2007.04.03 Some Frustrations
It's a full moon tonight, staring down with such a glare that it paralyzes the world. We got back this evening, S and I, from a lazy long weekend visiting friends and their kin in the decadent Californian valley known as Nappa. An odd sort of world-weary crankiness was affecting us, though we were careful to try to avoid burdening each other with our own irritabilities. Maybe we both had grown bored with the required putting-on-a-show of expected joy regarding our recently-announced engagement. Maybe it was the spiritual stains left on us by the truly dreadful Oakland Airport. Whatever the source, I certainly needed to go for a drive. In the Porsche. Like I implied, it was a still night. The raspy snarl of Richthofen sawed through it like a competitive chainsaw through some protected old-growth forest. It let me scream out some of my frustrations. Which, it turns out, are uncomfortably many. We went and saw a local concert by The Tragically Hip last Wednesday night. It was good; I felt alive. It was, overall, quite frustrating. They're the source of some of my most-favourite songs, yet somehow they manage to be so much less this past decade that it actually makes me uncomfortable. I want to be able to glower boldly at any who ask, telling them without hesitation that "I LOVE THE HIP!" I do, only The HIP I love existed in 1994, or thereabouts. Being a tone-deaf talentless cretin, I really wish I could keep my musical tastes simply-defined. No, that's not true - not really. I guess what I really wish for is another generation-defining and Canadian-heart-understanding masterpiece that shakes the very marrow of the earth the way that Fully Completely did. I pulled up to my arbitrary errand destination, and parked as I always do in the safest corner of the lot, making Richthofen snarl and growl before I settle him down for a brief wait. I'm in and out of the store as quickly as is feasible without sprinting or robbing the place. A middle-aged lady who watched me go back to the Porsche beamed at me when she saw me place the bag in the passenger seat and gingerly strap it in with the seatbelt. I'm not sure if she smiled because she thought it was silly, or because she realized that it was absolutely necessary. Arriving home from my augmented jaunt, I discovered an e-mail from my father, sent three days ago. He detailed his itinerary for his impending surgery, with Classic Castle Wit™ under the title "slit me like a fish". It reminded me of a vast myriad of frustrations, and I'm not at all certain that driving in my Porsche will adequately vent them. There's the frustration that, in the past thirteen-or-whatever years since he became ill, I haven't yet managed to say all the things that I want to say to him. It's an embarrassing faux pas for an aspiring writer. There's the frustration about being so far away from him since I took the job in the US, and there's the related frustration that I didn't have the simple foresight to arrange to be with him when he needed me. Both of these are compounded by my frustration with the Canadian government for not having finished processing my passport renewal yet. Which, in turn, is related to my many frustrations with the fundamentally retarded government currently in power in the US. Though, at this point, I think my frustration with the thought of my future children not having a chance to really get to know their paternal grandfather trumps the rest of these frustrations with the same aplomb that the Chicxulub asteroid trumped the Cretaceous. If I wasn't so weary, and old, and timid, I'd load up Richthofen, drive all night to cross the border, and visit my dad. Screaming defiantly with my boxer-6 engine all the way while listening to The HIP. Instead, I'm going to cry myself to sleep, hope desperately for the best, and stoically tend to my responsibilities like he taught me to. |
