You are currently browsing the daily archive for October 10th, 2008.
It seems to me that a lot of problems would be solved if English just had a consistent second-person plural pronoun. I like ye or yinz.
I was up late last night, much of it spent in rent and furious prayer over my immaturity, lack of direction, lack of will, lack of honest committment and clarity as to how to begin changing my life.
I took up the photo album my mom made me as a Christmas gift last year, with pictures of myself and my family stretching about thirty years back to when my parents were dating (where there’s a wonderful picture of my mom and dad in the seventies leaning against one of those boxy slabs the decade was famous for). I went into the bathroom, and look at my reflection. God, I look so much like my father. My mustache is thick and full, but finer, less choppy than my dad’s. I’m balding in the same way. I don’t see my mother in my face at all, except maybe in my nose’s scale and not it’s shape. I didn’t get my father’s schnozzola.
In the pictures, I’m anywhere from newborn to eighteen years old, and there is little coverage of my time in college, which has been documented digitally over the past four years, mostly. I compare my appearance now to how I appeared then, and I’m staggered at the change. I barely remember being that kid, that middle schooler with the dumpy Harry Potter look. Am I the same guy now?
I turned twenty-four almost a month ago. Twenty-three I could deal with, but twenty-four has me for a loop. I’m not sure what to make of it, or what it means. It certainly feels like an older year, an entrance into the mid-twenties. So why do I still feel like a kid?
If things do get as bad as my dad thinks, if we do return to the era of homeless people in fedoras, I don’t want to be worrying about this, or about money, or about work. I want to be building homes and distributing food. I want to matter. I want to finally be an adult instead of a glorified eleven year-old with a beard and a desk job.
Yeah, it’s a little maudlin. But that’s what’s on my mind.
Sorry blogging has been light-to-nonexistent. I had a wicked head cold for two days and have spent much of the rest of the time catching up on missed work and working on my new novel, USA. So I’m behind, I know.
I have in recent days been twice called alarmist. I guess there’s some validity there. It’s part of the nature of the Visaggio male; we naturally sieze on bad news. We are natural pessimists, or at least grudging optimists who struggle with optimism. We also inhale far too much news than is probably good for us, but grazers as we are, we will gobble up any information that’s readily available and run the numbers. We’re smart but not always educated in the fields we worry about, preferring things like music and literature that are of spiritual but not practical consequence. We are religious, and thus apocalyptic. I try to fight this natural tendency. But I figured I should explain it after a phone call with my dad, wherein he expressed is low, rumbling panic at his finances and his future in the wake of what he considers to be the ongoing and complete collapse of our entire financial system.
I am quite worried myself.
I told him, though, that Visaggio intuition is generally incorrect. We are stupid, panicky people who ignore good news when it contradicts our doomsday scenarios. We are paranoid and worried. He stockpiled food and water when Ashcroft floated the possibility of bio attacks, and was afraid Clinton might seize absolute power after Y2K. I thought that we’d already be in Iran right now in a massive general war over the Hariri assassination.
So what can I say?
But for once, it seems like we’re not alone in being concerned. When a newspaper of record like the WaPo is running stories with titles like “The End of American Capitalism?” I start to wonder.
Anyway, like I said. I’m probably wrong, because Visaggio men usually are, so I’m just going to sit back, kick up my legs, and toast to the end of the world.
