Well, kids, my life is charmed. Goddamn sweet as honey. I don't have any complaints outside of the usual complaints, and they're sort of hollow in my own ears at the moment.
I am, for instance, about to be squeezed out of my job unless I angle things just right. But that's not much of a thing; with what I know and what I have, I can find another job somewhere in the world in pretty short order. So work is not that big a deal.
The house isn't perfect. It's a small house, with many, many, many flaws. But the roof is new, the plumbing works, and the electricity will not be cut off without some sort of cataclysm or some random central Texas whippersnapper of a thunderstorm.
My wife, sometimes she can be oblivious to my existence. But I am quick to remind her, and we're doing a lot more together now. Plus, she just found out yesterday she got a grant, one year salary, renewable, which should be all the funding she needs to carry her to the Next Thing, whatever the post post-doctorate thing is.
My dogs are happy and stupid.
I have a remarkable collection of friends, all of whom I would lay my life down for. I was recently contacted by one who I have not seen in nearly twenty years.
How bizarre being able to say that. Twenty years is a whole fuckload of years. She used to be this improbably tall and skinny punk chick who I'd crushed on in middle school, someone that I admired and really enjoyed, and have missed. She's in Las Cruces, and her roadmap from the past to now has been, look, I won't go into detail. But she has dealt with more Bad Things in her life than I ever could without breaking. And yet, she's this happy, whipsmart mom of two, married, caught in the new downsizing of modern American life but still perfectly OK.
I have a feeling, a goddamn rock from space could come crashing down on her, and she'd brush it off. No big deal. Worse things have happened.
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Someone from the distant past shows up, someone who last knew you as, say, a highschool kid. A child. Where do you start? Internally and externally, I'm doing this math. How to explain myself? I am prone to introspective disorder, my own narrative running rampant (see: google, husi, and etc) but I'm feeling sort of light headed from the perspective I've been given by this.
It's a remarkable world, this.
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