Fuller Wiser

Better today. My wife and I are talking, which hasn’t happened in a normal tone of voice for a while.

However, she was taken aback by my revelation that I was tossing the creative work into the hobby bin. That may have even been the domino that tipped her defensiveness over, as quickly and quietly as she responded. She doesn’t think I should drop it, and yet my continuing to pursue it is one of the many things keeping our operation in chaos.

In a fit of martyrdom, she suggested that I quit my job and just stay at home making music. It pains me to say it, but my heart leapt. My poor old emotional, idealistic heart doesn’t know a lot of things that my mind does, and in truth, that has always been the case, thus my need for therapy.

But I pause, count to 20, and of course realize that there is no way in hell we could afford such an arrangement. We both have aspirations which need financing, and we’ve got this kid to feed. No, my facts are still straight: Education over art.

Unfortunately, in the heat of Monday morning’s breakdown, I emailed my mother. And a distress call from an emotional son activates the Mother Alert System, which cannot easily be silenced.

As I’ve documented here before, my mother and I have a very close and honest relationship. She has no purity and perfection expectations of me, and vice versa. We both understand that we are grown adults, with all the frayed ends and dented fenders entailed therein. Nonetheless, as a parent, I can understand the protective reaction if you sense your child is in danger. I will surely retain it well into my son’s adulthood.

So we’re getting together to talk, just her and I, this Friday night. Knowing us, the conversation will last well into the wee hours. This talk will be slightly deeper than most, though, because one of the reasons I’m seeking out her advice is that she’s been in a troubled relationship with my father for most of their marriage. I’m not entirely certain what I will uncover, but maybe there are parallels I would do well to be aware of.

The most alarming part of my current marriage crisis is how similar the battle lines are at their core. It’s not necessarily about the arguments, but about two different approaches. My wife on the side of heedless hope, and me on the side of watching our step on the tightrope. We both started out on the former side, but age and impact craters have driven me further over to the latter. Which, incidentally, is my father’s approach.

For someone who’s spent a large portion of their adult life rejecting the ideology of his father, it’s maddening to find myself out on the battlefield in his old suit of armor, brandishing his coat of arms against wayward over-optimism. How the hell did this happen?

More frustrating is that it doesn’t have the effect of bringing me much closer to my father. We get along better than we ever have, but that’s mostly because he knows he can’t tell me what to do anymore, so he doesn’t.

Unfortunately, I have only recently started to notice that in our joint complaining sessions (what passes for conversation between my dad and I), there is an occasional glint in the old man’s eye and a satisfied smile when I assess the hopelessness of a given situation. I’m trying very hard not to believe that my dad is subliminally telling me, “I told you so.”

Upon examination, a good deal of the clashes between me and my father in my youth involved my outspoken rejection of pessimism. At the time, I would rather have described it as an embrace of optimism, but my attitude was just as much, and possibly more, about not being something as being it. Anytime I held forth with why I was going to do something, my father’s predictable riposte was that it was unrealistic. My retort to this brand of attack was seldom humble, often lengthy, and if I could get away with it, a bit condescending.

My brain at that time reflected many of the themes addressed here at various times: What should be is more important than what is. Right is right and must never yield to pragmatic go-along-to-get-alongism. Everything would be all right if everyone just ____.

Invert those statements and you get my dad’s positions, though with qualifications: What should be would be nice, but it’ll never happen, so deal with what is. Right may be right, but nobody cares, so you have to go along to get along. A lot of things might be all right if everyone just ____, but it’s impossible, so why bother?

I recognize those positions. To a large degree, I now hold them. My mother talks a lot about creating your own reality, but that’s precisely what I’ve been trying to do for nearly two decades. The problem is that reality already exists, and doesn’t give a damn about the reality I’m creating to compete with it, and being the actual reality, is able to just ignore me and go about its business, leaving me standing in the road with my little pie chart full of dreams that live only in my head, and increasingly not even taken seriously there.

I have a nasty habit of frequently watching the movie Contact. It represents very starkly the battle between idealism and so-called realism. And true to life, the only thing that stops Ellie’s SETI program from being crushed by the cynical climber Drumlin is A GODDAMNED SIGNAL FROM ALIENS. And though they conveniently show up just at the last minute in the movie, my own experience leads me to believe that if the aliens finally do contact us, we’ll be too busy watching American Idol and finding new reasons to hate foreigners.

Still, the movie reminds my heart of what it used to be. I have some nostalgia for my more hopeful self, the one that believed the nuts-and-bolts world could be overcome by the power of pure idealism. My observation is that cases where the ideal beats the animal are rare and perfect storms, attributable as much to dumb luck as effort. Far more numerous are the tales of I-fought-the-law-and-the-law-won.

And yet the old heart hasn’t died yet. I feel its tugging during, of all things, speeches by Mr. Obama. He is the perfect Ellie Arroway on the high seas of politics, damning torpedoes in the straits, calling all hands on deck to believe our way into making it, while people in the engine room are sweatily wondering what the hell we’re going to do when we at last reach hull crush depth.

Given my current leanings towards the pragmatic side, one would think I would vote against the Senator Of Hope. But in this one thing, I am allowing my heart’s voice to win. To believe that there is value in aiming high, in believing something can be done before you know it for a fact. A hidden corner of myself still believes that, and looks for ways to assert itself whenever possible, slipping past the guards I’ve put up near all the old hull breaches.

Could it be that I am not alone? That the national outpouring of support for this high-talking politician is representative of a hidden optimism in us all? Is our society built in such a way that hope cannot survive long in adulthood, and is pushed down, aided by the conventional wisdom of cynicism in all things, from politics to employer relations to human interaction? Is our whole country suffering from the same neurosis?

Obviously it’s not everyone. Theism is the preferred repository for illogical hope in America, and its gradual disappearance from my life has left me unprotected, caught out in the storm with no umbrella, much less a roof over my head. Many of those supporting the more pragmatic candidates have already tossed their hope into the Bank of God, and have no need of seeking shelter for their emotional assets.

This is actually one of the only stumbling blocks between my mother and I these days. In her life, she has made the journey from card-carrying Baptist to nondenominational spiritualist, admittedly a big leap. But having started near her spiritual endpoint, I have continued straight on into atheism, and thus far, it has been one bridge too far for her to go.

As I know from experience, the difficulty with being a general spiritualist is that the evidence is emotional, not empirical. You feel that something bigger is out there, you sense that you’re being pulled in one direction over another, you infer that a lucky confluence of events is engineered by a benevolent force. But nowhere is there actually any evidence of the invisible hand.

This makes it difficult when attempting to convince others. You can recount your own stories of feelings, senses, and inferences, but they will never match another person’s experience. And in fact, they may directly contradict another person’s feelings, senses, and inferences in similar situations.

It’s the kind of thing that makes my mom and I hit conversational brick walls. She can tell me all day long that she has a feeling that everything happens for a reason, but never is there a scrap of evidence to support such a stance, save for anecdotes of her own experience and the resulting inference. While for me, the idea of an omniscient being tossing vague little clues into the ether in hopes that people will interpret them as such has really drawn my vigorous ire for quite a while now. If there is a god, he is a colossal asshole. When I tell my mother this, she just nods and says, “Well, I can see why you might think that.” Then we drop the godtalk and return to the world as is, something she’s less comfortable with.

I’m inclined to believe that this disparate god/godless worldview is one of the chief pebbles in my parents’ marital shoe, but I’m curious to see if, as usual, it’s more complex than I realize. With my wife and I, the god thing is already out the window, though I arrived in the abandoned celestial railway station a couple of years before she did. But like me, her heart is perfectly capable of irrational hope without a magic conductor to drive the engine. Unlike me, she hasn’t locked her hope away in solitary confinement.

It will be an interesting Friday.

Of all the problems that I ever imagined I would face in my thirties, this is not one of them.

I’m losing my wife.

Not to death, or even divorce (yet). But I am losing her, and it’s tearing me apart.

When we got married nearly ten years ago, we were fairly universally regarded as perfect for each other by all who knew us. We shared an offbeat sense of humor, enjoyed long nights of thoughtful discussion, and generally believed that most other people were morons. We didn’t hew to traditional gender roles, and had no conflicting theologies. We both came from middle class upbringings with no serious family neuroses or traumas, apart from her father’s death a few years prior from a heart attack. Our voting records even matched, at least those since her anti-abortion activist years in college (a remnant of mild fundie churching).

We never encountered the sort of pitfalls that other relationships around us fell victim to. I never felt threatened by her making more money than me. I was proud of her degree and accomplishments, and her sharp intelligence. I liked that she didn’t wear makeup or spend hours shoe-shopping, or buy into any of the myths of feminine mystique that screw up our culture. And she had no expectations of chest-beating masculinity from me, and enjoyed my apathy towards football, hunting, and other stereotypically manly activities.

We believed in each other’s dreams. I knew she was a good writer, and I believed she could one day make a career of it. She saw through my early-career artistic stumbling and encouraged me to work hard to better myself, praising me when I did. Our first four years, while financially and professionally difficult, were full of unbounded love for each other and comfort in the one thing that worked in our lives: Us.

What killed us was the clock.

It was in 2002, in the excitement of our move to NYC, that the problem first threw its shadow upon our doorstep. It started amicably, just discussions, not arguments. Proposed timelines, if/then statements, poles in the water to test the depth.

As it turns out, this was where I made my mistake.

My fairly consistent statement on children for the first part of our marriage was “yes, once my artistic career is established.” We were both young and stupidly optimistic enough to find this condition perfectly reasonable. But as years went by and no such career materialized, the question then became one of biology. My wife was entering her mid-30s, from which follow the late 30s, after which the prospects for healthy childbirth get ever dicier in the steady course towards menopause. The question was obvious: If there is no artistic career, will there be children?

My gut instinct was that no, there should not be. Because I wanted my career more than a child. I spent my childhood subconsciously aware that my birth was not my father’s idea. I was not abused, but my siblings and I were studiously avoided by my old man, as I’ve discussed here before. Above all other things, I did not want to feel resentment towards a child, because I knew that they would be able to feel it even if I never verbally confirmed its existence. Even if I smiled in their face and gave them horsey-rides and encouraged them to be the best they could be, they would be able to tell whether I was excited that they had been born.

However, as our discussions went on, through 2003-04, I didn’t say no. My career needed more time to develop, we needed to get on firmer financial footing, we both had to be in a better professional place…argument after argument, I presented these conditions. But the clock didn’t care. It said now, now, now, and I kept saying wait, wait, just a little while longer, please, and still it ticked on, potential offspring evaporating like water from a desert pond.

I never said no. And I should have. I did not want to be the object of her resentment. And I knew I would be. I knew that the children I’d made her wait for would not be optional anymore. In the absence of her own artistic success (always more nebulously pursued than mine), she had placed children as her life’s wish, the thing that got her up in the morning. To take that away could mean the end, if not of our relationship, then our love. And I still loved her, I loved everything about her that wasn’t yearning towards motherhood. But that part of her grew, and it was not discussing now, but demanding a decision. Now, not later. What was my answer?

I crumbled. I couldn’t tell her no, this woman who meant so much to me, who had gotten me through my darkest days of despair. I couldn’t watch her turn into a bitter old woman, simmering with regret and resentment towards me for the child she never had. I couldn’t live like that, and neither could our marriage.

But I did one worse: I convinced myself that I wanted it. With absolutely no experience of what life with a baby was like, I told myself that it was a new phase of my life, a journey which would enrich me and fuel my creativity with new experiences.

I was an idiot.

Perhaps I am lacking a necessary emotional component, but for me, caring for a newborn is the height of brain-numbing banality. The life of the mind disappears, replaced by animal needs and repetitive tasks made even more drudging by sleep deprivation and, at least in the United States, income loss.

My creativity was not sparked by having a child. It was deprived of oxygen, strangled and shrunken now to the point where, like Grover Norquist with his ideal government, I can finally drown it in the bathtub.

Impossible as it is to believe, though, I don’t blame my son for this. As long as I can remember, I have had an intuitive sense of moral fairness. Only those who are directly responsible for a problem should be blamed for it. I have held to that steadfastly through all of my adult life. And so it is now. The blame for the death of my creativity stands squarely at my own feet, and I will never forget that. I love my son, and I will never for a minute penalize him for his father’s bad decisions. It is one of the only things I believe in with no reservations, qualms, or doubts.

But the fact is that it doesn’t matter. My wife, still eyeing the clock, has spent the months since my son’s birth lobbying for a second child, even as lingering post-partum depression sent us both into therapy and despair. This time, though, I have learned my lesson. I have said no. And in doing so, I have at last become the object of her resentment.

Take note, all who read this. Ignoring my instincts and principles for fear of bringing destruction to my relationship has only resulted in delaying that destruction for a few tiny years. Only now do I understand that this one issue was going to bring us down no matter what else happened in our lives, barring arrival of the elusive career success, and possibly even then.

We were doomed from the start. Because we didn’t know how to ask the right questions in the right way, and not only have an answer, but several answers, one for every level of potential outcome. Even as we congratulated ourselves on how smart we were, how much healthier our relationship was than so many others, we ignored the meteorite hurtling towards our tiny planet, soon to unleash great debris-strewn clouds of anger, sadness, and regret. We have become our worst nightmare, the couple who lie together in bed, yet cannot speak without opening a wound.

I will not live in a house where I cannot speak. The silence will become resentment, which will become anger, which will surely become hate. The words she does not speak will, in my mind, become sharper, crueler, more unreasonable, and my unspoken responses will grow nastier, more condescending, and less concerned with the hurt they may inflict. I watched it happen between my parents, and I swore never to let it happen in my life.

It is beyond infuriating that this single issue may ruin such a deep love. Because I still love her, all the parts that are not wrapped up in this debate, all the things we’ve shared, all the things about her that still make me proud to be her husband. And this makes her the object of my resentment, because I find it inexcusable that a good relationship should be snuffed out for want of one more birth.

And of course now it’s gotten more complicated. In passionate exchanges since my “no” verdict, I have let slip the fact that I fooled myself into greenlighting the first birth. She now knows everything I’ve just written here, and that rewrites a significant chunk of our past. She can now resent me both forward and backward.

Thankfully, we are intelligent enough to know when we need help, so we have lined up a marriage counseling session for next week. But in the days and nights of silence between us, the darkness will fester. Shapes, intents, emotions will be born from the formless black, demons named and released in anticipation of the coming conflict. Walls will be erected, defenses prepared, anger fueling the certainty of the worse-case scenario.

There is nothing so deadly as silence between lovers. In it, anything may come into being. In the bliss of new love, each partner impregnates these silences with their own dreams of the shared future, magic castles filled with each person’s deepest desires. But a castle, however beautiful, is a fortress, and inside these battlements dreams become entrenched. There may come a time when, looking up at last, you find that rather than building your dreams together, you have simply created adjacent structures, each protecting its own prize. One arrow may be all it takes to unleash wholesale war.

I write this without knowing the result of this conflict, and thus without a clear-cut moral for the reader. But life is like that. Not until the end do you really know what it is that you have done.

I should clarify.

My last post read like a last will and testament, and to an extent it was. But not for my life. As I’ve written here before, I’ve been learning to let go of my aspirations for a career in the creative arts. Despite my best efforts over the past 17 years, I have not been able to make that which I love pay a living wage. This is not opinion, it is reality.

I have in fact been turning my attention to a new aspiration, one that in many ways is every bit as challenging and potentially rewarding as my artistic ambitions: By 2019, I hope to be a community college history professor.

In the hand-wringing screeds I’ve previously published in this space, I have frequently fretted about growing old in the administrative assistant profession, barring any sort of monetary return on my creative pursuits (an unlikely boon). The only other thing I really give a damn enough about to spend leisure time on is the discussion and research of history. I enjoy educating people about aspects of the past they may not previously have been aware of, and always have.

As much as it’s desperately needed in our society, I have no interest in teaching junior high or high school. My memories of being an adolescent history student are charged with bitterness about fellow students not allowing me to focus my attention on the subject, one of the only classes whose content actually engaged me in school. Plus the K-12 payscale is garbage, as my sister the educator can attest. Community college isn’t a whole lot better, but as far as I can tell, it is slightly more livable. And my brief stint in a junior college history class was enough to show me that crowd control needn’t be an integral part of the teaching experience.

This will require hard work. It will require a return to college, acquisition of a Bachelor’s degree, a Master’s degree, licensing, and plenty of student teaching hours. It will require my extra money, time, and brainpower for many years.

To be able to devote these resources to the task, it is imperative that I kill my earlier dream, and kill it dead. In the past, whenever a dayjob or other extracurricular activity has made demands on my spare time, and encroached on my creatively-focused work hours, it has been cut from the schedule. I have not given other projects priority because I retained the belief that they were always secondary to the work that I believed would shape my artistic career. It is time to turn the tables. It is time for art to take second place behind education.

It’s not that I won’t continue to create. But it will be sporadic, and only as time allows. It will not be My Life’s Work. It will be something I do because I enjoy it, and perhaps that will help me to enjoy it more. Because I have a creative project due for release this year, I’m holding off on my return to school until January 2009. This year will allow me to give my last hurrah a good push out the door and allow all who might enjoy it to know it exists. I would be lying if I said I didn’t hold a small measure of hope for it to be successful enough to make my coming sacrifice unnecessary. But it is a grain of sand on the increasingly large beachhead in front of me.

I hope this explains the previous post. The last thing I need now is for someone to believe in me as a potentially professional artist. If people enjoy what I create, that’s marvelous. But I’m done tensing for the leap into greatness. I’m going to do something useful for people’s minds, and hopefully for mine. Please let me be, I just might make myself proud.

Some people won’t let you die. Frank Slade in Scent Of A Woman learned that: poor, stupid Charlie rushing in to tell him he has something to live for, despite the fact that it was the old colonel, not the kid with no scars on his face, who had to live that pointless life.

I’m not talking about suicide, though. I’m talking about letting something go. Something that’s been hurting a long time, like a scarred, decaying limb that really needs to be amputated, and yet you can’t quite get up the nerve to make the cut.

And then one day you do it. You wipe away the tears, sit straight in your chair, and hack the damned thing off. You give a respectful salute to that which was once you. That was my arm, you tell yourself, but it has failed me, and now it is no more. What is now me does not contain that.

But then some bastard, some heartless sonofabitch, comes rushing in like Chris O-Fucking-Donnell, channeling a sandwich-hungry Homer Simpson. “It’s still good! You can save it! Don’t throw it all away! It’s still good!”

No, it isn’t.

You, who have only walked in for the last act, presume to know how hard I’ve worked to save it. Surely I haven’t tried this, or this, or maybe this…

Yes, I have.

I’ve done more than you can possibly imagine to keep that which I love from going bad, from losing its golden sheen, from the fate I’ve lain awake dreading for half of my life. You don’t know, and you never, ever will.

It can’t be that bad, you shout. There must’ve been something I didn’t try. These things don’t just happen, I must have missed something.

No, I didn’t, and yes, they do.

I was once like you. I blared in the faces of the downhearted that there was still hope, that no obstacle was insurmountable. Maybe they needed fresh eyes to see their problems, they just weren’t thinking clearly. I know, maybe you should try this, this, or this.

They didn’t. I cursed them, I wrote them off as losers, as the debris that constitutes so much of human life. Regular people. They just didn’t know what they were doing. They didn’t listen to me.

I was a fool. Why does every generation of idealists believe that no previous generation has ever thought that they would be the ones to change the world? But of course most of my generation got the memo: Idealism is dead, get yours and get out. Eddie Vedder told me. I will stare at the sun till my eyes go blind, how much difference does it make? But I’m a perverse bastard, and the resistance my classmates showed to idealism further stoked my fires. They, along with the old failures, were all wrong.

But you: How dare you come into my life and reawaken dead desires? How dare you assume that half of my life has only been a waste because I haven’t been trying? How dare you trot out simplistic solutions with no bearing on the realities of industry, of vanity, of cultural change?

You come in from outside and presume to know that which I’ve spent nearly two decades immersed in. You talk of how much better I deserve. Deserve? There is no deserve. We do not live in a merit-based world, not in business, not in academia, and certainly not in the arts. Quality (a subjective concept for a start) has no bearing on marketability. None. I know artists of such great talent that they should be millionaires many times over, and yet they lie awake in dank apartments, dreading the punch of the clock in the morning. And in ancillary capacities, I’ve watched the creatively bankrupt rake in profits far in excess of the weight of their output.

I’ve seen all of this, and you have not. You have seen Hallmark stories of hard struggle followed by blessed reward. But you have not seen those whose struggles remain fruitless. Those whose greatest love flowers in the dark, stretching for life-giving light, and slowly withers for want of the sun’s fickle touch. To watch its last gasp, its pleading to live and to be powerless to keep it from dying…you do not know what it is like.

Please. Leave me be. I know what it is that I do. Be thankful that you don’t.

Every few weeks it strikes me. The master plan. The way to bypass the system, become autonomous, and live happily ever after. The log cabin in the woods, the abandoned nuclear missile silo, the converted shipping container, etc., etc.

I’m an idiot.

It’s not that the plans wouldn’t work, necessarily. Some have a great deal of merit, and in the hands of someone else could be very useful. But they overlook one very plain fact: I am suburban.

I don’t know when it happened. I grew up in the country, but not the hardcore country. We didn’t grow our own food or give directions like “turn left on the dirt road after the rusted tractor wheel,” but we did have 3 acres and a barbed-wire fence. Mind you, we only moved there after spending my first 10 years in a suburb of Fort Worth, so maybe the seed got planted early on.

Upon leaving college in that small country town, I moved to Fort Worth and have thenceforth lived in cities or suburbs. Nothing illogical about that, my clerical skill set has a hard time making money in the sticks. And I only developed that skill set en route to pursuing artistic fulfillment, the routes for which generally exist in and around cities. 14 years in that environment, however lower class, have structured my standards for livability.

It’s not just a housing thing. Try as I may, it seems I cannot live on less than $1,000 per week. Granted, a portion of that goes to city-level rent and utilities, but a surprising amount of it is used for what we call pocket money. I buy the most expensive coffee, I pick up new books in hardcover, I choose big-name groceries over cheapo store brands, and I drive a new car. Mind you, it’s bottom-of-the-line and the only car our three-member family has, but it’s not the hunka junka that a truly frugal person would drive (although an argument could be made for the savings in repairs, yaddah, yaddah).

I have this impression of the level of life I should be having in my mid-30s, and I live as close to it as my budget will allow. It’s a nationwide problem, evidenced by the vast industry of beyond-your-means lending that has been groaning, and now fracturing, under the weight of my generation’s unrealistic expectations. Most of us will not have the financial security and debtless spending money that many of our parents did, and we have thus far not been able to accept that fact.

World War II left the planet in ashes and the United States with 50% of the world’s wealth, and a corresponding rise in lifestyle quality, at least for those not Jim Crowed into poverty. Slowly but very surely, that share of global assets has diminished, to the point that we now only comprise between a third and a fourth of the world’s economy. We of the GenX set have only known bubbles, not true prosperity. My twenties corresponded with the tech bubble, and indeed it burst all over my face. Now, in my thirties, the mortgage bubble has popped. It’s likely that many more letdowns are in store, and the distribution of the workforce across continents offers little hope for the lower middle class’ future beyond somehow maintaining the low end of the present status quo. My uncle-in-law spotted the tech bust coming in 1999, I myself spotted the impending real estate bust 5 years ago while processing insane mortgage applications, and in various capacities since I have seen portents of future calamity which I won’t go into here.

At this point, the logic is plainer than plain: Get off the goddamned grid. Establish a life as separate from the prevailing societal winds as possible, and weather the storm. Learn to live with less, preferably in a sustainable manner, and largely free of debt obligations.

How. Incredibly. Boring.

And that’s really what it boils down to, I suppose. There’s probably a reason for the stereotype of the artist who spends what he hasn’t got, revels in isolated moments of prosperity, and basically does himself in due to lack of forethought. But of course it’s not lack of forethought. I’ve thought about it. The information is there. I’m just not using it.

The left-brain/right-brain divide is a pesky force in human history. It can be perfectly evident what the logical course of action is, and yet the lives of perfectly intelligent people are often lived as if logic does not exist. The frustrating thing is that sometimes the less attention you pay to logic, the better result you get. And you never know whether the problem you’re currently pondering is one of those best solved by the gut, or one of the myriad sharp stones just waiting to be stumbled over by ignoring the obvious shadow they cast in your path.

Biographies are filled with tales of those who threw caution to the wind and won. That’s because no one’s interested in those whose caution got caught on the tree branches and ripped to shreds.

I have twin forces working on me at the moment. One is the impending completion of a creative project which will require a bit of money and effort to get to market. Hope and optimism direct me to give it everything I’ve got, in the belief that it will advance my artistic career, which is, mostly, what I live for.

The other force grows by the day, and would probably stop if I weren’t a news and blog junkie. It is the growing certainty that this country, and possibly the world, is headed for a recession/depression/big ball o’ shit in the very near future. Were I single and childless, I would start thinking about joint housing options with friends, and bohemian ways to duck the blade should it slice my way.

What I have, however, is a dependent and a spouse, and the requirements for each have to factor into my thinking. Yes, I know children are resilient, but if I’m gonna have a kid, I have a certain standard of living I want to keep up, both for his sanity and mine. My wife’s standards are a bit higher still, though hardly oppressive. Just a hair enough above mine, and most of them kid-focused, which is as it should be.

All of this means that as much as I’d like to give myself over to artistic dreamland, I really do feel I have to make plans for the possibility of economic disaster. I have grandparents who made it through the Great Depression, but not without harrowing tales of deprivation and struggle. Yes, the world is a different place since then, but in many ways it’s far more dangerous. The U.S. population has more than doubled since 1930, and many people, including myself, have skills that are only of use in a robust, hi-tech economy. Yes, I could bust rocks and lay concrete if I needed to, but there are others far more suited to the task should the need arise.

Upon reading the previous paragraph, of course, I spot the sort of hyperventilating apocalypticism that has traditionally pushed my derision button. And yet the evidence mounts that we are in for very bad things indeed, things we have been blithely ignoring in an economy whose sole impetus is growth.

And every time I get that feeling, I start with the master plans. Moving to the less expensive areas of the EU, trying alternative housing methods in remote parts of the U.S., finding a magic bullet to take us off the grid somehow.

But I am suburban as hell. I enjoy access to art-house theaters, good music venues, nice bookstores, Starbucks, and people who don’t talk about hogs and hay all day long. The sort of country town I grew up in got very stifling after a while, and there’s no reason to think that it wouldn’t again. Again, is a life that’s safe, secure and dull as hell any sort of life at all?

We read history as cause and effect. This led to that, which led to that, and so on. We sometimes blink and wonder how the people who lived through historic times couldn’t have seen them coming. We giggle at people who were totally convinced of an imminent catastrophe that did not in fact materialize.

We know nothing. No more than anyone in history ever has. We make guesses. Those who guess correctly get written up in one type of book, those who do not are thrown into different anthologies. Events do not take place on straight lines, they pop up snarled in webs, with threads woven by millions of individual lives. The entire design of the past is only visible from some distance away, and from that distance we cannot always see the smaller contributions to the greater whole. Like Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians, we see beginnings, middles, and ends, but seldom the snapshot of a life in mid-decision.

And yet here we are, all of us in mid-decision, a probability wave that resolves every few moments, laying down futures and pasts that will, in the end, seem inevitable. I’m ill-equipped to crank up the free will debate train. I believe I know myself well enough to predict that my upcoming decisions will be far more based on the cerebral end of the hierarchy of needs than the visceral. Nature or nurture, it’s how I’m wired, and always has been.

Logically, then, I should just toss the anguish and accept that if the worst descends upon us, I will be a victim and deal with it as it comes. If we are spared, I will have lost no sleep or time hunting phantoms.

There it stands. It can do no other.