Damn Unlikely

Hey Kid,

I just don't know, kid. I just don't know.

There are so many good reasons why I shouldn't be a parent. Jesus, I can't believe I'm saying this to YOU, of all people. Hello ammo!

I look at this journal and it seems so terribly neurotic. Here: maybe if we analyze everything RIGHT NOW--and I mean EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD--maybe you'll live better and I'll be a better parent and maybe, maybe just maybe, NOTHING BAD WILL EVER HAPPEN. It's not just neurotic, it's a power trip, and as power trips go it's exceedingly naive, which is exactly how I don't want to be.

This week I began to feel that maybe staying alive really is pointless. That certainly makes having YOU pointless.

A lot of different shitty things happened this week, and if you're sitting there reading this then they clearly weren't that bad, but I'll tell you the kicker. On the road between Kingston and Montreal, there's a detour to a little town in the plains called Merrickville. Merrickville was the kicker. Merrickville made me want to kill myself.

I took the detour because I'd been told it was a nice place to have lunch. It turned out to be nothing but a tourist trap: a few little shops with arty beaded necklaces and crystals for sale, a painting studio or three, flavored fudge, and a restaurant, as advertised. I sat down alone in a dark dining room half-full with other tourists, all significantly older than me, and while I waited for my food I eavesdropped. I always eavesdrop--is that a crushing blow to your idealized view of me? Probably not.

They were all deep in conversation, table by table, "chatting" I suppose. They talked about the things they'd bought from the arty little shops, and what they might want to buy later, someday, and about other people's problems. They wore sweatshirts, bulged out of their chairs, swiped fronds of greasy over-processed hair out of their pasty faces, and they just talked and talked and talked about nothing at all.

Do you realize, once upon a time, those people were just like you?

Once, at SOME POINT, the majority of them had to have been bright eyed and healthy and maybe even attractive, or at least wanted to be. The majority of them, considering the bourgeois circumstances, probably went to college at some point, and certainly all must have had some kind of dreams for their lives. They probably wondered if there was a god, perhaps asked themselves in despair if they'd ever find love, perhaps laid awake every night when they were twelve, thinking about death. Did they realize that one day they'd wake up and say to themselves, "Hey, let's go to Merrickville today! Yes, Merrickville will be a GOOD TIME"?

Probably not. One hopes not. I certainly never said that to myself. Merrickville, for me, was an accident.

I sat there and realized that this is what life becomes, for most of us. We become used to the mundane swing of events, the fact that life is not as romantic or exciting as we hoped, that we will work at jobs that bear very little resemblance to our hopes, and may never bring meaning to our lives. Or to anyone's life, for that matter. Worst of all, we get used to it. We stop caring. Or they stopped caring. Me? I'd rather die now and save myself the trouble of faking a life.

Today Dav and I went to the World Press Photo exhibit down the street, all the winners of international news photo contests, lit up and lined around the edges of the room. I saw pictures of bloated humans face down in filthy streets, little children with ragged nubs for arms, very few smiling faces, mostly starvation. Reasons why we don't read newspapers anymore. What can I say? You laugh or you cry. I cried.

Life looks like nothing but a simple brutal choice: either we suffer horribly, or we choose to feel nothing at all.

Yes, there's always drugs and spending to excess if you'd rather be abnormally happy.

But here's me, writing furiously to you, trying to... what? Stop it all from happening to you? Better I should never have you at all, then believe I have that kind of power. Maybe I'm just trying to lie to myself, weave a magical incantation over us with the power of my mind, believing that if I write enough down, it'll all be better--at least better. We'll stand up on the blasting bow of a white boat and wave silk handkerchiefs into warm wind and orange sunset skies. You and me, kid, me in my fluttering linen dress, you in yellow dungerees. Every single day, breathing salt and clean sky, the rest of the world nothing but a blue dream in the mist behind us. Each wave, nothing but a buoy into a perfect life.

Oh, god, I doubt it, kid. At any rate, I doubt it would be all that satisfying after a week or two.

I really don't know what to tell you.

I love you.



C.