Sunday, April 05, 2009
The Meaning of Life: A Photographic Smack in the Chops
Maybe that last post was a bit too much of my dirty laundry, to speak both literally and figuratively. And maybe it’s just a good place to start. Was a time that this here Chucklehut was a place of mirth and merrymaking, but that was back when Mirth Day was a mandated federal holiday and
ooh, internet magic! for you, no time has elapsed. For me, it’s been over an hour of cleaning off the kids’ car seats, ironing pants, preparing tax documents, and rationalizing a few cut corners. As I hauled the last sacks of garbage and recycling downstairs and outside in anticipation of tomorrow morning’s very early pickup (sounds more enticing than it is), I found an elderly man at our big blue bin, a broadbrimmed hat protecting his silvery locks from the moon’s searing rays, his body covered in sturdy workclothes, his face a map of lands undiscovered, his hands busily burrowing through our glass-plastics-paper. I staggered up to him with yet another tranche of effluvia, wishing that he’d been a few doors away or that I’d been just a shred quicker or slower to attend to this duty. He wished me a good evening, his voice like old newsprint or brown paper bags, as he transferred a few bottles to his shoddy, overworked totecart. I don’t recall saying anything back to him, which means I probably said, “have a good one.” That’s eminently repressible, given the circumstances. Who am I, to invoke the “good one,” for one such as he? What would a “good one” mean to him, anyway? What does it mean to me, anymore?
Well, I have to admit that there have been plenty of good ones for me lately. Not the kind that get lots of attention, with the sparklers and dancing girls and laudatory chirons, but good ones nonetheless. I had a good visit from my sister and her family; among other things, we together celebrated Z’s 4th birthday in grand style with 25 of his closest friends, and had a lovely trip to the new Science Museum - finally, for me, not on a weekend, so it wasn’t a giant exhibit in factory-farming livestock conditions, and I even got to see the movie at the planetarium. (The movie was narrated by Sigorney Weaver, so I was waiting eagerly through the whole thing for a giant acid-drooling titanium-clad alien to show up. Guess who walked out disappointed.) There was a charming trip with one of Z’s preschool chums to the zoo ("No Maulings Since 2007!"), full of them full of juvenile excitement and giant cockroaches comfortingly ensconced behind nice, thick plexiglass. Yesterday the four of us jaunted up to the headlands to visit Hawk Hill, a very short drive and an even shorter walk but the kind of landscape (natural and otherwise) that really makes an impression even on such jaded locals as we. Soon, Kel’s folks and two sisters and a nephew are coming to town to experience the phenomenon that is Jesse. Plus, pesach is around the corner - I’ve already got my gourmet Israeli caramel chews and a recipe for macaroons that would amaze anyone who’s been stuck with those chewy lumps of pencil-eraser shavings up with which most of us grew.
So yes, I shouldn’t complain, but why should I let that stop me? The inside of my skull is a riot of scrawled vituperation and dirty limericks and lots of redaction, rich voiceless blackness overblotting the outbursts I prefer not to acknowledge, or at least, not to articulate. Life seems to be a series of highs and lows. It reminds me of the stories of Everest climbers, who trudge across unimaginable heights on ice plains that are woven with hidden fissures, any of which could collapse beneath their feet and send them hundreds or thousands of feet into an abyss narrow enough to touch both sides with one’s ears and deep enough to be tantamount to an ocean floor. If that’s too tortured an analogy, I’ll stick with “highs and lows” - all experienced with explicit comparison to the plights of so many of those around me who suffer or risk so much more than I do, or who triumph with successes they seem to overlook but which leave me stammering with envy and impotence.
Given this bipolar orientation, this double-bound relationship with my own life, I challenge myself when I open the blog editing window to chuck an le or two, but lately it’s not coming out that way at all. Partly it’s the fault of my stupid bus, on which I haven’t had a decent seat downtown for weeks - just too crowded to get any writing done, and not even in an interesting way. Partly it’s work, which has been engaging and diverting and fully occupational lately, much to the detriment of my willingness or ability to do any decent writing once I get on the bus home. Partly it’s the sudoku, to which I’ve been resorting as a soporific at bedtime instead of my inkstained notebooks. Maybe it’s that I now live in a world in which hope is not an entirely ironic concept; maybe it’s that my world now includes a young child whose every vital fiber - and he’s got plenty of them - is devoted to the disassembly of anything that has been assembled, and the toppling of anything that has been constructed. There’s just so little energy left for jokes, after the boys are put to sleep, and so little chance for them beforehand.
Was that an excuse? An apology? A complaint? Maybe a bit of each, but really not. I read the site stats - there isn’t anyone coming by on anything like a regular basis, who doesn’t know what he or she is getting into when clicking through. By a wide margin the majority of my new visitors are looking for something related to some silly joke or bad pun I made years ago. I owe those trawlers nothing, and the rest of you I owe too much ever to make it up to you so I am comfortable not trying to. I do have a few lighter things stocked up somewhere to share with you someday, some silly rants and some light verse and even a funny list (funny to me, anyway, which is all it takes to get on this site). I could do an upbeat post on kitchen equipment (maybe that would be an upbeater post, but you see I’m already pushing my luck), or a downbeat one on another chapter of my English schoolboy days. But after all is said and done, none of that seems like the post that this site - as an extension of my own psyche - needs right now. What I need right now, rather, is a crisp, invigorating slap across the punim.
Everything is fine, goddamn it. I get black moods but I need to remember that blacklights brilliantly illuminate as well. I once had blacklight posters, and marveled at their intensity under the purple bulb for more hours than might have been recommended for a child of my then-tender years. The point being, I need to get the hell off my Hamlet complex or whatever it is that I am indulging so gratuitously these days. And lucky for me, I actually have an antidote. So let’s all take a mutual gander at the following THINGS THAT REMIND ME THAT LIFE ROCKS:
Exhibit 1 is Jesse. Here he is charging down the boardwalk at the Lobos Creek meadows at the Presidio. The really cool thing about this photo is that he’s actually running toward me. He’s a runner-awayer, most of the time. But whether he’s coming at you or otherwise, he definitely does it with every scrap of enthusiasm he can muster.
Kel snapped this Jesseshot at the Academy of Sciences. I think he’s getting ready to do some welding.
For all of J’s goofy hamhandedness, Z is all smoothness and panache. He’s got more style already than I will ever be able to rent for any occasion. This image of him showing off his ticket at the zoo is a good example of how amazingly cool this kid is. And today he came up and whispered to me that we were going to be friends and have fun all day long. And you know, he was right.
At Z’s birthday party, he insisted on having a pinata. He was so excited about it the night before that he couldn’t settle down to sleep, eventually just begging Kel “Just say ‘pinata.’ Please, just say it!” We picked one out in the shape of one of the characters on one of his favorite television shows. Zach loves Pablo. Especially, Zach loves whacking Pablo with a cheerfully-festooned authentic Chinese pinata-whacking stick. And he he is, doing just that.
After several of the kids at the party had taken their licks against Pablo’s tissue-clad hide, the poor thing’s head popped right off. Not to be dissuaded, we just hoisted him aloft again with the rope strung under his adorable little flippers. Actually, it felt macabre and wicked, but the kids smelled the candy and were going to attack Pablo till he burst anyway so I figured we might as well keep trying to make it sporting. But once we got Pablo’s pieces back home, his decapitated head became an object of delighted fascination, especially to Zach and his cousin Delia:
Changing gears briefly, a few days ago Z begged me to make cookies with him after work. We still had a good lump of hamentashen dough, so we rolled it out and punched a few standard sugar cookies out of it. Z and J both participated in the whole process, and apart from leaving the kitchen so dusted with flour that a CSI team could have been there taking prints from every surface from the ceiling down, a cubic hectare of fun was had by all.
Plus, the cookies turned out great.
Let’s conclude with a few shots from yesterday’s trip to Hawk Hill. It’s a stunning setting just west of the GG bridge, at the top of coastal bluffs that rise about 1500 feet right up from the ocean. The whole city is laid out across the bay, the water sparkled through the gate, and the bridge gleamed orange in the blazing sunlight. I took a bunch of landscape and cityscape photos, none of which are in the least interesting. If you’ve been coming here for any length of time at all, rather, you already know that my interest was mainly taken with the many ruined military emplacements left after WWII. Hawk Hill was heavily fortified and fully manned, and the crumbling concrete bunkers and magazines have been richly embellished by individuals with a fondness for cheap beer in large cans, and for writing in a mostly illegible manner on every available surface. Here’s what it looked like to me:
- and here’s what it really looked like to me. By which I mean, this is what it looked like to visit a paint-stained, rust-crusted wrack of a reinforced concrete bunker, and to find in its wall an inexplicable hole that penetrates from the fog-battered exterior to the sot-stained interior, a hole that was most likely originally made for some military necessity but has since turned into a place for pushing beer cans out of, or into, an abandoned and outmoded space.... a garbage chute, a wind-admitter, a toehold for erosion and a cipher in shape and purpose.... but this day, I peer into it and find instead:
the meaning of life. I think I’ll go to bed now, and be grateful for its warmth and constancy. And maybe later on in the week, I’ll send along something less self-referential. I think I’ll be ready for it soon.