Rearranging deck chairs, one day at a time

This has been a shitty year.

For almost everybody I know, not just me. It’s been the first time in my nearly half a century that the “economic downturns” I hear about on the news have affected me and my peers personally.

It’s all the goddamned internet’s fault.

I was a newspaperman. I had business cards that said “Newspaperman” as job title. Newspapers have been around for centuries. When I started in the field, I’m sure the tiny part of my brain that wasn’t working on where my next line of speed was going to come from, assumed Newspapering would be a job I could ride all the way to retirement. Generation upon generation before me had.

For a while, I even played with the idea of buying a struggling weekly somewhere and getting it back on its feet. I had observed my publisher and his lifestyle through the ’90s and came to the reasonable conclusion that his was a pleasant existence, with enough money and respect of the community to go around.

Instead, now I have a part-time production job that was cut from full-time, six days into this fabulous year. I have to either scramble for the freelance work I hate, or feel like a dick because that’s what I ought to be doing but am not.

And my misspent youth? Coming back to haunt me big-time in the medical arena.

Stay away from drugs, kids. Keed spills.

Even my high-achieving friends are finding their careers termed-out by the Communications Revolution. Their business is not mine to share, but even non-druggie, college-educated friends and acquaintances are finding their backs against the wall.

How shitty a year? My Mom, the most iron-willed person I’ve ever known, succumbed to depression and had to go on meds for a while.

And every indicator, from the asinine squabbling over the budget in Washington to the shrinking page count of the Idaho Statesman, points to continued hard times in the days to come.

The very worst part is, I look at my beautiful son, so full of life and love and promise, and absolutely dread what the world is going to put him through. He wasn’t lucky enough to be born into the right family, one with all the money and influence in the world. He’s not going to be protected when the shit really hits the fan.

He will be as prepared as I can make him, but being admittedly unable to foresee the pitfalls of the future that awaits him, I am necessarily going to fall far short of the mark and he will bear the consequences of my failure.

Meanwhile, we’re rearranging deck chairs. The Best Man is coming to visit this weekend. I’m going to see a movie this afternoon with my Idaho Friend. Next week, a stranger is going to put a garden hose with a camera on the end of it into my butt and take a bunch of pictures, see if I got any cancer going on down there. (Up there?)

And The Boy is taking swimming classes.

We went back to the same young lady with a pool in her back yard he worked with last summer. He started the week about exactly where he’d left off last year—timid and over-cautious—but by Thursday, he was doing everything the instructor was telling him to. He picked up in one week what it took two weeks last summer to fail to accomplish. (Well, he’s still working on back floats and jumping into the pool, but I’m pretty confident now that he’ll have those down by the time his classes end next week.)

As we left class yesterday, the instructor already had the next group of kids in the pool and was working with them. We walked past and he said, “Bye.” She glanced up and offered a polite “bye bye” in return. We walked another couple of steps and he turned around and blew her a kiss, a big one. She giggled and said something like “see you tomorrow!” A couple more steps and he turned around and told her, “I love you!”

This genuinely took her by surprise. After a short pause, she replied in kind. She was smiling from ear to ear.

That’s just the kind of kid he is. He deserves a better, more secure world and we have not only failed to provide it for him, we haven’t even bothered to begin laying the groundwork.

And that’s why I’m still here, arranging deck chairs.

The assholes who run the world—the governments and financial behemoths—aren’t going to give a no-name, un-wealthy kid like him the time of day. It’s up to The Missus and me to prepare him for the rough road ahead, and for today, that is enough to make this former Newspaperman keep next week’s appointment with the butt doctor.