Another Solstice

I have the sort of restless mind that spends more time observing, projecting and scrabbling for context than it does just existing, just being. Willowy late-middle-age Baby Boomer ladies pretzeling their way through [vaguely Hindi-sounding adjective] yoga classes would call this a lack of presence. I am not good at being present. I spend way too much time trying to be past and future.

Using a phrase like "restless mind" to describe myself runs the risk of coming across as self-important early-millennium first-order douchery, sure. Hm. I don't really have a "but" sentence to qualify or soften that.

When I went off to graduate school to learn the very practical skill of thinking about stuff that happened a long time ago and that thousands of other people had already thought more than enough about, most of whom were middle-class white dudes exactly like me, I did it with the paradoxical idea in my self-indulgent, rationalizing brain* that looking backward was a better way of looking forward and looking down. It was easy to see my shoes where I stood, sure, but if I just read enough of the right books in the right order, I would understand not only how I got there in the first place, but where I was likely to end up next.** Also if I kept looking backward, I could avoid all eye contact (even accidental!) with the people around or ahead of me. My priorities were pretty clear in my twenties. Not all who are alone are lonely.

When my kids were really little, I'd sit with them in their beds as they went down for naps. I wouldn't nap myself and I had no interest in trying to shepherd them back to their beds as they inevitably eschewed sleep for their preferred pastime of appearing silently out of nowhere to make sure daddy can't relax for five seconds. So I sat there, NOT LIKE A WEIRD CONTROL FREAK, but like a regular and well-adjusted good dad, and I would take the opportunity to read. Not to the kid, but to myself, from a book with no pictures in it, as a method to more completely ignore the child at whose feet I was sitting. It was in this fashion that I wended my way through the lengthy and deep Terry Pratchett Discworld oeuvre, but in between cracking satirical novels about witches and cops I pushed myself to read complicated history and philosophy because I was pretty sure parenting was rotting my brain one peanut butter and jelly sandwich at a time.

It was in those slow afternoons of what I now call the Crawling Years that I learned some things that had not just eluded me in graduate school but had been the active components in the "failure" that saw me leave with only a master's degree and not the PhD I'd set out after. I understood Nietzsche way less than 100%, but I knew I had no expert professor to fill in the gaps for me, so the choice became clear: accept that you don't currently get it all or give up. I did not give up. At the low/high point, I think I understood about 20% of Martin Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics, but I got through the whole goddamned thing. It's about four pounds heavier than it was when I bought it with all the extra red ink from all my illegibly scratched-in marginalia and compulsively indiscriminate underlining, but that's just more proof that I charged forward against a cause that was maybe never exactly achievable, but certainly never lost.

So I've spent a lot of time trying to be better read, fighting against the tug around the ankles always threatening to pull me back to my white-trash roots, reveling in ignorance and disdaining those who deign to know better. Or who would use words like "deign," the fuckers.

I'm not going to pretend that this program of self-improvement has sustained itself. I watch a lot of television now and I think over the past two years I've read a grand total of four books, none of which were written by Germans. The only thing I'm working on is Rosetta Stone's Latin American Spanish program, but even then "working on" is a generous description. I mean, there's evidence that I'm not not working on it, but let me just say that I had though to end this paragraph with Spanish joke or even a Spanglish pun and, well, let's all just keep waiting for that to show up, shall we?

Now what intellect I have left, I spend thinking too hard about television and movies. I don't really even engage politically as it's not really a productive epoch for that kind of exchange, except for with people who either already agree with me or with people who will benefit from my perspective. This latter category is entirely occupied by my children, by the way. Don't worry, I'm not straightening people out on the commuter train. This is Southern California anyway. We barely have those.

Or what I do is I spend time being fascinated by science-y sounding news items like this CRISPR thing about DNA something or the TRAPPIST-1 thing about I think aliens(?) or articles about how wolves reintroduced into ecosystems cause beavers. Oh! And also? I like to put together unsourced faux-logical streams of causation that explain the secret and invisible underpinnings of modern American social and cultural norms.

Like right now, it's really fucking hot where I live. Like way over 80 degrees. Because summer has started and I live in a semi-arid transitional climatological zone, just on the wrong side of a rain shadow between a rising coastal plane and the Mojave Desert. So "fucking hot where I live" is the refrain between now and about mid-October, the traditional time when I stop complaining about the heat and start complaining about the fucking holidays. Then I think: would anyone live here if air conditioning had never been invented? Sure, some people would live here because there are hardy folk looking to exchange comfort for affordability in every human population. But cheapskates and masochists aside, there are over 300,000 people in this city where I live. And 4.5 million or so in these inland counties where the adobe bricks bake themselves. And since A/C has become affordable and omnipresent since the end of WWII, the population in mostly hot-ass California (fuck off, San Francisco and Newport Beach) has gone from around 7 million to almost 40 million. So what does this mean? It means without the invention of air conditioning, this giant, slanting demographic counterweight offsetting the rest of the country's statistical mean to the right of center is far, far slighter. Sure Donald Trump would probably still be president, but he probably would have won the popular vote too. Think about living in that unholy dystopian nightmare.

And also there's this huge problem of trying to sustain a still-expanding population in an area with almost no native sources of potable water and one that is built on top of land that sometimes violently tries to shake us off of it. But I told you, I'm not reading a lot anymore. I can only be responsible for one profound revelation at a time. And no solutions, sorry. Maybe if I start availing myself of the newly legalized aids, I can get my restless mind to wander more productively.

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*see, "restless" doesn't always mean "socially productive."

**weirdly, it's usually a Buffalo Wild Wings. No idea why. I don't even like their food.

***sometimes literally, what with the kids and all