“Umm, there’s a hearse out front,” I said to my wife and son a few Wednesdays ago. We were in my kid’s upstairs room, and I could just see a black vinyl top that had appeared out his window. I was only puzzled for a moment, and then I ran down the stairs and yelled, “Dad!”
No, nothing bad had happened – I knew he was driving!
“You’re going on one of your walks,” she said, from her desk by the office door.
“Yup, just up and down the hill, only exercise I get,” I said, in the doorway. “My legs give me a hard time if I don’t.”
“You just go up to that crosswalk right?”
“Actually, I’ve started to loop through that neighborhood that’s right there,” I said. She nodded and said there were some gorrrrgeous houses up there, but I think she was thinking of a different street, well past where I walk. I waved and didn’t correct her as I went outside, across the lot and around the tall wooden fence, where I texted my wife in the shade.
August 20, 2012
All of us spend some of our lives doing things we don’t enjoy and aren’t very good at. The less time we spend doing such things, the happier we are. You could telegraph your life’s discontent by blacking out squares on a calendar, dot dot dash, for tasks done joylessly and badly.
This is not an unqualified endorsement of the fun and easy. Chips and salsa are easier and more fun than boneless chicken breast, mashed potatoes and canned peas, but you could live on the latter, though doing so might make you wish you were dead. And there are jobs that look like work that we do for fun.
Since I was 13, I’ve had the feeling, one I can’t shake or name, that it is immoral for someone as fortunate as I am to be so frequently unhappy. This feeling is the ghost that animates this blog. I have learned to live with this feeling, its thrashing and reveling, in public and private, its phases of virulence and remission, as a kind of soul-work for my un-religious self.
The religious person, I imagine, has made peace with the morality of his moods in a way that I never have. I could say, defensively, that I don’t choose to feel rotten and resentful, the way people choose to steal cars or cheat on their taxes, so I shouldn’t feel bad about my feelings. But I suspect that my resenting of life, and then my guilty and earnest and futile effort to stop, has warped my choices and actions; that a spiritual exhaustion from all this may have let me steal from and cheat the people I’ve known.
Now I see this person, this person of faith hearing me, responding in two ways. The first is through a television screen, an old bulbous glass one with dust I can see in the afternoon glare, and he says to another character, “One of the people you’ve cheated, [pause], is you.”
I’m sorry to write that, but like most of us, I’ve wasted too much of my life watching television.
The Perseverant 