The pro-forma birthday blog
So I’ve done it again. Another birthday and I yet contain mass and volume. I exist in time and space and the government demands financial tribute. I meet or come close to all the standard benchmarks one requires to proclaim, “I am alive!
That’s the good news. On the other hand…
Idaho continues to give me very little love. For three years now,
I’ve tried everything I could to make friends and fit in. With anyone. I tabled
for the ACLU until Citizens United made
that task impossible. (They also didn’t care for the time a guy walked up in
Renaissance Faire drag and I went off on a tirade about the Visigoths.) I went
to a few NORML meetings, but apparently in Boise, I am what narcs look like. I
even took a desk job at the local uni to make friends and influence people
which ended up a near-catastrophe. I tried to inculcate myself in The Boy’s
school community, but after an unfortunate shouting incident in the school
parking lot one day, that avenue closed to me. I’m sure there’s other that
stuff I’m forgetting or deliberately omitting, too.
The problem is three-fold. One, I work from home, so there
is no one at the office for me to “click” with. Two, Idaho is culturally and
politically a backwater. People like me, the bleeding hearts and the artists,
and anybody who isn’t a gun-toting fire-breathing conservative is an outlier
here. And three, the communities where I might find like-minded folks are
pretty goddamn insular, what with Boise being so isolated and our type so
unwelcome. They circle the wagons and I haven’t found a point of access yet.
Besides what I brought with me—my family—I can only think of
a couple things I’ve enjoyed about my time here. Because I want this to be a
positive piece!
My weed connection is great. Great weed and always a
welcoming environment. But then I’ve always got along well with the LBGT
community. Outliers like me.
The people who run The Boy’s martial arts academy have also
been very good to us. Besides what you’d expect from a martial arts curriculum,
these people—gun-toting, fire-breathing conservatives that they are—have been
extraordinarily welcoming. And they have several families of the “Timmy Has Two
Mommies” variety in their classes, so underneath all the God, Guns and Guts
bluster there beats an accepting heart. Good people and I am grateful for them.
That’s about it except for family, so let me say a few nice
words about The Missus and The Boy.
The Missus feels bad for ‘dragging’ me out here where I have
successfully failed to flourish, but she shouldn’t. For one thing, her wedding
ring is inscribed “Wither thou goest,” because I thought I could hang out my
shingle anywhere and get by. I was pretty confident back then. I was at the top
of my game. I had two job offers waiting when we moved to northern Cali.
Unfortunately, my game is/was newspapers.
Yah. And that isn’t her fault. And almost all of the other setbacks I’ve enjoyed would have
occurred wherever we were living, too—mostly the result of a lifetime of youthful indiscretions finally coming home to roost. It just happens that Fang’s Very, Very Bad
Three Years happened to fire up a few months after we moved here, when the dog
nearly pulled my arm off my torso and I was in a sling and constant pain for
six weeks though the holidays. Also not her fault.
And I have been a misery to live with. If our situations
were reversed, I would be despondent. It’s horrible living with that much
negative energy in the house, ready to pop off at the slightest real or
imagined provocation. I pity her, and I am enormously grateful that she has not
kicked me to the curb yet.
She is a star at her job and an amazing Mom. She was
everything I ever wanted in a lifemate the day I married her and she still is.
The Boy will soon transition officially to The Little Man.
He’s become a voracious reader,* is holding doors, ordering from merchants by
himself, taking guitar lessons and becoming damnably more perceptive around the
house. Just last night we had our first Birds & Bees talk with him, because
all the comedy shows we watch, they talk a lot about S-E-X, and from the
audience reaction, he could tell it was a pretty funny something. So we told
him the bland, not even just-the-facts version and hopefully made the word less
interesting to him.
*One of the things I especially loved this last year was
reading comics with him, him aloud on the iPad and me following along in the
print version. He seems to have lost interest in that activity, which bums me
out, but God it was great while it lasted. And he still reads comics, just to
himself, so it is a total net win.
Looking forward to spending the summer pushing him hard.
Thinking up new Firsts to conquer, new challenges to be met, more steps outside
his comfort zone. The world is not a particularly comforting place, and he
needs to be prepared to meet it in kind as necessary. I’m old and I won’t be
around forever.
So that’s my job and my joy. The Missus cooks and cleans and
nurtures and will one day make damn good and sure he goes to college; and I
push his buttons and will one day, hopefully, provide him with enough Daddy
Issues to sustain his art through the slow patches.
There’s the report. As I write this, it’s Friday morning and it’s cloudy and gloomy out. TV
weatherman (we call him Larry’s Liver because of my opinion that he looks like
a bit of a tippler) calls for 80% chance of rain. But I have The Boy here with
me, due to another one of the mandatory monthly charter school
auto-gratification days off, so if I can tear him away from his book,
confidence is high for a pretty good day. Guitar practice, work on some
taekwondo in the front yard and scooter around the block (if it’s not raining),
maybe watch a superhero cartoon or two, Fuddruckers, Oblivion, then off to four hours of intermittent taekwondo
classes. Home, ice cream cone, bed, read, sleep.