There's very little except fading memory.
My dog's losing patience with me.
I'm not holding up my side of the master-pet relationship anymore.
Not enough treats. More walks required. Too much laying around while I endure.
Ive got my new favorite song on repeat. It's their one.
I had the one good song.
Every other was an attempt.
Toss them into the canyon after all the work. After all the, "I wish I knew."
After all the, "I wish I had."
Watching TV, reading the recommended textbooks. Streaming the guitar chords with bass and B3.
Maximal media consumption.
Everything I did in life led to this.
Kubrick's room at the end. Staring at the void I was told was God, when it was that guy in the taco truck the whole time.
The food was good
But did it need a thousand page holy book?
Spoiler - revelation is that this is what it was.
Reality was that nothing cared, not the sun, not a grain of sand, not a water drop, nobody, for how you were mistreated.
You had an adventure. They always suck, the worse the better.
A message in my inbox from AARP says I can pay to have someone talk to my angels.
May as well because they never talk to me.
The sky is full of UFOs. Bigfoot roams the forests. Light is the speed at which the end of the world is the beginning.
The only wisdom I have for my children:
You should pay attention. You were born sensible. Your time is not my time.
I come from a universe where I wasn't allowed to know what I knew.
I listened about the drugs until
I didn't. (It was weird but nothing happened.)
I was born before my opinion was important. Before they asked me to rate my groceries. Before I had to write a performance review for the lady who sold me the socks (alpaca).
How'd you like the dumplings? My oncologist wants me to rate his bedside manner (not good) and his efficacy (quite good). I'm just not used to it.
There's nothing to say. The guy's got one good song, and the rest were attempts.
You knew the chords. You sang along. You wished he'd do another one as good.
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The scientist who started all this came to my house last weekend. I hadn't seen him since he last brought me to Antarctica twenty years ago. Since then, nearly everything happened. Had I known more about life I might have thought more carefully about going. I wanted adventures before I knew how much they hurt.
His wife was a fellow cancernaut. In 2018 I received his eulogy for her. Then he developed various cancers including the same one that killed my father. These days the treatments are good. You don't die of it anymore.
He had his girlfriend with him. They met online. She asked me if I did online dating after my divorce. I sensed a pointed question to which I said, "No."
She didn't appreciate my stories. I had twenty years of them saved up. She wanted to leave when I got into the one about the pyramids. He sensed her desire to leave and got up to go. We both had so much more to talk about. Before they got to the front door I made him come back to my office, where I keep all my electronics and synth equipment. On the wall is a professionally mounted map of the Taylor Valley he gave me. He signed it back then. Wrote a note to his friend and fellow adventurer. His words are quite clear. I think he was shocked to see I had saved it.
So much time. So much pain. Neither of us could pass the physical qualification exams to go back to the ice. Cancer and age. Loss. That adventure is over. It grenaded and left scars on everyone.
I point to them when I tell the stories. Here is where my toe froze plodding back to camp in a herbie. Here is where I drove a leatherman through my hand on Lake Hoare. Here is where I got hungover after attending my first rage. Here is where I fell in love.
"You changed my life," I told him. He just looked at me, silently. I'd never seen him at a loss for words before. Or maybe there were a bunch of words that were painful to say.
I'm glad he just smiled.
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dannye once asked me if I thought my adventures made me a better writer. I told him they gave me more to write about, but I was probably as good as I would ever get.
It's really amazing to review one's life and realize that at every age we knew so little.
I learned we are never "there." There is no permanent fulfillment.
We are born to be unsatisfied. This drives the quest.
And we are blind to the grail already in our fists. It was given to us at birth.
I didn't make it up. It was this way when I got here.
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We were in my father-in-law's tug boat, motoring back to Juneau from Glacier Bay National Park. The sun blazed. The winds were strong. The seas were ten feet The boat pitched at 45-degree angles as we climbed the swells and then dropped into the troughs. We had to hold on to avoid being thrown about the bridge.
The boat was on autopilot which was a good thing because my father-in-law, being the experienced seaman he is, was not hanging on to the wheel. Thus he was thrown backward as we climbed a particularly vicious swell. He crashed into the door of the cabin with some force.
Then I saw an orca. It was as large as a good-sized Toyota. It was enjoying the waves.
"It's waiting for us to fall in," I shouted, because things were generally loud: the motor straining, the boat slamming into the troughs.
All I could remember with my limited knowledge of marine biology was that orcas were carinvores.
It came up to the side of the boat, spraying it from its blowhole, alternately diving and coming back up.
I shouted, "Bruce, a whale," to my father-in-law who was struggling to get to his feet.
The whale cruised to the bow of the boat and breeched out of the water like it was at Sea World.
"It's going to hit the boat," I yelled, definitely alarmed, certain the coast guard would find nothing but empty inflated life jackets puked out by a cetacean.
"That whale is not going to hit the boat," my father-in-law informed me authoritatively. He pulled himself into the captain's chair and grabbed a handle to secure himself, rubbing the back of his neck.
The orca followed us until we got into sheltered water and the ride smoothed out. I could see the spray exhaled by individuals in a pod in the distance ahead of us. Presumably the whale went back to its family.
"Sometimes they like to play with you," Bruce said.
My arms and legs were sore from holding on so tightly. I made us all a cup of tea and sat, wondering if we'd just had an adventure, or if adventure was just imagination.
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The blonde-haired girl has a friend who is a famous poet. I say "famous" because she is invited all over the English-speaking world and actually makes a living at it.
I became an engineer to avoid being an impoverished writer so I never thought such a thing was possible - but there you go.
The poet writes about her miserable childhood. She writes about the cruelty in the world. I feel sorry for what she had to endure as a child, but am happy the world accepts her output.
She does readings and hosts poetry-writing workshops. Many attend.
Who knew there were so many poets.
She asks me to join. She says to me, "Why won't you write more? You know so many interesting people, and have done so many interesting things."
Sometimes it's best to remain silent and smile.
My quest has been completely imagined by a five-year old sitting on his bed playing with rocket ships.
And I only had this one hit song.