My dad was in the hospital for a week and I didn't have time to cry about it. Not in a whole week. How fucked up is that? He's doing better now. It turns out that he had pneumonia, and that his lymphona is probably causing problems again. This after this summer, when he had a really bad, almost fatal, allergic reaction to his primary medication. You know, the pills keeping his tumors from developing, the ones that were not killing his immune system. Unlike the current treatment he's doing. Which leaves him achy, tired, and sorta sad most days, that some days makes his bones hurt because he has to regrow his bone marrow with pills.
I hate that I am not there with him. I hate that I am writing grant proposals and trying to write papers with theoretical BS because I have to tailor them to particular professors and classes. (For the record, I hate performance studies.) I hate that our medical system makes it difficult for him, that he feels unhuman in the hospital.
Why is it that we modern humans in American have no time to feel? To take care of our families? Why is it that these carcinogens remain in the environment when they are killing one in three of the people we each know in the Midwest? I know the answers. We're too busy. We have to keep in the rat race, keep making money. We have to take care of them by taking care of ourselves. You know what I think would take care of both me and my parents? How about jobs that actually matter, that have job security, that have healthcare, that are actually respectful of their employees? The deeper we get into information tech, the less we respect beings. Knowledge after all, is the be-all, end-all. Or more accurately, the commodity that is knowing stuff.
Or something. I'm testy, I know.
I do not think we should go through our lives without the connections that we each have made before. I do not think that friends should drift apart, as long as they continue to understand each other. I can meet up with so many people from so long ago and still have so much to say. Why drift? Because there's no time.
No time. No time. But there's so much time. We have infinity to live through, the dark masses of anti-matter at the core of our universe and not-so-subtly drifting through space slowly reaching for our tiny planet. We will be consumed, at our most basic molecular being. We will be destroyed. But there's so much time. Our planet is going through the pain of climate change. Of dying, bit by bit, and we seem unable to take action. But there's so much time.
There's each day. Each minute. Each hour. Each month. Each year. Each week. Why do we get trapped in the story that tells us that we cannot do anything about anything? Because it's a story. Which is why I'm in this situation. I need all this BS socio-cultural capital (like knowing what that word means) to reach across the distances, to try to help people understand that the story we tell ourselves everyday is one of millions. We are each living in alternate universes. That is why we drift. We each tell ourselves subtly different stories. And we could tell so many others. There could be so much more time.
But I'm trapped too. Trapped by my desire to have a job, to overcome the problems my father has faced. To not worry about finances. About insurance. About housing. About all the little shit that gets in the way but also makes up the world we live. Not trapped enough not to care, but trapped enough to not escape.
Or is it merely pragmatism? After all, next week is thanksgiving, and going to my parents right now would cause them more pain than not. (they spend so much time trying to make me happy when i visit that it would just be silly) Is it merely the world as it stands? Is it that we are each so small and unable to do anything?
I dunno. I don't know where I'm going with this. Maybe we're all bits of bone marrow in the body of the planet, and we are pushing and pulling, trying to grow and destroy all the other cells, all the plants, animals, and bacteria (according to some scientists, different microscopic organisms make up 2 of 3 main kinds of life, the other being everything else). Maybe we are an infection of reality, morphing it into something that it never was and never can be. Maybe the roots running beneath all this cement will find the air again someday, and we will all be turned to dust.
Or maybe we are each a molecule in this massive solar system, which is a molecule in the galaxy, which is only a molecule in the universe, which is only a molecule in the thing that is larger than that, which is only a molecule to something else, and so on. Maybe we are so small that what we do means nothing. Or maybe we are so small in this deep black void of space and antimatter that what we do is everything. Maybe the spirit that sparks our bodies to life is the reverse of the dark matter, is the anti to the centers of unviverses, is the other force. And our lives are just larger in a different way, in the hug from a friend, in the taste of a cherry in spicy curry, in the sensation of cool white snow on your skin. In the smile of someone you might love, in the taste of chocolate, in the memory of green grass growing beneath your bare feet. In the canoe my father made me once when I was small, in the look on his face when I do something awesome.
Maybe being able to tell my dad that I love him is a big thing. And all this shit I have to trudge through to do the things that I know are important is just the space dust rushing past, revealing my solar system to me as my life forms around the important parts. To reveal our place in the universe was always what I, what we, make of it.
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