From the tornado into the hurricane, they tell me. Like going from Kansan Oz to Katrina, or Maria. Hurry up and wait for it. I miss just from hearing about them rice and beans from Costa Rica, where the seniors went on their trip, and think again about those conduits of experience we wrap around culture, how best to honor those gifts we're given of learning and traveling, how best to pass them on to others in some form or fashion, as Joe tells me I ought to.
Two days on from Little Brother's due date--though we were all so sure he'd come a week early--it feels much later. Christmastime and Eastertide kids. A second spring break or early summer starts all the same, as this is when we contracted my long term sub to tag in, and I can't complain. It's also the day Granny and Grandpa are heading out, after being here with us a couple weeks in which we thought we needed the help, only to find it was the company. A lot of restaurant food, a lot of playtime for William. He understands practically everything now, and that seems to include the idea that he'll be a big brother, and that just as people are born, they eventually die. This is the one thing we know most surely, and yet nothing else about it. Not the time or place, and we know it only second hand. Somehow, at Easter, even its finality is revealed as questionable. So while William is understanding more and more, we come here to the limits of what I know myself, and to teach him about it a prospect fraught with uncertainty, a long-term project we'll have to work on together, hopefully for a long time.
That said, there's also plenty of nearer-term plans to re-up on at long last. Japanese, Spanish, French in various forms, and the magic circle quote in Cassirer's Language and Myth; revisiting Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in light of Jenny Odell's Saving Time, on the moment and nihilism; Bakhtin likewise, that knight of infinite resignation and perhaps faith, for writing about the school, and about games, endless material. The cruel fates of Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing, like a parody of Socrates, complicating their viability as role models; Proust and Virginia Woolf, too. That longish piece from Eva Brann on the epic and novel, to which the only comment was a gripe about the time era conventions. Still needing to write some more about T3, Undertale, and the philosophy of games; to generalize the audience by finding a better storytelling voice, rather than the petulant academic one I fall into so often. The books on the psychology and sociology of games reviewed briefly. The organization of wellnesses and credits tout court. Reading and child care groups; the prospect of a lab school. The limitations of data, dangers of reductive uses and misinterpretation of the purpose in the first place.
Uncovering older projects: a Demons-like novel in a historical fantasy mode, with the quote from Jefferson about digging in his cellar; the Coffee Dragons series for kids; essays for James and the others; trying to publish stories, poems, and the rest, however mediocre. The essay on FF, of course, and PP, which made it as far as getting substantial comments and await rewrites, amounting to an admission of comradery and requiring a reserve of confidence, that not being exceptional in this does not mean the work is not worth re-doing. Audio for podcasts, to keep those rolling as much as possible, and recording some of the piano pieces for musical interludes, intros, outros, those little touches that help make the thing more fun, and more a work of care and art than a chore or afterthought. Curricula for parents and kids, too, in the Shandean vein, how helpful it is for books, movies, play to connect together: I Spy, or Totoro sleeping under the trees at the Easter Egg hunt. How when Mei is lost, the mom and dad are even oblivious, spared but for the miraculous arrival of the corn with writing on the husk. That scene of Charlie Chaplin and the corn cob which Odell describes, right alongside references to the Simpsons and Beavis and Butthead.
Maybe time to reconnect with Spark and the Ulysses book club, to get in touch with local writers for help with publishing. Certainly past time to find a church to volunteer with, for language learners, the widows and orphans of the verse. Undertaking to rejoin seminars, reaching out to the Catherine Project; reconnecting with Signum and the Pixels. Remembering to scan headlines but then to read on archive as long as it may last rather than the news, to listen to books rather than quite so many podcasts, and more often to leave silences, breaks, for nothing in particular. To sit and look out of the window, or over the fences; to play music, not letting the instruments go to waste while waiting till next year to try again to get the band started.
At a certain point I must have given up keeping journals organized at all, and now I don't know where I've been writing things. I have three or four paper ones going, kept in different places around the house, and any number of files on a nearly full drive where it's easier to just search than it is to put things in folders of any sort. Then there's this blog, as well as the ones for video games and whatever else we talk about on the squares, books and films, mostly.
I notice the NY Times has turned to games as generator of virality and FOMO; their longtime film critic walking away for good; their culture writers' podcast appearing and disappearing like 3 Card Monty. So it seems even the pros are gotten the best of. Watching Ted Lasso, remembering when The Wire was what everyone talked about, all about games and players.
I finally have started to remember dreams again, imaginary people and places. Goals to read Magister Ludi alongside Maryanne Wolf's attempts to re-read it, and to compare her work and Gopnik's on literacy and play for a PhD of my own. Dealing with the self-consciousness, self-protectiveness in writing privately, and how conveniently that means the inevitable lack of privacy effectively prevents writing. Resultant cycles of self-recrimination, resentment, forgiveness, anxiety, to the point of wanting therapy or psychedelics to help break through. So far, just writing anyhow, even if no one, me included, will ever read it.
