Mindless Blogging, Vacation Edition

By vacation, of course, I mean school break, and by school, I mean the one my child attends.  I enjoy my younger son quite a lot, actually.  He's smart, and intuitive, and an incredibly deep thinker, traits that make him, to me, extremely entertaining.  When he's home all the time, though, linear thought becomes difficult.  He's six, after all, and the concept of other people's separate consciousnesses is a nebulous abstraction at this point, even for such an advanced philosopher as himself.  For example, in the course of writing this paragraph, I've been asked to look at his Minecraft horse, play Minecraft with him, witness said horse's fashion show, reminded again that he's ready to hold the fashion show, and informed that his horse is misbehaving.

When one has reams of schoolwork to accomplish, chores to perform, and all of it should have been done yesterday, these interactions are a special kind of spiritual torture.  When one has nothing planned and the vague feeling that one should post a blog entry once in a while, it's even worse.  After all, why?  Why shouldn't I can this half-assed effort at blogging regularity and go ride horses around in (shudder) Creative Mode? (They're trapped in a cage of arrows.  See?  It looks like somebody has been shot by a bunch of arrows ...)

I'm sure this angst is worsened by my semester off, which is about to end, during which I have accomplished ... what?  My Great American Novel remains unwritten.  The new house still doesn't look like it's inhabited by Martha Stewart.  It might even look like it's inhabited by a crew of hillbillies with a penchant for decorating with cardboard boxes.  (Are you ready yet? ... Look!)  My art remains exactly as I left it in August.  My crafting skills have been at the service of a horde of small children for months, with nary a concrete project of my own to show for it.

Should I tie this up in a neat bow?  Note that, although greatness in the arts has not yet been achieved, other greatnesses are showing potential?  That as a result of willing and enthusiastic work at my son's school, I have a community, potentially wonderful and deep friendships, a house, for Pete's sake?  I don't know.  Ennui and uncertainty are often voices worth listening to, provided we listen deeply and discerningly enough.  In the meantime, my child has, again, delighted me.  Mom, look, I made an exploding blueberry!

A Clever Title That Won't Make Me Wince Later

I dreamed about you last night.  I'm not sure what a heartstring is, exactly, but it's been ten years and I still feel a tug in the center of my chest.  We were sitting at a round cafeteria table, in a room full of the usual suspects, I guess, although I didn't see any of them.  As we sat there, opposite each other, I felt that old familiar magnetic current, the one born of friendship and shared experience and never being able to have an actual conversation (unless it was an emergency or my boy's hair needed buzzing) with a touch of lust, deeply repressed.  Or more than a touch.  Anway.
You are not the only one I dream about, but you are the only one I dream about specifically.  There are That Place dreams, involving unexpected return, confrontation, and, more recently, plotting mass escape, but the dreams about you particularly are different, if only in that they are more personal.  I vaguely recall a conversation about your children, maybe an interaction with them.  I heard you and your wife lost a baby recently, a few days after her birth.  Before that, I heard that you were depressed, always on the couch, and that your wife was so stressed her hair was falling out.  My heart throbs with impotent rage and sadness.  The young man I knew was full of puppyish enthusiasm and energy.  Now you sound broken.
I think about how our lives could be so different if things had been ... different.  I know that "if only" is a waste of time, and I know that the things lost would be at least equal to, and possibly greater than, the things gained.  Still, I wonder.
I cannot wish you well.  Not because I wish you otherwise, but because "well" is not a word I can realistically associate with that place, nor do I believe that it's a possibility for anyone remaining there.  I wish you ... awakening.  Freedom.  Bravery, heroism, escape.  The chance to breathe again.  That's what I wish.