Freewriting: Sometimes

         

            The grinding of the coffee beans and the songs on the phone,

            The kids’ bedroom doorway and the smells of sensory hone.

            It’s trash day, the compost bowl, the dishes to put away,

            The hours-long wrestling match to remember the name of this day.

            The concept of a manual has perched atop my brain a number of times in the last year and change, its landing style the fashion of double samara. After marination, the concept of grooming youth for adulthood wafts, a familiar, strangely unidentifiable fragrance.

            Pages, it seems, have been ripped, Cliff’s Notes editions composed by a novice.

            Sometimes the difficulty of squinting the eye just right so that the open one can look through the lens and not only see its own lid and lash seems like the hardest part. For some, the contents of the slide always present dollar signs. For others it might be fame. In both cases I think early-life circumstances scrunched something, skewed the vision, knocked the gears askew.

            Those can’t be the things.

The Moments That Make Up a Dull Day

January’s been a tough place to be in terms of keeping tabs on my mental health. Matter of fact, I’m pretty sure my head’s visited all of the beneath-the-couch-cushions corners when it comes to the emotional dinner plate. With my starches there’s been fatigue. Each bite of protein has had a dollop of motivation on top of it, and when it’s come to getting those veggies down, I’ve been every bit of both the refusing child and the adult who knows better. My head has nodded in agreement to angry, unaffordable appetizers; my inner glutton has thumbs-upped dessert when there was no room left in my belly.

Google Maps Navigation has been my favorite smart-phone tool as the new job opens itself up to windshield time, but the more familiar I become with it, the more of a stranger I become to myself. It’s as though I’m perpetually shoe shopping, but can’t tell how each pair fits until I’ve left the building, and then once I’m processing, my foot tells my brain how each shod situation felt unfamiliar.

Maybe I’m out of shape. Getting back in to therapy would do me some good. Age is not helping, as these weird, dull flashes of pain have been greeting the inner back of my skull. Perhaps above everything: Happiness hovers, half attainable, frequently out of reach.

And I have answers for none of it.

Elihu Joseph

Father Steve Cooke at St. Peter’s Parish -- Take it easy; I don’t have a Jesus agenda -- spoke of faith in a September 29th homily. Before I get into that, it warrants mentioning that the Catholicism portion of my life has been rugged at best. I hated Mass as a kid, quit attending as an adolescent, and directed my spiritual channels towards eastern thought in my 20s. The only consistencies my church-going life have ever maintained were to a) make my sister(s) laugh during service, and b) to not fall asleep during homilies.

As the months leading up to marriage dwindled, it occurred to me that my future wife was really not going to drop the church thing. She was going to make a practicing-Catholic family out of us if it killed her. She’s done just that, and I admire her for it. I haven’t always been on board -- I like to sleep in and used to loathe the notion of tithing -- but I’ve come around, and I almost look forward to it these days.

Almost.

Here’s the skinny with Mass, though, if you’re not familiar: Sing, a reading, sing, a reading, sing, Gospel, homily, sing, collection, sing, Communion, peace offering, sing, conclude. Our church puts on a heck of a good Mass, and that’s worth mentioning because there are those out there that simply don’t. It’s pretty painless, and we’re always done with breakfast and chatting before football starts, so it’s a sacrifice I’ve come to accept.

The first reading features a passage from the Old Testament, the second is from the New, and the Gospel focuses on a passage that has to do with Jesus’ life. The priest, then, is supposed to incorporate the themes of the three passages into one idea and express it in a way that involves modern-day life and how humans might go about living it.

I think it would be easy to do that once. Fifty-two times a year not so much. And for consecutive years without sounding redundant? Big-time challenge. Big time. The only other minor detail is that you have to care about what you’re saying and if you’re good at it that should come across to your parishioners.

So, I can’t recall what the readings were about on September 29, but in his homily Father Steve spoke of faith. The idea of such a concept is something I’ve borderline hated for as long as I’ve been old enough to have complex opinions. People are always telling you that you should have it, or that you’ve got to rely on it, like it’s a solid stock in which you should invest. I think, though, that I’ve always been of the mindset of questioning faith’s return; the old what’s-in-it-for-me adage. But he talked about his family and a particular outing in which he and his 14 siblings ate dinner with their parents.

An older brother of his toasted their mom in such an exquisite, thankful fashion, that the rest of them moaned and C'mon'd him for having gone first with an untouchable toast. Then, several years later, at a similar meal, that same brother stood to toast her again, which prompted some eye rolls. This time, his toast was short: "Thank you," he said, "for the gift of faith."

Breaking Stuff

Lately I’ve been infatuated with the idea of breaking shit. Or rather: The idea has been infatuated with me. Lemme clarify: I haven’t wanted to break any of my shit; mostly my wife’s. The life of the idea is akin to a photograph flash as I’m always reminded that she doesn’t really have any shit I could break that would just devastate her. Mostly, I think, she’d just feel broken knowing that she’s married to a crazy person.

And that’s no fun. She works with crazy people for a living. So it’d be like taking pieces of her paycheck and putting them in the trash, as we’d naturally want to replace whatever it was I destroyed.

What probably ruins it more, though, is that she’d have to tell her family and friends that I smashed something in a fit of rage and then they’d look at me funny. Or at least I’d be paranoid thinking they were looking at me funny, talking about me behind my back. Also, I can hear my daughter parroting “Daddy broke ours” whenever it occurred to her to say so, or when she came across such an object out there in her little person’s life.

I’d probably feel pretty crummy about breaking the thing, too, but in that pan sizzle of a moment when I’ve body-jumped into the temporarily insane me -- man, do I want to break something. I’m uncertain about the makeup of such a desire, but usually it feels like: two parts release, one part display of power, and half a part of some vague symbolism into which I haven’t yet tapped.