Ramshackle Head

"I love you more than the world can contain

In its lonely and ramshackle head"

Sufan Stevens

Some days you come home from work leaden with the weight of another batch of students of concern, but you are not calling them that anymore, so instead you worry about their overall wellness. Your afternoons and evenings becoming only the time in between work, so much so that you forget that you are living a life, raising a family, tending your own needs, maintaining a marriage.

Is this all that life is meant to be? Noticing and appreciating the in between moments? The few hours after you overcome the exhaustion and the few minuets before you succumb to it and sleep?

You wash the lunch boxes and make the next day’s lunches on auto pilot, you watch the late shows make fun of Trump as a pathway to your sanity. Who has the energy to worry about the world beyond the children in your life? You check in on the homework, hoping it’s done, but not really caring because let’s face it homework is bullshit. You work on the speech therapy words with the little one, because you are paying a small fortune for improvement.

It’s Tuesday night so you and the girls take the bus to the local restaurant for pints and pies. The sun sets on your second IPA, illuminating the sky in a blanket of violent and pink. You and the girls are talking about music based on the post you wrote yesterday. They seem to understand your point, even though the older one argues for the sake of arguing. You wonder when she will calm down and let you love her. You imagine a time- the two of you, a trail, a campfire, a conversation that doesn’t end in an argument. You hope you are doing this right. The parenting The teaching, The being a man. How can you be?

It’s hard loving two hundred kids at work, but the two at home need your attention too.

You come home and play Sufjan Stevens, slightly buzzed as the kids get ready to sleep, wondering if this is what you dreamt peace meant when you were living in the Tenderloin.

At least you have the freedom of these words, the ability to scream your insecurity into the world and await a few likes to valiant your voice. It’s a bit sad that you need it, but what do the people who do not write to release their tension do, in the solitude of their own solitude and darkness.

At least these posts make it feel like someone might hear your angst and make you feel less alone.

Later you’ll watch some TV show, this week one about spiritual awakening and a cult in Oregon, wondering if what you have gathered in life is what you need. You think back to the Rainbow Gathering and the sign that said, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings have a human experience.” It feels so lame and cliche now at 43, but on that random Tuesday evening in Taos, New Mexico, it felt like a door way, a promise into something different. Something bigger.

You wonder if there is anything bigger or different in your immediate future.

Tomorrow, you will work on mundane trivial administrative tasks, the equivalent of teaching kids how to jump through hoops, because that is what the system demands of them at this time. Weren’t you supposed to be showing them how to break the system down?

You’ve been sitting in the younger one’s room for a while now, because she’s sacred of her dreams. You wish you could crawl into them with her and show her the wonder beyond the fear, but there doesn’t seem to be any room for you in there. Who knows if you would even know the way.

Not for anything, but you are grateful every night that you are healthy and sleeping in a warm safe bed. You are aware enough to know that most people cannot say the same thing. You remind yourself to get over yourself and your navel gazing petty bourgeois ennui.

You’re not sure how you ended up here, but now that you are here, you will complete the final sentence and get ready for whatever comes next.