What is wrong in your head

What is wrong in your head that you would send me a letter like the one you just did?  On what planet are you actually living. 

I think it's a measure of just how low and ridiculous our relationship has gotten that I'm writing this here instead of responding to you.  I know that won't do any good, I know that won't change anything and rather than beat my head against the same wall that has been smashing me bloody for years, I'm writing it here.  Because I have to say it.  How dare you.

You're giving me back?  You think you of all people are in a position to do that?  I have not lived with you in 30 years.  You have not known me in about 20 and yet somehow you presume to imply that what you do has an impact on who I am and how I'm taken care of.  You have no idea who I am.  Your lofty words and silly smile don't touch me because I know that's all they are, that's all they ever have been.  Silly reflections of a silly person that for whatever reason purposefully let go of reality long before I was done growing up. 

I am truly sorry for you.  I had hoped, and maybe still do hope in some small malnourished corner of myself, that there was something for us to build on.  Some indication that for once I could be the child and you could be the adult and I could talk to you like I see so many others do with their parents.  This is obviously not that time. 

The door is closing on us, I know that.  I did that math last night, I know how much longer we have to both be residents on this planet.  I'm not the mean bastard you seem to think because I don't want it to end like it is.  But I am also no longer a masochist that feels the need to let your crazy into my life solely because of what you were 38 years ago.  I have a family to take care of, I have my sanity to preserve and frankly dealing with you jeopardizes both.  I truly wish it wasn't so but if wishes were dollars and all that jazz.

How dare you presume to be a mom only to make your peace with me.  You don't get that privilege, you don't have that right.  You're not even worth the response. 

The more things change

My wife is a beautiful woman.  That's the first thing most people notice when they meet her.  That was the first thing I noticed when I first met her.  What also becomes apparent very quickly is that she's pretty damn smart too. 

We were driving somewhere and talking about a vacation we had taken in the recent past.  A trip to Italy which concluded with a day in Pompeii.  Pompeii for me was spectacular, beat only by Machu Pichu in terms of wow factor.  It's a town almost entirely intact, frozen in time, and hauntingly familiar. 

While talking about Pompeii and sitting at a traffic light waiting for it to change, my wife made a comment that I immediately rejected but have since reconsidered.  She said, and I'm paraphrasing because my memory isn't that good, "It's amazing how little has changed since then".  I scoffed immediately.  In no way does our life resemble that of the ancient Romans.  But I was wrong and she proved it.

The Romans had plumbing, indoor even.  They had homes and roads, professions and libraries, They had taxi's and messengers, they took baths, they had fast food (this particular feature of Pompeii surprised me).  They worked out, they sent their kids to school, they traveled for holidays.  They had an elected Congress, they had a professional military, they had codified laws and they paid taxes.  In fact, if you took electricity away from us and legal slavery away from them, we would be the same.

This was my wife's argument and the more I thought about it, the harder it was to dismiss.  Is it really possible that we have changed so little over 2000 years of evolution?  Sure we do things faster than they did and we have medical advances that they didn't but again, if you take electricity away those differences fade.  Who we are as a society, who we are as basic human beings, the things we do and care about, the ways we operate, what we consider normal, is virtually the same. 

They might have called it consumption, we call it cancer.  Neither of us can cure it.  They prayed to multiple gods, we pray to one.  Neither has seen him/her/them/it.  They fought the "barbarians", we're fighting the "barbarians"; neither of us is winning.  It's all eerily the same. 

I'm sitting in the cafeteria having lunch today and watching CNN.  Or rather reading it since it's too loud in there to hear what the anchor is saying but I can read captions and the scroll bar at the bottom.  Apparently the pope is set to meet with someone regarding world poverty and the factoid rolls across the bottom: 85 people control 50% of the worlds wealth.  Well shit. 

My first thought was "how is this news"?  Sure the number might be a little shocking, that's a very small number of people given the world population of almost 7 billion to hold so much of the worlds wealth.  But should it really be that shocking?  It's always been that way.

The Romans are a notoriously inequitable society.  The wealth of the known world, and they conquered much of it, was in the hands of a select few elite.  The overwhelming majority of people in the Roman empire were slaves or non-citizens with limited rights.  The Asia of today if you will.  Actual Roman citizens faired a little better but they weren't necessarily rich.  Think of them as today's college graduates.  But a small handful of Romans had it all.  They could do anything, buy anything, be anything they wanted.

Man hasn't changed much since we as a species first discovered the concept of value.  Since then, we've been identifying things of value and working and fighting to acquire more of it than the next guy.  Today it's money, 2000 years ago it might have been land.  Whatever that value item was, we have been standing on the shoulders of the drowning to get more of it since we first noticed it was there. 

Frankly, I have a pretty low opinon of the average person so I'm not overly concerned by this idea.  The world is as it presents itself to be.  Not as your parents told you it is, not as Hollywood says it is, not how you think it should be.  It just is.  The people that are surprised and appaled by this dubious statistic CNN flashed on the screen are the same ones that cannot see the world as it is.  For whatever the reason, they choose to think of the world differently and so this real world event, that an inequality of such monsterous proportions exists, actually surprises them. 

It shouldn't.  We have always been this and unless Gene Rodenberry is right and money become obsolete 300 years from now, we will always be this.  Take away the fancy cars and the cell phones and we're not much more than we were 2000 years ago.   
 

 

Trying to Feel Sad

I read something in my FB feed this morning that told me a girl I went to high school with died.  She had breast cancer and was a year older than me; a year younger than my sister.  It's not the first time someone has posted that a classmate or an almost classmate had moved on but I had time so I pulled out the year book and I looked her up. 

I vaguely remember the face.  Frozen on the page of my yearbook.  Forever 16 or 17 like all of us.  If she said 10 words to me during our 3 years of overlap in that school I would count it as a lot.  Having no memories of her one way or another tells me she at least wasn't a mean person.  Well, not to me but I'm a pretty decent litmus test for these things, I got my share of shit from classmates.

In any case, I remember the face but we were nothing more than strangers to each other. 

I feel sad about her passing though.  I googled her name and found some articles that explained more in depth what happened.  2006 diagnosed for the first time (31 years old).  Chemo and breast removal sent it into remission.  2009 it came back but had metastasized to her liver.  Fighting for 4+ more years until it got her.  That's what I learned.  She had 2 boys (9 and 12) and a husband and from pictures lived in a nice subdivision in town.  A place I know well from hanging out there as a kid. 

Two things really hit me.  One, her boys were 1 and 4 when she first found out she was sick.  I can't imagine that, having a little man of my own.  How would I tell him mommy is sick?  How would I face the idea of bringing him up to be a good man without the one person he loves above all others?  How did her husband do it?  Two, she fought. 

Her FB page was mostly open and there are hundreds of pictures on there.  About 3/4 of them are of her boys doing boy things like playing baseball and fishing but there are some too of her.  While she was in chemo, no hair, no eyebrows, hollowed out but still smiling. 

That's what got me.  She's doing chemo, she's fighting this thing and she's going to baseball and football games with her family.  She's going fishing.  She's wearing her team's jersey and rooting them on.  She's going on vacation with her husband.  She's living and fighting because she now knows what so few of us do.  That you're never more alive until that moment when you almost weren't. 

Like I said, I didn't know Jennifer personally.  I probably wouldn't have recognized her if we'd passed in the grocery store.  But I felt myself grieving for her and her family just the same.  I hugged my wife and son a little tighter this morning.  I gave them extra kisses and made sure to tell them I loved them because it's important that they know I do.  It's important that I recognize just how lucky I am to still be drawing breath, and to have those I love draw breath, this morning because so many other good and decent people are not. 

Life is pain Highness.  So said Wesley in the Princess Bride and the older I get the more I realize how right he was.  Human suffering is everywhere if we pay attention and maybe it's right and good that we should sometimes.  Because we are in fact never more in the moment, never more appreciative of what we have, never more alive than we are in the moments immediately following the moment that we almost weren't.  It doesn't take a near death experience to get that, just attention to the death that has been there all along.