The Exhale

It's obnoxious to say it, but I'm pretty happy at the moment. The internet these days is awash with trigger warnings and all sorts of other built-in controls to make sure whatever it is anyone is about to read might not accidentally bring on a unprovoked rash of sads, so I guess I should jump out right up top and say if you're feeling bad about yourself and the idea of reading about someone else's relative good fortune propels you into a black hole of self-loathing, comfort eating or animal harming, DO NOT PANIC. I always find a way to cloud up a silver lining before the end. You know I'm good for it. Plus we've all sat through my occasional dark night of the soul phases, so in the long view, it all balances out.

The thing that astounds me the most, as we wade into the part of the year we refer to as Birthday Season around here, the kids all put on another tick in the ones place on their odometers and... they all seem to really like me still. And two of them are now teenagers. I remember being a teenager myself. NOTHING I would have written then would have opened with anything like the first line of this blog post. Mr. Sullen McEnnui, that was me, a ball of simmer, with temperatures ranging from indifference all the way to perturbed annoyance. My kids still want to talk to me. They seek my company and conversation. Either they like me or all three of them are highly functioning sociopaths, able to completely mask the "fuck you" behind their eyes. Which, I would like to say, I would be OK with. I've always been more of an actions-before-intentions type anyway.

Whatever the reason, after watching my sisters with their (older than mine) kids, with all the curses and threats and long nights of quiet, soul-chipping worry, I'm aware enough to sit here and appreciate the fuck out of my relative peace and calm. Anyone who grew up amidst chaos is always burdened with the niggling, bass-thrum certainty down in the squirrelly recesses of the brain that those days are just around the corner, just waiting to come again, like a herpes outbreak or your run-of-the-mill messiah. Every year that doesn't happen is one of the Golden Years.

It also may just be that I've finally lived long enough to learn to appreciate the things around me, the things I used to take for granted if not actively fight against. I love my city, my state, the great metropolis we orbit (Los Angeles) and the country that contains us all. Or it could be that I have, coincidentally, acquired for myself a better-rounded perspective for all these things through finally getting the fuck out of this dump for a bit. Over the last four years I've spent time in San Francisco, LA, San Diego, Monterey, New York City, Washington DC, Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans and Atlanta, with a significant amount of time invested on the interstates between those things. I feel like being elsewhere, trying to milk a grand, complicated organism like a modern American city for whatever rich, nourishing protein I can squeeze out of it in a limited time has allowed me to apply the same vigorous approach to places like my hometown, which no longer looks quite so fragmented and stale, or LA, which I no longer refer to as The Place Where I'll Eventually Be Stabbed.*

Or maybe anything looks awesome after spending any time in fucking Detroit.

Right now I have that great and rarest of human gifts: I don't feel stuck. I did for a while. I will again. Sooner than I'd like, no mistake. But I recognize as I approach 40 that, for whatever the reason, I'm able to love the things closest to me. My city, my country, my girlfriend... All of those were outside my emotional reach just five years ago. Especially my now-girlfriend. I was still married five years ago. That would have been bad luck had I tried. Married guys are gross. I would have totally struck out.


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*That title has been transferred to My Left Kidney.