Re-homed

Report day for incoming freshman at the dorms of my old alma mater was last Sunday, 24 September 2017. There's a whole second dorm community that's gone up in the 20 years since I graduated, served by the exact same inadequate parking lot as the old dorm. To head off a massive jam of emotionally fraught middle-aged people trying to park their cars and contemplate the incremental but undeniable advance of their own mortality at the exact same time, the organizers smartly gave us all staggered report times so we wouldn't all arrive at once. Plus, they give you a window of exactly 30 minutes to unload and get the fuck out of the way to make room for the next wave, so it's a whirlwind of angsty positive motion, without quite enough time to stop and build to a full-force existential nervous breakdown. So it went pretty well.

There isn't really much of anything to look at once you're inside the dorm room itself, unless you count the roommate. The room is about wide enough for me to touch both walls with my fingertips if I stretched my arms out, so the entire tour takes about as long as a theatrical double-take.

The roommate himself seemed fine. Some white kid from Gilroy, the garlic capital of the world. I checked the Wikipedia page and it doesn't seem to note that that place produces pillow-smothering roommate murderers at a rate any higher per capita than any other place, so I guess it'll be OK. From what I understand of Gilroy, the biggest concern, demographically speaking, is that he'll get my kid hooked on synthetic opioids, but the joke's on him because our hometown already competes in that category on the national level.

My son's mom and I went to drop him off and, since we only had the one very temporary parking permit, we went in one car. That means the drive home was just the two of us, the mutual divorcees, alone together for the first time since she moved out back in '10. It could have been awkward I guess, but the fact that we'd just set our oldest boy off at a good school, having made it all the way through Inland Southern California public schools without impregnating anyone or learning to cook meth* or getting a neck tattoo, we were feeling fairly accomplished, if not a little wistful and maybe the tiniest bit self-satisfied. Somehow we've ended up doing a pretty good job with that kid. The other two, yeesh, but that one... well, I don't want to jinx anything. It's only been four days. Fingers crossed.

It's been a week of looming and crashing momentousness around here and I for one am exhausted. This week I've been trying to train myself to cook food for just three people, which is harder than it sounds when you're used to four, especially when the missing fourth one is an 18-year-old boy-man who contemplates food less in portions than in piles. Besides that, everyone just feels a bit off kilter without that extra voice around. We've been adjusting by doing the thing we know how to do best: taking it out on the middle son. He didn't know he'd been hiding out for 16 years, shielded by the trailblazing presence of his older brother, out there trampling a path for him to follow. I wouldn't say we're trying to make him cry every day, but it's just a cathartic, happy coincidence that we've been able to. The way I look at it, self-esteem is on the most subjective of scales. You need points of referential comparison. In other words, if everyone has high self-esteem, then nobody does. That's why god gave us middle children, everybody.

Other than that, I'm out here trying to figure out how to be a single person again, for the first time in my forties. It sounded scarier before, but I just divested myself of one of my offspring and that didn't kill me. What's a Tinder coffee date with a stranger going to do to me?

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*or at least if he has learned to cook meth, he's been considerate enough to do it in such a fashion that I can't tell he knows how to cook meth. If you can't get full social responsibility, at least shoot for good manners. Still feels like a win for us either way.

To the left, to the left

It's almost 11:30 pm here as I start this, so I'm getting to this late. I'm worn out and a bit emotionally raw still, so this may be shorter than usual. I'm in such a state, I'm afraid if I go on too long some poetry may even leak out. I'll do my best to fend it off, but you've been warned.

I was out on a school night with my boys seeing Kingsman: The Golden Circle, a title that bothers me since it really should be Kingsmen not Kingsman seeing as there are several dudes, but they're insisting, so, fine. Also Colin Firth is somehow in it, even though in the last one [SPOILERS] shot him in the [SPOILERS] right after the fucking batshit crazy [SPOILERS SPOILERS] scene. But it's ostensibly a comic book movie, and we know that in comics, nobody stays dead except Uncle Ben.

I may do a full review in future,* but for now I'm preoccupied with a) being newly single, for the first time in many years and b) being on the brink of casting off one of my children into the quasi-adult airlock leading eventually to self-determination that is the American public university.

The first thing I've only been trying to wrap my head around for the last 72 hours or thereabouts, but it all came about without a lot of shock or scandal, so I'm in a fairly positive space. On this side of 40, all I'm really looking for is to avoid any creeping bitterness or cynicism. For dudes who hit all the demographic markers I do, that usually ends up looking like latent--or worse, decidedly non-latent--misogyny. There are no women responsible for my predicament. Heck, I'm going to have some Saturdays free to get virtually beaten up by strangers across the globe from the comfort and safety of my couch. Whatever frustrations I have I can always work out by throwing my PS4 controller at my innocent and unmarked walls, which seems healthy and cathartic to me.

The second thing, my boy moving out, I've had a lot more time to get used to, obviously. People in this situation like to point out how fast time seems to move, but look, it's legitimately been 18 years since he was born. I know, I was there, I lived all the days. It's not that I'm glad he's leaving, far from it, but it's not like it snuck up on me. Dude is like six feet tall these days. He's not sneaking up on anybody.

There's more to say about all these issues (and myriad others), but I'm spent. I'm going to lean on the indulgence of the vast and loyal readership to permit me to get away with this disjointed and scratched-out piece. I'm also going to say to you all: if you know any single ladies, now's the time.

Self-Sucker Punch

Just to update you from last week's news about my emotional well-being, I can say that I am managing my anxiety a little better this week. It's not gone, but the spikes feel slightly less spiky. What I can't tell is if this means I'm improving or that the added emotional shock-trauma of being blindsided by an unmanageable wave of worry has leveled off into something I expect, blunting the sting a bit. Yes, I'm such a state that even if I feel better, I'm convinced it's a sign I'm actually secretly doing worse. Maybe I just answered my own question.

Normalizing the abnormal isn't an unreasonable fear, however. This has been a rallying cry for social and legal vigilance since this past January and the Incident On Capitol Hill.

So far I've been going it alone, wading through the peaks and troughs of my journey through compromised perspective. I have the option of seeing a talk-therapy person, one I used in the past through the knotty incidences of separation and divorce, but scheduling and co-pays involve the resources of time and money, neither of which I'm spoiled for at the moment. Besides, I'm a heterosexual American white man in 2017. I'm not going to let anyone tell me what I can and can't handle, even if it's my own body, the thing doing the actual handling. Or, in this case, not-handling.

It would be easier to tell if I was being unreasonably jumpy or overreacting if things would stop happening that lacked the regular limiters on reaction. I mean, right after Hurricane Harvey tried to drown most of southeast Texas, another Atlantic hurricane--Irma, starting with the very next letter--kicked Florida up the ass right after literally depopulating whole sections of the Caribbean. How can I tell if I'm unreasonably freaking out when the reasonable responses to stimuli include freaking out?

Also next week, really in about 10 or 12 days I think, I'm going to be shipping my oldest boy off to college, out of my house forever. Or until the holidays. Or, now that I think about it, he's going to the state school just on the opposite end of the city we currently live in, so maybe just until the following weekend. But the point is, a milestone will have been reached. A threshold crossed. A barrier breached. A curtain drawn. A candle snuffed. A something-else something-ed. This shit is so heavy, even the metaphors are at a loss.

Maybe that's the root of it, the Grand Finale of the first stage of the most profoundly transformative relationship of my life, me and my firstborn child. That'll probably cause a psychic spasm or three. The good news is that if this is what's causing my anxiety, I won't have to worry about it with my other two children. If I've learned anything from being a parent, it's that when you get down to the third child, it's not that you care less; by then you just learn that you're allowed to care less. And so then, yeah, I guess you actually do.

Dogs and Cats Living Together

Certainly, there's plenty to be anxious about. It's 2017 and the world has decided that nothing is left that makes sense below the level of pant-shitting crisis. Sure, there are ways to understand events in a manner devoid of panic or earth-bending calamity, but the new epistemology is rising, shaped in a crucible that burns away the limiting impurities of sense and sensibility and replaces them with, well, mostly just more burning. Pretty soon there won't be anything left to experience or even really look at that won't hurt your eyes just a little bit.

There are people for whom the cumulative crisis is an obvious lie, where the seeming causal chain is no chain at all, just an unrelated handful of steel links that might be touching each other, but are in no way connected. They just happen to be collected together, in a burlap bag tied around our feet as we cling to the edge of a freeway overpass above the river that used to be an interstate. Yeah, OK, things are grim. But that's no reason to go indulging in false narratives and conspiracy theories. It's possible to have a series of ailments and no collective syndrome. It's possible to have lashing rain and tearing wind without a low-pressure vortex of nothing drawing it all together into anything so coherent as a storm.

I find these people and their smug calm absolutely unbearable. While yes, it's true that every generation of humans is convinced they have it worse than every previous generation, up to and including the absolute certainty that we are the Special Ones chosen to experience the end times, it's also true that eventually, one day, a generation of humans with this exact solipsistic, myopic view of history and their inability to conceive of a universe where humanity exists without them, will accidentally be right. To be clear, I am NOT SAYING THIS IS US. I'm just also being careful to not NOT say it's us.

It's probably not coincidental that I've chosen this particular period of time to become actually, clinically anxious. It's a curious thing to experience an actual emotional disorder. I have a ton of experience with it second hand as literally every adult woman I know is on medication for depression. I obviously hold on to the caveat that perhaps they have not all been depressed and this is simply a capitalist-patriarchy handshake cultural inevitability of pathologizing normal female human behavior and then monetizing the treatment, but I should point out that I have seen cases where intervention was no-shit life-or-death stakes. A medical loss of perspective is frightening.

I've been lucky that I'm not prone to depression, not even a little. But I definitely can get The Other Thing and I'm about a month into it this time. The great news for everyone around me is that I have no idea how long it will last and the way it manifests makes it difficult to self-diagnose the triggering event in the first place.

But it's really possible that the triggering event isn't all that important. Like I suggested, once the monster is awakened, every news cycle anymore is nothing but high-grade monster food. So here's me with my stomach knots, my preoccupation, my sleeplessness, my restlessness, my fidgeting irritability... yes, I'm as much fun to be around as I make it sound.

It helps to think about the fact that I've been here before and there are long stretches in between where I'm as level as anyone; a steady, reliable font of unsolicited nuggets of perspective for anyone unfortunate enough to make eye contact.

So I'm leaving other people alone for now. One of the tragic/happy side-effects of anxiety is that all you can really talk about during an episode is yourself and how anxious you are about stuff. Like this entire blog post, for example. I got through the whole thing and didn't once mention the new British royal baby coming. I told you, perspective is the first thing to go.

I'll try to do better next time.