Dad Brain

 The days rub together until all the rough edges are gone, their frictionless freight smooths the involutions on my brain and, when I speak, I do so in the clipped empty utterances one uses with an interlocuter who clearly isn’t listening. I start talking and just sort of hope the wind is going to finish my thought. It’s not a problem of articulation because I start talking without even having an idea of what I’m going to say. The issue is that once the words would rise up to meet each other, like birds leaving a telephone wire. Great starling murmurations of thoughts and plans would come swirling out of my mouth. Now, the first few incoherent words: a bird flaps off, scooting into the air, looks back and sees she is alone in the great yawning sky. 

 

I wonder if it’s because I don’t write much anymore. Until about 19, my speech was so choked with popular references—in particular, The Simpsons—that I scarcely noticed that what I came up with on my own was less significant; really just verbal glue that held the references together. My personality communicated itself through those references, if people caught them, they laughed, if they didn’t, they thought me eccentric. And then, all at once, I got tired of watching TV. Maybe the quality of the programming had changed, or maybe it was that, as an adult, I was no longer limited to the house. I wandered into the world, and I did so in such an uninformed, curious way, that the world gifted me with experience and stories. I was like the proverbial fool whom God watches out for.  

 

The role of tv references in my conversation changed to stories: the time I slept in the dumpster, the time a homebum almost stabbed me in a late-night taqueria, the time two skin heads almost pushed me onto the El tracks, etc. etc. Instead of connecting situations in my life that paralleled something funny that happened to Homer or Fry, I connected moments to each other and, because I was moving around a bit, and spending my time with different people, I like to think the stories weren’t dull, or self-absorbed for the people who had to listen to them—but who knows. 

 

Writing helped me refine the stories. I was writing so much for school, that I’d gotten in the habit of sitting in cafés and hammering away on a laptop. It was work, but it was recreation, too. When finals were coming up, I’d bring a stack of books into Thieos Diner and write notes, term papers, etc. When finals were over, I’d take a few walks for a change of pace, but it was cold in Lansing in the winter, and, I’d eventually find myself back at the diner writing, but without term paper prompts to answer, I started writing stories. 

 

I tried some fiction. One of the first I liked was a very Salinger-esque story about a kid who takes his date to Taco Bell, not to eat so much as to just hang out in an “ordinary” place. The date, predictably, isn’t into this plan, and harangues the protagonist for not having enough interest in the things they’re supposed to like. 

 

I can’t find the story, but I’m sure it was terribly translucent. The date was an obvious foil to reveal the benefits of doing things differently and having a too tender relationship to the world. The protagonist, was meditative, slow, and sad. Which was how I felt most of the time in those endless Michigan winters. It wasn’t a bad feeling, but maybe I romanticized it too much. 

 

The story ended with the kid going home after having a potentially break-up-level disagreement with the date; he feels little, but becomes almost happy when an unnamed cat jumps onto his lap and allows him to pet him/her. The story let the reader to wonder about whether petting the cat could provide as much satisfaction as talking to a human, provided the human was disagreeable and the cat, agreeable. 

 

I couldn’t write that sort of thing anymore because that slow, and sad feeling has left me—I almost want to say deserted. What was once my impetus to write and connect and flesh out the pieces of my life, changed to low-level anxiety after I had kids. And anxiety, low-level though it may be, does nothing for the writing process.  

 

So, other than when something exceptional happens, I don’t sit and write those feelings anymore. And then there were the years—really years—I spent writing cover letters, teaching philosophies, and answering essay questions in less than 500 words about my experience teaching. I think I got sort of enamored with the idea that I could write a cover letter just the right way and change the direction of my life (I mean, I was applying to jobs in Massachusetts—I know very little about Massachusetts, but I once wrote myself into a job interview there—which I declined). Only now do I see that I was using these applications partially as a way to give purpose to my writing when I couldn’t find it in previous methods. 

 

Now, when I’m not clocking ten emails an hour at work, I’m at home, wrangling my kids, trying to stop them from screaming, or from getting hurt. Sometimes, I think I’m going to do something else, like work in the garden, but I have to realize over and over, that when I do anything I’ve only shifted the burden of their care onto my wife again. I feel bad enough just going to work every day, I can’t make her do all the discipline, food prep. and careful explaining during the weekend, too. But you’d be surprised just how much I do. I still haven’t learned how to do two things at once. I’m either just standing there—empty-headed—at the park, or I’m frustratedly trying to vacuum, or replant the amaranth, and tell one of my kids: “don’t, no, hey, watch out!” Either my wife gets the kid out of my way, or I postpone the task. How the hell she manages to do anything while I’m at work, I have no idea. 

 

Yet, she gets more practice, so she’s a little better at multitasking. She’s even learned the subtle art of talking to other adults at the park without letting the kids fall from dangerous heights. In my case, either I’m listening to you, and my kid is about to start wailing any minute, or I’m saying “don’t, no, hey, watch out!” and you’ve gotten the message that I’m a lousy interlocuter. 

 

Well, let me tell you, idly chatting parent, I used to pepper my conversation with witty Simpson-isms; I once had a great story about a guy in Boystown who kicked out a plate glass window; I used to feel sad, and slow; I was more than “don’t, no, hey, watch out!”. I can only hope that, some day, I will be again—not so sure I want the sadness back, though. Life feels much less profound without it, but I like being able to turn my happiness on just by smelling my kids’ hair even if I can’t explain why, and I know that the day will come when they’re not going to tolerate this anymore. I guess, then I can go back to feeing sad, if there’s anything left. Until then you're lucky to get “no, hey, don’t, be careful!” Even those I get mixed up sometimes. 

Eucalyptus Blood

I spoke with Paige the other day. She reminded me I hadn’t written anything since last April. “I know,” I’d said. “I think about it often.”

 

When I was teaching, I used to have a little time to myself, I’d get to the café early to grade and revise lesson plans, but sometimes, I’d sneak in a little writing early in the morning to get myself started. This way, by the end of the day, I’d feel more well-rounded knowing I hadn’t spent all six hours in front of the computer working for the benefit of others. 

 

Now, that’s very much what happens. Every morning, I ride past the oily black mud and the scarred and stacked trunks of 100 years of Eucalyptus growth where they’d ripped the long stand of fog-stirring trees out to make way for the future bike path. The trees, in some bizarre study, had been found untenable for bikes to pass under, though cars had been passing under them for a long time, and—over a weekend—they’d torn them all out. Now my morning commute had this rusty smell which I imagined to be some kind of profound eucalyptus sap, like the life’s blood of the tree that one never smells unless they’ve hacked down many of them in the same area and then left their trunks out in the damp, salty air, still porous and seething with their passive respiration in the final gasp. 

 

I ride past the ruined grove and I think about writing something about it, but then I get to work, and I start replying to emails, my blood pressure rises, and I start walking quickly; I start handling things, things which aren’t mine to handle. I start doing a job. 

 

It’s work I’m probably better at then teaching. It’s helped me realize that I really like to do things on my own and just hand them over completed. Being Socratic was always a little difficult for me. I found it hard to guide with discussion, when I either wanted to chat, or lecture: there wasn’t much middle ground. Now, I get to do both—lecture and chat, at work, and at home with my kids. I don’t have to attempt the middle ground—but I don’t write much, and those eucalyptus trunks are pulled out of the black mud, one by one they go, lumbering down the highway to be pulped god knows where after growing 100 years in the same place. I don’t write about it. I just watch it, and one day very soon, there won’t be anything there at all. My kids won’t even remember the trees, but they’re indelibly fixed in my memory.  

 

Eucalyptus will always make me think of Golden Gate Park, or The Presidio in San Francisco. Both parks are nearly resinous with the smell of wet eucalyptus nuts, tramped on in the walking paths, and pressed so that their oils drench the streets when they’re run over by cars. The air that washes over the northern part of the city like a wet sheet of fog flapping out that green smell as it rolls over the ocean currents borne on the air. 

 

Even in the Tenderloin, when Mikey and I first moved there, the eucalyptus smell sunk down to this low part of the city, almost masking itself as another indigenous piss smell, but too florid to fit. Every evening, it was the rise of the smell that cleaned the city, and by mid-day, it would burn off along with the laundry smells, and the bare sidewalk would look washed, and empty. 

 

In Golden Gate Park, the unmolested eucalyptus had sprouted out like great earth-bound circulatory systems with little bronchioles way out into the sky, little clutches of tiny, feather-shaped leaves, 100s of feet up, very wet, very green, but forming a crispy, thin, at times, slick carpet under the trees, along the foot paths, smelling much older, like prehistoric, which isn’t hard to imagine with the other giant broad-leafed plants that live in the fog, like the growth at the healing margin of the world, growing brighter, riper here than anywhere else before sloughing off into brown and gray, and growing brittle and dry. 

 

When my wife Gina and I moved a block from Golden Gate Park, we’d go for evening walks and find the place as packed with animal life as it was with human life. Coyotes were trotting along the shoulders of the streets, racoons were thumping around in trash cans, mice thrilling through the grass, and the fog descending on the trails of birds, like breezes blowing low and in incongruent directions. In that part of town, the green belts of the Presidio, Park Presidio Blvd., and Golden Gate Park really hemmed the people in and, especially in the evening, the natural world seemed to put up a fierce struggle to reassert itself. Succulent gardens, tame by day, trailed over the sidewalks, sand from Baker Beach swelled in the gutters, and always the eucalyptus nuts thocking down on the wet grass, the wet pavement. Absolutely the sort of sound that didn’t happen if no one was around to witness it because it took imagination for it to happen; too wet the ground, too light the green pods, and too thick the fog for a sound without a visual cue. They were so many coins dropping through fountain water, settling at the bottom with quiet flashes of light. 

 

Even when they did Outside Lands, just a few blocks away in the park, all the light, sound, smell would get enveloped, filtering out from the park in something wavering, and disembodied. Gina and I walked right by once, and though we probably passed with a few hundred feet of the stage, the stand of eucalyptus trees between us and the band, led to a long debate about who had been playing as we walked through the Avenues back home. Within a block, we could hear nothing.

 

We were working a lot then, to pay the rent, to save, and because we had no reason to refuse extra work. For The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, I had the day off and Gogol Bordello was going to play, a band I’d always planned on seeing in a small bar with beer sloshing over the crowd, with other people’s armpits—ubiquitous when arm-raising choruses began— in my face, and now we were going to see them outside, in SF, for free. I brought a messenger bag with a 12-pack of PBR, and probably everyone else planning on seeing them did the same. 

 

In the late afternoon, we sat in the bower of a few curling oaks, which were reaching toward the sun, out from under the cedar and the eucalyptus giants, their distinctly lobed leaves pressed into the gummed mud around our feet, the beer cans crushed and stuck back into the increasingly empty 12-packs, until you had to rattle around in there to find a full beer. The cool cans on the warm day were covered with condensation and the leaves found their way inside the box to stick to the sides of the cans like camouflage. 

 

I don’t know how we managed to find our way out of that bower in the twilight when the band was about to start, but we somehow stumbled out, fog-damp, and blissful, still with a beer or two tucked into our pockets, beers that, later, when the band began to play, we poured over the sky as a bacchanalian libation and then danced the lost cans down into the wet earth. 

 

The roseate coastal light coral pink, the sky crowded with clusters of branches and leaves, arms around my loved ones, strangers smiling up with a knowing look, with the unity of purpose that comes at a concert when everyone can know and appreciate at least one thing about everyone standing in front of the stage, something that makes us all feel knowable. In such an unknowable world, it’s something to be able to look at a bunch of people and say, “they all like X band”. 

 

Gina doesn’t like to sing at concerts, doesn’t like it when other people sing, but I had to keep throwing my head back and drinking in that unifying sky, that indomitably green San Francisco smell. We yelled, sang, sloshed beer around, embraced each other, toppled into the crowd and from the crowd, even as it toppled into us; we cheered at the band, cheered at the world of such beauty, and cheered at our mothers and fathers for loosing us into such a world, especially because no one knew if such an experiment would have a satisfactory result. 

 

And at the end of the band’s set, everyone knelt down and picked up a few pieces of trash, and I, still bubbling over with love and beer, started grabbing all the trash I could, so thankful and only finding one way to express my thankfulness. I picked up trash until it was almost completely dark, and Gina had to steer me out of the park, which had now been given up to night, and raccoons ringing the dumpsters, and fog, still clanking of Pacific buoys, rolling over the city like a slow-motion wave. And, on the walk home, the alcohol-thinned blood, and the amplifier’s tinnitus being the only indication that the whole thing had happened, so quiet and empty were the avenues, so burgeoning was the sky and the rolling fog. 

 

…

 

It's probably been at least five years since I’d had a PBR, much likely longer. I just made it out to a DIY show by the ocean a few weeks ago, but I was alone and the gap between bands was long, and the day with two kids had left me too tired to want much more than sleep, or maybe a quiet moment with a book by an open window. I was glad to be there, but it was nothing like it was, and I looked around at the kids arriving to the show wrapping their arms around each other, and dragging PBRs out from their twelve-packs to give each other, and, I thought to myself, “my kids have all this to look forward to. They will have their moments with the eucalyptus leaves, and twilight skies, with the roar of the ocean barely perceptible, like a sonic under current.” 

 

I ride by that grove, and smell the blood of those 100 year-old trees, and know something else of life. I have a clearer sense of what has been given up although I never set out to learn anything. I just went through the world, stopping to appreciate it where it was markedly beautiful.