I’m working a theme. For instance, yesterday I spent quite
some time trying (maybe succeeding, who knows) to convince
my son Eliot, eight, that “What the funk” was a bad catch
phrase for, at the very least, public and/or private (because
what’s really private anymore?) endeavors. And while I’m
writing this, in an airport, waiting, two very small girls are
walking right up to me, staring and going “wha” or else “laa”
and one points at my pen. “Pen,” I say, and one says “peh,”
and that’s pretty adorable, while their mother is trying to corral
them away from me, a stranger in an airport who is not to ask
them to watch any bags or call out “What the funk” or otherwise
have secrets or reveal them. In my own personal brand of
awe, I had more children, and all of my good ideas stand in
the way of much better ideas. Right now, if I weren’t thinking
it a good idea to write down precisely what’s happening to me,
perhaps I would discover something through meditation or
study, or some of that “inner listening” I hear that others
are able to do, but that just makes me fall asleep. Hope, also,
is the enemy of progress, so hoping one day to make progress
toward listening to that “inner listening” is to be doubly
thwarted. The two little girls are now saying “Ready, go!”
and running from one side of the airport lounge to the KCI
Recycles cans they have set up at the center. Say, for argument,
that I were to begin instead on a serene pasture inhabited by
a tribe of shepherds at Hyannis Port. What possibilities might
dislodge themselves like the weight of information that a guy
spent the summer attempting to calculate last year, coming up
with the idea that all the information on the Internet, the
information itself, weighs about as much as an egg, and off
we might have gone from that to where, every now and then,
I realize all living things are connected, and I get a second of that
dizziness where you turn and find you’ve hiked to the lip of
the Grand Canyon, a kind of whoops. In the picture you smile,
because it’s a picture, and any lingering confusion looks like
you’re reaching for some trail mix, and not suddenly knowing
your entire existence is spinning out above you in circles.
