How I spent my Autumnal Equinox
11:37am feels like its a respectable enough time on a Saturday morning to ask me to wake up, and I feel obliged to comply. The haze of teetering on whether or not I should brush my teeth or walk to get a coffee clogs the major decision making capabilities of my head as my legs do what they can to get me down the stairs without falling. I find myself reading an article on how cats will use robots in the future to make humans obsolete. “Modern science has very nearly rendered human beings unnecessary when it comes to the life of a cat,” the author muses. “We are simply a large and complex external cat organ, one given the duty of making itself obsolete.”
My phone rings, a technological miracle given how many other functions the mobile device has and given its current record of ringing only about 1 in 3 times, and it’s one of my offspring’s many sets of grandparents. They’re at the front door and expecting the boy and his brother, high school football games call them all from distant, Southern hills. Seeing as how I had spent the morning, to this point, only thinking about hygiene and caffeine and actually doing nothing of any real value, I sprung to action, desperate to get two kids ready for the day in the time it takes a young grandmother to get from her car to my front door. 45 seconds later I have the youngest of the two dressed and hoping the other will show some initiative. A tensity subsists between my desire to be a good parent, a mindful person, and the closer reality of my factual instincts to sloth off until I’ve become a singular entity with my recliner. My thoughts get overweight with the immediacy of the moment and, after some light conversation and cigarettes, the boys and their grandparents are off.
Within the next 38 minutes the lady and I are showered, dressed and in a rented Toyota Prius, heading off to the South Side, sparking green and desperate for a zombie movie. When we leave, we’re 15 minutes driving time away from a movie that starts in 25, but by the time we arrive in a parking lot two blocks away from the movie house, we’re 2 minutes late. I procrastinate, wondering if it would be better to just go and see another movie. The board reads off like a Sunday lineup on TBS, and I struggle to light a cigarette in the wind. It gets smoked half way down when she says “Let’s just watch the zombie movie.” The statement makes so much sense that we somehow manage to buy tickets and get into the theatre in time to catch two previews.
Afterwards we rendezvous with the next generation again, and the boys, the lady, and myself find ourselves elbows in on $70 worth of sushi. It is, after all, Saturday and I’m in love with raw fish, ever since she took me to this place in Brighton where conveyor belts promenade thin strips of salmon, tuna, snapper, octopus, and whatever other neon rainbow underwater meats look or taste good sunbathing on a wad of rice. The youngest had a quick love affair with sushi earlier this year, when he experimented with wasabi, squid tentacles and seaweed salad, but he quickly exhausted it and was now picking at two pieces of shrimp as though he’d rather die on a deserted island than ever face the taste again. His brother, however, was a stranger to the world of raw fish and rice, and the allure was just too great for him. He and the lady smiled and made jokes as I tried to photograph the experience for longevity. But pictures rarely last longer than a year, and by then the experience is too faded to remember anything except “Great composition, and I love the colors.” It’s all Photoshop though.
A late afternoon lay turns into an early evening nap and when I awake the three of them have made a fire and are cooking swordfish over it like roadtrippers from the 50’s. As I stumble out of my second groggy headed hypnosis in one day, the boys both start to find sleep more and more appealing. I think I scare the older one. I can come off as extremely grumpy. Or simple, maybe?
I finish the night reading Wikipedia entries on Legend of Zelda characters and wondering, if I had to choose 20 people to go to a desert island and repopulate a post-apocalyptic world, who would they be and why?
Up Next: Harmony Drive