I’m king of the world. I’ve made end tables and people. My wife helped some, but not with the end tables. I must have read a bazillion wasted pixels, written by people nearly old enough to qualify for grandparent status, explaining that they’re not ever having any kids because of the need to pay back a quarter-million dollars in school loans, the end result of which is an inability to spell “lose” and a job drawing pictures in foam.
Let’s all read another 600 words of Marketwatch twaddle about how much it costs to raise a kid to adulthood. Oh, lets! I like to read that sort of thing and point and laugh at the author and everybody that reads it and doesn’t point and laugh. If you put a dollar sign anywhere on a child there’s no hope for you. What will they put on your gravestone? Trick question, there will be no one that cares if you’re alive or dead to buy one for you, but for the sake of argument, what would it say? That guy/girl sure could watch premium cable.
Speaking of pointing and laughing, go watch the video again. No one points and laughs better than a toddler.
I wrote the other day of the need to Keep Going. The Keep Going statue is the only trophy I want on my shelf just now. My wife says it’s fine if I want to accept it, but she’d prefer I didn’t start posing for it until I install a new bathtub. The Keep Going trophy is the only one worth having if you have children.
Longtime reader and commenter DadofHomeschoolers drops me a line from time to time. He’s one of the many people who let me know there are others that Keep Going. It’s much easier when you know you’re part of a quiet wave. His son Daniel is like my older son. They are too old for (homeschool) high school, but they keep going, of course. Daniel is studying to produce records, and like all people who Keep Going, he’s not waiting for a diploma to do things. Juliana Schnee is his friend, and another homeschool graduate, and they’re making recordings together. Juliana is writing music, and performing it where an audience can get at her — the bravest thing I know.
I offer no advice. Just a heartfelt wish that they Keep Going.
[If you know of someone that qualifies for Keep Going status, send it to SippicanCottage*at*gmail.com]
SHE CALLED IT the piazza. I’d been to the library and it isn’t a piazza at all, but she says it just the same.
I didn’t say that, but it’s not like I know what to call it anyway. I wouldn’t say it to her face if I did know because she is so fierce. The doctors, like bad farmers, pulled babies and other things you’d think were vital out of her and all sorts of bits off of her as the calendars repeated themselves, and father says when they bury her there will be an echo inside. She carries on like the turning of the earth, and everyone loves her and fears her no matter how much of her is left.
She never went leathery; she got adamantine. She was a basilisk to a stranger and a pitted madonna to her own. We make a pilgrimage, no less, to visit her. Which one are you again is the name she uses to prove she loves us all the same amount. She presses a quarter in my hand like a card trick when we leave.
The piazza is just a rotten porch that leans drunkenly off the building and she sends me to get the food that cooled out there. It’s thirty rickety feet above the jetsam of a thousand lives gone bad, surrounded by chainlink and crime. She’s like a one-woman congress, overruling all sorts of laws of man and nature, but you can’t help feeling she can’t keep a lookout for gravity forever on your behalf, can she? Everything is only a matter of time in this world.
It’s always hot and close when you return, breathless from fear and hurry and the whip of the wind, and you notice she has only two colors: grey and the pink of her cheek. There are always things I don’t understand, boiling. Everything on the plates is grey and pink, too.
The rooms are in a parade. The triptych of the parlor windows shows the sack of a forgotten Rome through the tattered lace. No running in the hall! Her daughter lives down stairs so there was no one to bother but… the very idea!
But how could any child linger in that tunnel of a hall? You had to get past it to the kitchen table. The bedrooms branched off, dim caves that smelled of perfume bought in stores forty years closed by men thirty years dead. The indistinct whorls on the wallpaper reached out to touch your hand like a leper.
At the table, the lyre-back chair groans and shifts under even my little weight, and you sit transfixed while she spoons the sugar and dumps the milk into the tea until the saucer is a puddle, and you wondered in your head how many times the bag could take it. There’s cinnamon and laughter now and then and blessed sunlight that turned the battered battleship linoleum into a limpid pool. The cork shines through the scrim of the coating, a million footfalls revealing more and more of it over time.
I look for signs and wonders where I can find them. I’m not talking about Glory Clouds that rain gold dust or talking bushes. I am on the lookout for any signs of life. I am enthusiastic about the slightest signal I can find that might indicate that someone is trying to carry on their society’s traditions in a meaningful way. Oh, the heck with society. I’ll settle for humanity.
I’ve made a lot of friends all over the world by writing. People have been nice to me and my children. I live a generally isolated life, made more isolated by my family’s refusal to submit to the cult of societal obsolescence. I suffer no pangs of guilt about walking the earth, and look for fellow travelers who want to Keep Going. My wife and I are nothing special, but we are at least a testament to Keep Going, surely.
A while back, a person I never met sent me a computer he didn’t need anymore but I couldn’t afford. I gave it to my son so that he could use it to record all the Unorganized Hancock videos you see here on my webpage. He sent me a greater gift, though I doubt he understood it as such. He sent me a video of his daughter and her friends singing like angels. He sent me testimony that someone else had the same idea I had: Keep Going. These girls are wholesome and lovely and I found the whole thing charming beyond words. My son used that computer I mentioned to turn part of the raw performance video into this nifty little finished product. I meant to post it on my blog a year ago, but I had to Keep Going at something or other and got distracted. Better late than never. The whole concept of “better late than never” is a form of Keep Going, after all.
People post pictures of Darwin all over the Intertunnel but they have no idea what he said, or what it meant. They definitely don’t know that a friar made applesauce of his theories, and the science-is-settled contingent of the last century simply stapled them together and put Darwin on the front like the cover sheet on a TPS Report. Darwin worshipers mistake cowardice, self-absorption, and sloth for wisdom in an uncertain world. I am Spenglerian. Society is an organism, too, if you ask me. All you worshipers of Darwin should maybe wonder what Darwin would have to say about an organism that refuses to defend itself, and won’t reproduce. He’d say it deserves everything it gets.
Morons think there is an alternative to having children and raising them. I don’t. Oh, and by the way, if an emperor moron like Ray Kurzweil manages to upload his meager intellect to a computer, I can assure you this is how it will turn out, and I’ll be first in line to do it:
I am serene in the thought that If I can’t manage it, my kids will do it. Or his will.
Evelyn Mulwray: Tell me, Mr. Sippican: Does this often happen to you?
Sippican: What’s that?
Evelyn Mulwray: Well, I’m judging only on the basis of one afternoon and an evening, but, uh, if this is how you go about your blogging, I’d say you’d be lucky to, uh, get through a whole day.
Sippican: Actually, this hasn’t happened to me for a long time.
Evelyn Mulwray: When was the last time?
Sippican: Why?
Evelyn Mulwray: It’s an innocent question.
Sippican: In Internettown.
Evelyn Mulwray: What were you doing there?
Sippican: Blogging for nothing.
Evelyn Mulwray: Doing what?
Sippican: As little as possible.
Evelyn Mulwray: The Internet gives their men advice like that?
Sippican: They do in Internettown.
Month: June 2015
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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