Rant and Roll

I wanted to make photographs like the paintings of Modigliani, Hopper, Balthus.  Have you looked at their works?  Over and over again?  Do you see how they repeated things, over and over and over again?  Did anybody complain?

Just saying.

I scramble to make my last factory day of the week.  I am feeling much stronger now, though not strong at all.  I am feeling cleverer again, but not clever.  I can't wait for the day's end.  I want to sit and plan the future.  Yours, not mine.  I just want to imagine mine.  It is great in imagination, if I let it be.

I got a call from a contemporary last night with whom I've worked many, many years at the factory.  He never calls me, so I figured something was up.  He was checking on the health of another worker, another contemporary.  He wanted to tell me about the time of life we are entering, I guess.  I have enough horror to fill his and my cup both, but I went along with the gallows humor.  Dark days love company.

Later in the evening, Q called.  He always calls when he is driving from one place to another.  That is my ranking on the chart.  When he gets an incoming call, of course, I am dismissed.  He wanted to tell me about his experience back in his home state with the hillbillies and the rednecks.  I won't tell his tales as there is far too little, sometimes, to draw on for the blog.  But he has been away a good long while and so there is a low-brow exoticism to the hinterlands of Disney for him now.  There are plenty of seriously mean and stupid people here, but you know that if you ever look at the news.  Life is pretty fucked up everywhere, but they don't all put their kids in the microwave.  I'm just talking about the master race, though we have a really good multi-ethnicity of inbreds and gasoline sniffers here.  You would be hard pressed to find a better mix of unregulated miscreants.  You want to stick to the main roads and not wander off too far.  You might think I'm kidding you, but I'm not.

Anyway, old Diesel Dick and I began talking about kids.  I guess I started it.  After talking to the factory worker, I was fed up with hearing about the total victory of having and raising kids.  What a lucky fuck he is to have. . . etc.  I love kids.  They are the best things in the world.  O.K.  There is that.  One parent's story, however, is not different from another's.  There are only a few variations.  They either do well or they fall into trouble.  They are beautiful and smart and play soccer or baseball, and they are all getting scholarships to good universities or a master's degree while serving ten years for stealing a car and having a pound of cocaine.  Irrational moment.  Kids make mistakes.  Most, though, are in IB programs and double major at a state university.

I like the kids better than the parents, of course.  They never talk about their parents unless it is interesting, like how fucked up their mom and dad are or about the time they were nine and found their mother's vibrator in the closet or a pair of handcuffs in the nightstand.  Kids love to talk about how their parents embarrass them.  They can't wait to get out of the house or out of the state and on their own.  It will be nice to see the folks once in a while at the holidays, they think.  And of course, there will be the constant need to borrow money.  

Anyway, Q is on a busman's holiday, of sorts, seeing all his age-group friends who have kids and things in common, etc, so I was complaining to the wrong guy, I know.  Q loves his son and is quite a debater and I knew I had made a mistake because my argument wasn't about kids at all but about me and my experiences.  No matter how much I listen to the kid narrative, no matter how far down that road I go with them, the minute I begin to talk about the things in my life. . . the hand comes up and the words "Oh, no!" fly from the good dad's mouth.  Is that fair?

I'll bet Hemingway didn't talk about his kids much.  I'll bet Picasso didn't, either.  Nor Joyce, nor Beckett, nor Keith Richards.  O.K.  Sure, they were all probably terrible parents, but you get my point. I know.  It's a weak point, especially if you have kids.

I've seen two surveys, one done in the seventies and one done not long ago, in which they asked the parents of grown children if it was worth it.  I think the question was if they had it to do all over again, would they have children.  The OVERWHELMING response was NO!

But everyone of those gas-sniffers have children.  Lots of them.  More than you do.

O.K.  I'm done begin an asshole.  I'm beginning to feel better, as I said, but am not all together yet.  There is no point to this entry.  It is just an inchoate rant.  I love my mother and I loved my father.  And they love/d me.

I just found out that two of my ex-"girlfriends" who are in their early thirties just got pregnant.  They have pictures of their bumps on Facebook, of course.  I wish them luck, I think, though I may be pettier than that.