Let The Beat... mmmmdrrrrrOPPP!
Rhythm. Quite a word, no? Not only does it describe the underlying, propulsive force of music and language, it’s also the Vatican’s preferred method of birth control. I know that sounds funny since no one who lives in the Vatican is supposed to even need birth control, but they have a position anyway (don’t get me started on their recommended “positions”), one to which I am morally obligated to subscribe. I’m happy to say that I have, and with great success. The rhythm method in conjunction with the vasectomy I had after my third child was born has thus far (fingers crossed) prevented any impregnation of my wife by me.

The 100% success rate of this powerful combined one-two anti-procreation punch (rhythm and surgical intervention) also gives me the added bonus of knowing if my wife is getting hers from somewhere else. If she turns up pregnant, either it’s a sign of the Second Coming (no pun intended) or it’s a sign that I have the moral authority to go out and kill some guy for porking my missus. So it’s all plusses.

Where was I? Oh yes, rhythm. As my oldest boy wades deeper and deeper in to his first year of the endless mindless, torture that are the School Years (if he had any idea, he’d run. I’m too much of a sadist to tell him), I’m being reminded of the rhythms that defined and shaped my existence from the age of five until my last day of graduate school twenty years later.

The work changed (obviously), the teachers and places changed, but the rhythm remained the same. Like most things, school life was defined more by its absence than its presence. It is only by reaching limits that borders are knowable; as necessarily important as Is is, it is completely incomprehensible without grasping the Is-Not to hem it in, give it shape and coherence, to draw solid lines bringing the order of Form to what is otherwise Chaos.

Of course I’m talking about vacation. Whatever school I was ever in at whatever level, that’s what you always lived for. The first day of school isn’t the first day of school, it’s the End Of Summer Vacation. And then you count the days until Columbus Day. And then Veterans’ Day. And then Thanksgiving. And then the first big one, Christmas Break. Er, Winter Break. Sorry Christ-less heathens, didn’t see you there.

But ooh, the Break. Two weeks, no waking, no writing, no homework. Sure, you miss the walking-around money you get from beating up smaller kids and divesting them of their meal money, but mix in some petty shoplifting and you almost never miss it.

That’s where we are now in the Is-Not of my son’s first Christmas Break. From this side, the parent side, it’s an entirely different experience. Past that, though, as someone without the anchor of work or school, there is no “break”. There is no definition, no delimiting, no goal of absence that makes substance from nothing. There is simply Work (taking kid to school and all that implies) and Other Work (staying at home with kids and all that implies).

So divorced from the social connection of outside employment I find myself also divorced from the satisfaction derived from the rhythm.

My rhythm now is what I make of it. It’s all awkward beats, full of alternate screeching and silence, tripping and halting, confused and overwhelming. Kind of like a Bjork record.

All this is my way of telling you that I am writing this entry on my laptop on MS word instead of in my handy Blogger New Post window. My wife is occupying the comfortable leather chair at my desk, putting her defined, vacationing hands all over my desktop computer as she figures out how to work our new photo printer.

So that’s what this is all about. We’re all on vacation, whatever that means any more. My kid is off, my wife is off (mandatory vacation for her struggling company until January 2), imposing her “normal” rhythm all over mine.

As long as she’s getting up with the kids in the morning, though, I can live with it.



This post on the Narcissus Scale: 9.0


Pops

- posted by Pops @ 10:38 PM