So I Hang Upon My Altar

I accept that summer is over but I'm not ready for what comes next, much less whatever it is we call what we have right now. If I didn't know any better, and I admit  I usually don't, I'd wonder if I'm not a stunt double in a Leonard Cohen music video for Last Year's Man. 

I mean, it sure feels like what he's singing about, and not just here at my house but across the region as everywhere you turn on the East Coast, hurricane season is the topic of concern.

I'm not really worried so much about the rain as I am about what Dylan Thomas referred to as the dying of the light.  Almost everyone my age I know, and there are not nearly as many of us left as I'd have thought should have survived to this point, is, like me, bone weary all the time.

We get up tired, slog through our days semi-comatose, and crash on couches in middle-class fever dreams we never envisioned ourselves as ever living in, to go to bed and fail to dream and get up and do it all again. 

Don't get me wrong. I'm disappointed in myself and in my life, so far, but I'm not unhappy. I met and married someone who loved and who still loves me though I haven't done anything remotely lovable in a ridiculous number of years. 

We have two children who are now, themselves, adults and who are getting on with their own lives rather nicely without us, which is the whole plan as I remember the orientation briefing at Dad School from back in the day.

I, and by that, I mean my peers and I didn't crash or go down in flames, we surrendered a little bit every day until we really ran out of things to give away. We traded our blue skies and beliefs for BMWs and shipped good paying jobs to low-wage third and fourth world nations so that their people could have an opportunity to earn forty cents a day making sneakers that I buy at a hundred bucks plus and never even think twice about it.

In another fifty years, some of those places are going to have indoor plumbing and potable drinking water, and those people, or maybe only the ones who survive until then, will want to put up a statute for folks like me. Don't worry about it, you're welcome and keep the cholera blankets. Hell may freeze over and you could use the warmth.

At some point, we turned into our parents, who are laughing their asses off now as they really didn't do as terrible a job as we kept insisting they had. And considering how we could fuqq up a one-car funeral procession (twice so far and don't ask me about the wet dream in the desert), it might have not been a bad idea to quit while we were only slightly behind instead of pressing on and losing sight of the entire caravan. 

We thought the future was Twenty Questions but, instead, it proved to be Hide 'n Seek in a dark room. And I take the one who finds me back to where it all began, when Jesus was the honeymoon and Cain was just the man. Same as it ever was and I knew coming in that going out would be the same.
-bill kenny