
The chestnut tree out front, chronicled in blog posts from 2018 and the eponymous Chestnut War, continues to die. Now at an accelerated rate. A large branch maybe five feet long from break to leaf tip fell off one sunny September afternoon. No storms that day so I guessed just a sudden snap of wind. or just the sudden chaos we invoke hypothetically. That branch got "hit by a bus."
The tree has a complete and lovely overall superstructure. At the end of the intersection of Addington and West 120th, one can see it from seven house lengths away and it looks like a lovely tree with a tight bobbing outline against the houses. Its a tree you would see features on a logo. Closer up, however, you can see the patchy empty boughs where entire leaves have withered away. These are big hurting bald spots on the tree where the park curls up form the branches and lichen takes over where wood hasn't frayed. Up close it has this melting snow cone look where flakes of snow have melted and refrozen together, albeit briefly, to come up with a jagged canopy.
Summer 2021 and the tree was loaded with the wispy pipe cleaner flowers. All through August there was that perfume fairy piss smell but that boon turned into few nuts. Likely the neighbors have plundered most of them (My wife swears they are the ones who broke the big branch) but just enough to fill a cereal bowl. A big cereal bowl, mind you. A real two scoops of real raisins and flakes kind of bowl, but a cereal bowl nonetheless. Each year they have dwindled in amount and also in value. From a precious crop to just a novelty. They taste sloppy chalky when roasted, but with enough sugar I can try to make homemade orgeat. That is a nutty syrup usually made with almonds but could be an artisanal blend made with actual chestnuts. Or even peanuts for this circus feeling kind of drink. The handful of nuts should be enough for that. And, if any other ersatz ones do fall, I can add it to the seeping pile in the vial.
I imagine that the next five to seven summers will see more branches slough off. Maybe ones big enough to block the driveway or other wise actively inconvenience the house. Bit by bit it will clockwork out into a stumpy snag with snarled branches and just one section with leaves. There will be less actual chestnut husks by this point, but I will never be so brave to head out there barefoot. It would just make for an even more elaborate story. The one branch dropping the one last chestnut grenade. Even a glancing blow will send someone hobbling.
