Still Life With Beer Bottle

“Tenure is short in the fast lane. Julius Caesar was dead after five years at the top, and the hideous pervert Caligula was gone just short of four, like a one-term U.S. president.” Hunter S. Thompson, from Generation of Swine

In early September my daughter will turn 15 and my son 20. My Virgo children, markers of my years. How did we get here? Plenty of twists and turns in this road, more than a few potholes to knock our alignment out of whack, an off-ramp or two that led to an unfinished bridge over a dry riverbed. I can’t help but look back and wonder what I’ve done, what I’m doing, and what it all means.

If you have to ask yourself if you are happy, are you?

I think of all the books I will never read and the places I will never see; both are numerous. I want to travel to Italy and Spain and France, the Czech Republic and Istanbul, but travel requires money and time and I’m a working stiff, dependent on the monthly paycheck, like so many in this nickel and dime USA, where peasants are on the hook for outrageous costs for our kids’ education and the pills we need to remain healthy. I’ve stood witness to the death of the American Dream and the deliberate strangling of the Middle Class, lived through Nixon and Carter and Reagan and Bush I and his demented offspring and the frenzied corporate giveaway of the Clinton years.

And Obama, friend of the oligarchs, the world’s biggest arms merchant. President Drone. Evidence? I don’t need no damn evidence, reasonable suspicion is all I need. Bang, you’re dead. Sorry about your wife and son and nephew and mother-in-law. The science of murder is unfortunately inexact.

A long downward slide toward the abyss where a smiling Hillary Clinton waits with a hand-lettered sign that says, “Join Me.” No way sister, I’d rather cannonball down than stand on the rim with you. Go swindle someone else with your BS tales.

I sit on my rented deck with a cold bottle of Guinness, green treetops on three sides, a slight breeze; the bottle sweats. Finches and wrens titter and flit among the branches. Overhead there is blue sky streaked with wispy clouds. My daughter is at rehearsal for the Fall show at the high school, my son is working at a restaurant in the trendy Funk Zone, and my wife is on her way home from the SB Independent. I should read but am tired after a long day and it feels good to sit back and close my eyes, let my mind wander back over time and place. I have a sense of peace, but no sooner do I realize this when I wonder when it will end. Because it will, because it must, because this is the way of life.

Why is it that the longer I live the less I feel I know? I am humbled by my ignorance.

Lines blur, colors fade, certainty is dangerous; this seems significant, to me anyway, but the finches and the wrens could care less.