But nevertheless why not

I think I've always believed that if you jump into something without thinking, but you do it with all of yourself, however it turns out is never a mistake. When I was 27 and found out my 19-year-old girlfriend was pregnant, I was in between freelance jobs, running out of money fast, and running up a credit card debt that would hang around my neck for the next 10 years. We'd only been together for six months. I didn't even hesitate choosing to keep this child. We were infatuated with each other and thought we were in love. What the fuck, right? The relationship didn't work out, but having my son did.

The situation I was in at that time, being broke and living in one room in a filthy house full of hippies, came from another one of those decisions.

I had been working my first real job and I was constantly frustrated by the sense I wasn't doing enough with my creative life. It was a marketing job, and I got the idea you could use marketing, which I kind of liked, to promote stuff that mattered, like the arts. I met another guy who had had the same idea. He was an artist living with other artists in this knotty house that had once been a hunting lodge and fronted on a river bank. The New York/Connecticut State border ran directly through it, there was a marker on a stone out front. Everything was crooked, every surface lined with found objects placed or glued there by previous waves of creative, wayward people perhaps going back a few decades. I decided to quit my job, survive on freelance, and move into the house to start that company, which never got started, at least not because of anything I did. I was too busy getting my girlfriend pregnant. Later I would move to Minnesota with her without ever having visited there.

In between the times when I make decisions like these, that could be considered ballsy, I criticize myself for being scared. I should've enrolled in Graduate School in England like I wanted to. I should've moved to New York City or San Francisco like I wanted to. I had a free plane ticket to New Orleans I never used, even for a weekend. More than anything, I should've finished the ten different novels, plays, screenplays, songs, and poetry manuscripts I'd written only one or two pages of. What I'm afraid of in all these cases is steps. The individual steps it takes to do something seem really boring or inconvenient (e.g., applying to Grad School, doing research, booking hotels) and I find that kind of stuff agonizing. But when something is handed to me I almost always take it.

A year-and-a-half ago, I separated from my son's mother, who I'd ended up marrying and having another child with. Just a few months after the first one was born we had started having these fights that got worse and never stopped getting worse. It's another story, suffice it to say I'd been so frustrated for so long I couldn't breathe anymore, and anger might have been the only thing keeping me alive, because when I wasn't angry I felt fat and domesticated.

Suddenly I was again living in a room in another filthy house full of wayward people. I spent a lot of time alone on my kid-free days doing the kinds of things I'd missed out on for the previous ten years, like taking a four-hour-long run all the way from Uptown Minneapolis to Theodore Wirth State Park, or going to movies by myself, or sitting and meditating for hours, or taking hours to just walk quietly in the woods. I started writing and playing music again. On free weekends, however, I complained of being bored. I said this to a coworker and she suggested I try an online dating service. I had no interest in dating if it meant working toward finding another relationship. But what the fuck, right?

A few weeks after I signed up someone called "butnevertheless" winked at me electronically; the dating machine had matched us up. A few times I was matched up with women because we both liked cats or were carbon-based lifeforms. Having had one nearly bad date, I knew that a pretty smile that hints of a sense of humor; and eyes that might flash with intelligence; and tousled hair that might feel soft twined around your fingers; and that might elude you trying to call it any one color, because it changes in the light; and what could be, as far as you can tell in an over-exposed vacation photo, a body that makes you wish you could paint a picture of it; that these might not be enough. She could've been dumb. Or cruel. Her personal description sounded witty and literate, but that didn't mean the first time she opened her mouth she wouldn't say something awful. My senior prom date did ("You know what I think is really funny? When dogs get hit by cars.") I considered these things and decided to write her a note anyway.

She wrote back, and then we talked, and it was obvious we should try meeting. When we did it was daytime and I saw the pictures had been good pictures. When we met again at night she told stories and she made me laugh.

That night, we were in a restaurant. The air was subtly energized like it can be when the lighting is a certain way, and there was just something about her that darted back and forth and danced around behind whatever it was she was saying or doing that made me want to take hold of her, so I could pin it down. One day three weeks later we were writing to each other. We'd been writing for hours every day between trying to do our stifling jobs, which were even harder since we were so tired from staying up past one in the morning every night, and she said, "Am I your girlfriend?"

Not liking uncertainty, my mind had been been trying to put labels and definitions around what was happening with her and I'd get anxious and push them away. It had been four months since I split up with my wife. The ten years before that had worn away just enough space, between me and my thoughts, to hesitate before making any more of these impulsive decisions. I knew I was holding on too tight to the idea of those four months and I knew saying the wrong thing now could screw me forever so I kind of laughed at myself, and shrugged, mentally, and put my hands on the keys and typed "Yes."

It's more than a year later and I'm still saying Yes. To building a relationship with her kids, to letting her build one with mine, to half moving in together, to introducing the idea of totally moving in together to my kids, to building a room for them in her house. Right now, I'm in another one of those minute spaces between two worlds separated only by my own tight grip on one of them.

One one side, getting officially divorced is another one of those things with steps, steps in this case that include lots of money and potentially, if I don't have enough of it to get good legal advice, spending all kinds of additional money that should be shared between me and Elizabeth. There's the inequality between the money I have now, and the money she has, that means for a while she'll be floating more of the bills. There's a pride thing wrapped up in there, and in the fact of at least still owning my own house. There's a family me and my boys (who I haven't said enough about) have built together, our rituals and our foods and the little adventures and guilty pleasures we have for ourselves.

On the other side is the rest of my life, which I also haven't written enough about, that promises with more certainty than the uncertain options in all my previous courageous decisions to be absolutely perfect. Our kids love each other, we love each other. There are brief moments between kids sprawling and thumping and jumping on couches and shouting, sometimes screaming, when all six of us have sat eating pizza and I've thought "This is my family" and I know those will grow. But this is the option requiring more of a leap and I'm being just a little too cautious.

I read about Tim Leary's death in the Times a few years ago. The last words he spoke after years of making many of what could be considered the wrong decisions were "Why not, why not, why not." Now I'm looking head on at what I fully intend to be the rest of my life until I die, and I'm pausing just for a second before saying "Why not?" too. I'll let you know how it works out.

When my oldest son gets mad at his brother he says, "You're fired."

Primates.

Last night me and all three boys were piled on the guest bed downstairs, where my two are sleeping until we get their room done, me reading a true story about a family of gorillas. The youngest two rolled around making animal sounds as part of their game, "Puppies," periodically stopping to check in on the story with its pictures of noble animals and the Rangers who protect them.

(And also pictures of their guns, which they carry to fend off poachers and predators; it wouldn't be honest to make it sound too idyllic. Earlier the kids, shirtless as always, were playing some combination of GI Joe, Star Wars, "Spies," and just bashing into things).

The ladies came back from a trip to buy coffee and diapers. The toddler tumbled on top of us cushioned by her puffy pink coat with a container of fruit repeating, I've got blueberries, I've got blueberries! They were gone in seconds. Kids don't hesitate. We're both still technically married to other people, but our boys called out Goodbye, Stepbrother! leaving for school this morning.

More space than you can imagine.

Tonight my boys wanted to take the dog out into the middle of Lake Harriet, which if you've never been to Minneapolis, is essentially right in the middle of the city. My dog, a prancy little collie, goes absolutely crazy out there. It's the wide-open space I guess. She never sees so much space, bumping up against walls, furniture, and people in this too-small house as she does. You get far enough out and she just starts to run. Anywhere. She runs in huge galloping circles. She comes barreling at you and then swerves at the last minute. She wheels around and jumps, putting her paws up on my chest, then drops low, snorting as the icy snow goes up her nose.

Initially, trotting along on our way to the middle she managed to walk keeping her paws (they're dainty) almost directly inside one of the two, narrow, day-old tracks of some kid's sled, which I insisted we follow to ease my paranoia about untested ice.

My nine-year-old kept ahead (he has this distinct walk even from a distance, trying to keep his head straight so his hood won't fall off; he won't wear a hat, or gloves most of the time) while my kindergartener stayed with me, explaining we were Ninjas on our way to a spying mission inside C.O.B.R.A. headquarters.

We started around 6:00, already towards the end of twilight. When we got to the middle of the lake the boys were off talking and the dog sniffing around the upturned crust of the snow layer and I stood and breathed and looked around; the moon --- in its... quarter phase? I don't know --- was mostly the color of a dusky pearl, you could just make it out, and the un-obscured part seared with cold blue light as if it were bursting free from the shadows. The fingernail of some blind god up in the sky. What I liked was the light it cast on the crests of snow. The sunlight of the coolest day. Morning in Antarctica. Quiet, but sort of a pregnant silence. Something or nothing could happen and either thing would be portentous.

I made the kids stop and listen.

On the way back there was a lot of screaming and wailing; the littler fellow said his leg was broken from walking and I had to put him on my shoulders; but I didn't care because stars had come out and I haven't seen stars in a long time.

Things fall apart

I was laid off from my job on Monday, or maybe I was fired. Either way it involves me, two kids, a wife, and no savings. Will we lose our home? Will we keep it, but will I keep my cool? Do I have cool?

Wave upon wave, it's anxiety and numbness, but always a steady thrum of nightmare energy.

It's strange. When there are hints we will get through this I become disappointed. Why is being on the verge of solving an urgent problem so much more appealing than having solved it, even when the fear of not being there yet shakes you to pieces?

On Wednesday, just two days after I walked out of the office with all my stuff in a box, the family met at a hotel water park for my nephew's birthday. I was avoiding, out of fear, the big slides. They are brightly-colored, man-width tubes that wind through the big, indoor space and poke through the outer wall too, curling around the outside of the building like a big set of ribs.

I played with my five-year old son in the easy parts, the kiddy slides and pools.
All the while a prodding voice told me I was a coward and drew my attention back again to the slides. Everything I did there, every pool I splashed in, was partly an effort to stay occupied in the face of this persisting fear and challenge.

There was another voice behind this mocking one, a quiet suggestion there might be some value in climbing the ten-story wooden staircase to try one of the four big slides. Maybe I would learn something there. Maybe I deserved a little terrifying fun after what we'd been through, the prospect of selling off our home or who knows what might come. I certainly deserve to forget about everything for a while, do something as simple and counter-intuitive in the midst of being jobless as play at a water park.

I've climbed the staircase and now I'm at the top, with tattooed men and their tattooed wives, all of us letting it all hang out. Perhaps some of these gentlemen have been out of work longer than me. They hang slightly lower to the floor.

At the end of the line is the black hole that roars with the sound of rushing water. I see six-, seven-year-old kids willingly throwing themselves into what seems to me to be the mouth of horror. A quick shove and they are gone, into God knows what.

One of the large, flat-topped, tattooed men lies down in the bath of splashing water at the base of the tunnel, puts his hands gracefully behind his head, and shoves off into uncertainty. He's followed by his wife, a large woman in a one-piece. A couple of kids go. It's the presence of the kids that taunts me not to do what I want to do, which is turn the fock around and walk back down the steps to play on the giant turtle with my kindergartener. (If I need to mention it explicitly, the only irrational fears I harbor, besides spending a night in a haunted house or being tortured, are 1) fear of heights and 2) fear of drowning; it's great to be on top of a how-many-story wooden platform about to throw myself into a dark tube full of water). Now it's me.

I step into the knee-high bath of churning, chlorinated water and put my hands on the hard green plastic to brace myself. I sit down. One really does say, "Here goes" in situations like this and I do. I shove off.

I am traveling very fast, downwards, through a pitch-black tunnel, a single row of tiny lights is the only bearing I have, they bring light from the big room (and perhaps from outside, at one point) showing through pin-sized air holes arranged in a line, flickering like a silent movie or one of those hand-cranked animation machines from the 19th century.

I don't know if I feel terrified or exhilarated until, half-way through, water begins spraying up into my mouth and nose from the tensed edge of my foot and I become quite sure that terrified wins. I am surely going to die in here. My throat starts closing up and I can feel blood from my protesting heart rising quickly to my head with great pressure. All the standard I'm Dying stuff happens: muscles tighten; mind pinches closed, onto the single terrifying thought of one's death. I'm dying, I'm dying.

Time stops in the way it can, and I realize I'm not afraid of not living. I'm afraid of not knowing. What's going to happen, exactly?

Seemingly still for a moment, deep in the bowels of the plastic tube, suspended above the heads of all these people in a room the size of a football stadium that echoes with the shouts of children and the murmurs of adults, I relax with some amusement into the awareness that there is absolutely nothing I can do to stop my descent. So, like the tattooed, flat-topped man and his generously-framed wife, I put my hands behind my head, relax all of my muscles, and drop.