The heading reads morbidly but it conveys some of the apprehension I am feeling. Management and I have been married six years, together for nine, and from our first date to this morning have never really spent a day apart excepting the very rare business trip. It has always been just the two of us and about us in our marriage. Now that her belly has really popped it is strikingly clear that the picture will now be of three. It is a huge shift in the dynamic.
Don’t get me wrong, I am excited, more excited about the arrival of our child than I have been about anything else in my life but there is this nagging sense of loss itching the back of my head. I am losing my place as I know it and I can never go back. That phrase, “You can never really go home,” is fitting in that my feelings are eerily similar to the one I had when I left my parents home and when we got married. For the sake of piling on maudlin cliches, doors close and doors open. Certainly our child presents an opportunity to bring us closer, and very likely it will, but that latch clicking behind me is bothersome.
Contingency planning has always been a big part of how I live my life; it isn’t that I am risk adverse rather I prefer to plan for risk and my planning always includes ways to return the situation back to the starting point. Trouble with massive life changes is that there is no way to restart, its a trajectory so the annoying little project manager in me crumples his Gantt charts and stomps around muttering to himself. Our child was planned but damn if I fully realized these emotions sweeping over me and my frustration that I cannot plan, only approximate.
Executive branch to EFF: We’re above the law. Oh wait, “Freedom’s Not Free”, right? Fuckwits.
Best-sellouts list - Los Angeles Times - Quite possibly the lamest thing to happen in literature yet.
Sagaciously he stated, “Screw a practice amp. You don’t plan on playing out so why buy one. Get a pre-amp or an amp simulator.” Yes. Yes, he is right.
So my list of lust continues to grow.
Sort of a strange feeling thinking that in a year I can expect that card and the requisite tie-like gift (though I’ll press for more useful things like a nice set of flatwounds for my 6-string bass or another hard drive for the server).
Management and I were discussing how our benchmarks for adulthood are rapidly evaporating. First was graduating college, next was my curveball of grad school, then it was buying a home, and lastly having a kid. I told her that I needed to go back to the drawing board and devise more barriers to the club. Maybe things a little more obscure like grey hair, since I shave my head it would be an easy milestone to miss, tucking t-shirts into shorts, or mowing the lawn in athletic socks and dress shoes. Someone out there should always be less hip than I.
It isn’t hard to see that I have a thing about growing up. Not really sure what my hangup is, no one really wants to get old, but for some reason I have this compulsion to feel young to stay relevant and informed. It doesn’t really matter as it is very likely our kid will grow up with the same perception we had of our parents: out of touch. I suppose that in the end I come off as sad as those hipsters featured in that New Yorker article, though I cannot see myself running out to buy a skateboard and hitting the half-pipe on my 38th birthday. If I do, please, someone take a contract out on me. I’ll pay for it.
Then again, you are only as cool as you let yourself feel. Regardless of what my kid thinks at fourteen, I’m going to be a cool dad. The one with the freshest tunes and the inside line on the best local sushi. Knowledge like that equals cred.
