My life is one filled with premonition. On a regular basis, I have a deep foreboding; a dark cloud eclipses the full-moon that shines down into my soul. If I run the statistics back to the very limits of my recollection my track record is 100%.
In the 70s I heard about the possibility of nuclear immolation at the hand of ‘evil’ communists. It never happened.
Years later when my parents divorced, my mother sat on the bed with me and said, “It’s just you and me now. Whatever’s happened in the past is in the past and we’ve got to stick together if we’re going to make it,” my heart soared. I believed that day was the beginning of a new and wonderful beginning for us and that we’d finally be happy. That never happened either.
Not long after when I went to live with my grandparents and went to a new high school I thought that was finally my opportunity to make friends with people my age. I’d finally be normal as I could shuffle off the coil of previous geekiness and be a normal kid like everyone else. That still hasn’t happened.
Three years later when I transferred back to the school district I’d come from before I was braced to once again be the pariah of the school. That didn’t happen either; everyone was actually happy to see me it seemed.
Even more years later, when I was unceremoniously ejected from Purdue for an overindulgence of academic freedom, I thought my life was at an end, that I would suffer in the quagmire of a factory like all my relatives before me. That certainly didn’t happen.
When I met a girl who made my mouth drop open in awe, I expected her to laugh in my face. After all, she was from the big city and I was dressed in skin-tight pink shorts and a dark-blue velour shirt with a shaved head. She didn’t laugh then but we do still together laugh now.
After our daughter was born I was pretty sure there was NO way I was going to figure out what I was supposed to do with a child. How could I ever learn to love something that pooped in the middle of the night and woke up the whole house? As it turns out though, I figured out both things easily enough.
Now I’m back to the same strange feeling. As if I’m standing at the edge of a great canyon peering over into the vastness. It could be that I’m about to fall headlong into the void or perhaps the view will change my sense of self forever. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll slip on the ice going out to get the mail and break my neck. Or perhaps my blog will become nationally syndicated in the American Journal of Writing for People with Poor Taste. All I can say with any certainty is that no matter what it is that I have no clue what tomorrow will bring. Good, bad, or indifferent we are all merely dandelion fluff on the fickle winds of fate.
Current Novel: “The Inheritance of Loss”, Kiran Desai [270/320]Daily Robism: There is no greater disservice one man can do another than to fail to tell him the absolute truth.
2 comments:
"overindulgence of academic freedom"?
Life will always have its unpredictable ups and downs, many extreme, as you've seen. What do you think may be the source of your foreboding?
Yeah, I need to write my little blog autobiography. See, when the other kids were learning Pascal in CS180 I was learning C++. When the other kids were learning some other thing I was learning some other different thing. I've never been good, apparently, at staying iwth my group.
The source of my foreboding? Pfft, just typical human paranoia. Nothing happened obviously. Well, until tomorrow when the meteor strikes anyway.
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