I can't sleep. Well, I was sleeping, then Samson, now 9, wakes me. 3:30am
"I wet the bed"
"ok, what do you do when you wet the bed? You've been having accidents every night for awhile now. . .?"
"I take a shower"
"Yes, then come lay with me"
Samson has been peeing the bed ever since he was 6 months out from being fully potty trained at 2. At 2 and a half, he began wetting the bed. There have been good stretches lasting weeks, then there has been now, where 5 of 7 nights he's wet. He took a shower for about 25 minutes (forgetting to use the soap, I could smell when he snuggled into my bed). I laid there, in-between my partner and my youngest son, held in a limbo of subconscious rest and restlessness that are the opposites these two males represent. Tom with his zen outlook, a Way of complete peace, a real testament to calm. Samson, who went to bed after a fit of rage over a cartoon he was apparently coerced into watching, and as it came to a close, he began his protest, screaming and stomping about, arguing that his older brother gets to pick everything. It ended abruptly as I gave him the Very Dramatic Lecture (abbreviated for time) that each day is a day closer to death, that we have one less day to love each other and have fun. Isn't it a shame he wasted tonight on anger over a cartoon he enjoyed until he realized he didn't actually chose it.
Seems like a lot could be gathered together about Samson's emotional status from this opening bit.
So I'm awake, the consciousness of Samson's angst and anxiety and all the general irrationalities and realities that come with being 9 in our family, in this age, in this space - all this toppled the reptilian need for the coveted 8 hours, the rare, the legendary, the un-real 8 hours of sleep.
So I decide to write, and instead of beginning a new blog, why not just write here?
An update is called for. I'll keep it simple for now, and tell you about the bus.
It's sitting beside a very old garage about 20 minutes from where I sit in my dark living room right now, under this slow fan. Twenty minutes into New Jersey countryside most people don't think exists. Twenty minutes from me, a bit closer to the sunrise and the shoreline, overlooking a soy field and keeping neighbors with a wild peacock. Flanked by the garage, then my friend's house - a rambling mash-up of a late 1700 brick house and modern additions added by his father for their 6 children, completely dated by the appearance and materials, a strange but comforting home for two people now - once for 8, it is divided into 2 homes. My bus's other neighbor is a house set back from the gravel road, a dark and moss-engulfed home that I imagine looks from a Grimm's forest, but my imagination is wild, and I bet next time I look, it's just a wooden house. I don't know the people that sleep inside that house, but I'd like to think we have much in common, if only our shared frustration at that bus. . .
That bus, it almost surprises me to see the photo on the front of this blog, so white, with the lights draped carefully and carelessly, with Ezekiel not prophesizing like he did in the Old Testament, but plying the role of angel, announcing the birth of a bus I should name Sirius because of the constellation - Sirius B namely, because it exists but we can't see it without a telescope. We can't, but in a book by Tom Robbins - Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, I read 17 years ago - in this story there are Africans who know about this star before it was 'properly' discovered. I like to think Sirius exists, and even that a group of Aboriginal people may know the details of Sirius even now, even as they are a day ahead.
The bus sits and rots, molds, sinks, peels, changes chemistry in undesired ways for one who (last I checked on this blog) was making a moving gallery out of the decomposing shell. Like everything, Chernobyl included, nature is taking over. Stinging creatures have build nests in the last two years, and I have removed them in the winter. I currently represent 49 spiders in the gallery, showcasing unimaginable masterpieces of utilitarian design and working conceptual pieces that are not only bottomless metaphors, but boast as many uses as a Thneed.
So it sits, and I visit it about once a month, and sometimes take a couple photos. As it gets warmer, I think about completing it. I remember the passion I had just 2 years ago, driving up from North Carolina, driving on restricted roadways (well worth it) in New York state, thankfully not taking out any overpasses. . .I remember this and I luckily have this, these writings, which are embarrassingly honest, terribly young and optimistic, and painfully naive. I moved up north and I feel with that geographical and cultural move, I have been shown the truth in that last sentence. I also realize that the truth in that sentence is why the people who did not support my efforts years ago did not support my efforts. If someone told me today that they were putting all their extra money into a project they knew nothing about, while having three kids and little to no support and no Plan B, I'd tell them in a less eloquent and more unapologetic delivery, of the idiot choices they were making.
I don't regret a thing.
I'm glad Sirius is seeing the sky ripen into morphing shades of ripening plum right now.
