Lily of the Nile

I've said during other momentous periods of time that my history (as in my experience and professional training before now) in history (as in the academic discipline revolving around avoiding math at all costs) has conditioned me to want to document what is happening while it's happening. If you've ever paid attention to a Republican politician since 2015, you will know exactly why: it doesn't take long at all before people--out of either our natural fungibility as narrative-based animals or because we are dirty rotten liars--begin to overlay the actual events with storylines that are either easier to accept (because either the new version is more comfortable to live with or it simply streamlines the recollection of a complicated cacophony into a much more convenient timeline, especially when suggested to you in a not-at-all leading way by a Fox News interviewer) or just suit our new needs in the New Present. Not to get too philosophical, but all experience is potentially a total hard-drive wipe, second by second, depending on the level of delusion we're either searching for or capable of living with. The winding, sometimes circular path you cut out of unexplored wilds with a dull machete and brute strength can instantly look like an eight-line interstate the second you look behind you if you're willing to imagine it so.

Even though I wrote a way-too-long paragraph about it with way-too-complicated sentences, I feel like I can still say without irony: I don't have to belabor this point. We've had two of the most memory-holed experiences in the history of human public consciousness just within the last five years in the COVID epidemic and the January 6 invasion of the Capitol building. I did my bit for both of those in as real-time as one can manage in a weekly blog, with my characteristic even-handedness, or at least as evenhanded as one can reasonably expect to be while shitting themselves. You don't have to remain perfectly calm to be a beacon of perspective, you just have to be able to articulate why you're shitting yourself in the moment, especially in a time when that seems like the most logical response to the input.

I've taken a step back from recording and commenting on political and social events in the last few years, mostly to give myself a break, from both the speed of events and from the exhausting work of trying to understand anything amidst the more and more entrenched, more insistently braying sources of white noise. We're really down to the point where there are almost no "events" to report on. The entire public sphere has become analysis of one kind or another, to use that term in a hilariously general way. What actually happens has become so insignificant, "news" channels have stopped pretending to give headlines in any kind of programmatic way. The idea, I think, is we can get those from the internet (which is famously and uniquely terrible at headlines, the initial source of the term "clickbait") so TV "news" is just people reading off talking points about stuff that happened, sometimes even before it happens. We knew Bill O'Reilly's cavalcade of bullshit he called the "No Spin Zone" was dark irony at the time, but what wasn't clear was that it was the prototype for all media going forward.

With my now-faded, barely remembered history in history in mind, though, I do remember that first-person accounts of human lives on the small scale are just as valuable for insight into a culture as Great Man Of History accounts of governments, world leaders and whom either one is fucking.

So following on the last few weeks' posts about my new empty-nesting, let's recount a few ways things have progressed here at this house, the place I go every day specifically to hide out from The News.

1) The room vacated by my last remaining home-living child has specifically been targeted as my future office space, which has involved a total cleanout and a fresh coat of paint on the walls. The smaller rooms upstairs I don't think have been painted since the house was built in 1997, so they looked a little bit exactly like they had bounded in a teenaged boy for many years. The rest of the house is kind of a gold-beige, which I still mostly like, but has been kind of everywhere since 2003. I went with exactly one can of what our friends at Sherwin-Williams call agapanthus, a sort of purplish-blue, right on the border with pastel. Is it manly? Reader, I will be 50 years old next week, it would be a real weird time to suddenly start giving a shit about that as a category.

2) You know what is manly? Yard stuff! It's less manly to pay other men to do yard stuff for you, sure, but sometimes you start getting arthritic knees and also you just have the one trash can, which can look awfully small if you haven't bothered to touch your backyard in like a year. Instead of the traditional weeds, for some reason this year the entire patch of bare dirt back there was entirely colonized by wild grass seed, so during the rains, I had a lush two-to-three-foot-tall thicket of thriving invasive grass. This of course turned into what forest rangers and firefighters call "an immediate cause of concern" once the rains stopped and it all dried out. So I took the hit and spent the money I got cashing out my vacation time when I quit my last job, replacing the dry thatch with fake grass. Real men give a shit about lawn maintenance, I know, but I refer you to the previous numbered point where I opted for some lavender walls.

3) Less impressively, I seem to have accidentally opted out of going to my regular general practitioner, at least for the rest of the year. This isn't part of the empty nesting, but with all the transition going on, including the new job and new insurance, it turns out I mistakenly chose a plan that won't pay for the clinic I regularly go to or the doctor(s) housed within. I've been an adult for a long time, in fact for such a long time that just this week I passed the point where I've been a parent longer than not after my oldest turned 25. And yet somehow, I managed to completely balls-up a pretty basic adulting challenge by basically uninsuring myself. Sure, I still have insurance and I've been randomly assigned a new GP by my existing stupid fucking HMO, but I've had about an ass full of changes already. I already asked my long-time doctor's office how much a visit would cost out of pocket (it's about $174), so now I get to run two of my long-standing anxiety drivers headlong into each other: discomfort with change vs. threats to my economic viability.

And see, because I'm writing this down in real time, we don't know which of those crippling neuroses will win. This is actually fun! Not as fun as waiting to see if a bunch of deluded car salesmen would be able to successfully hang the vice president of the United States on live TV that one time, but history is history, big or small.