Skip to main content

Heimliching my Mother

"When you look back on your life, it looks as though it were a plot, but when you are into it, it's a mess: just one surprise after another. Then, later, you see it was perfect."
Schopenhauer


Visiting Mom
I once heimliched my mom around a living room. My kids hid behind the couch, afraid to come out. A big chunk of burrito flew across the room. I still remember the arc it took. As a family we don’t talk about it much, though she did seem grateful about.

Things just are in my family. Things just are the way they are, no cause, no effect. Things are presented to us and we choose to react or hide, depending on the circumstances. Our choices in life come after the fact- it’s what we do with stuff after it shows up that defines us. Thinking about stuff is what we do all day while waiting for life to show up and give us something to react to. It’s just all one big line we stand in, waiting for the show.

My mom came down to visit and brought Mexican food for us. We sat in the living room, around the big screen TV, and talked. The kids told tales of how their lives were working out. I smiled and nodded my head a lot. We were waiting for the show.

Bug eyed and reaching with both hands to get IT out, my mom looked surprised, and a bit embarrassed. She looked both ways- left and right, and tried to speak. 'Gack, gack,' she said. Showtime, at last, I no longer thought.

She stood, I stood. I wrapped my arms around her waist and jerked her up. One time, two time, -- ack and blow time. The burrito flew; the show was over.

Well, that was sure something, we both thought. The kids peered over the couch they were hiding behind wondering if the show had ended. I think it was like watching Texas chainsaw massacre; they had to close their eyes at the really scary part. We all giggled about how we weren’t hungry anymore, cleaned up and mom went on her way down the road. Just another slice of near death, and back in line for the real work of waiting for the next show time.

Reflections and ruminations of reflections are what we do as a family. Like a second brain, we grind up thoughts and polish reflections until we can eat off them. It’s our great gift, and what we do while standing in line.







Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Explain nothing, except your self

Explain nothing, except your self. I feel like the last of a tribe struggling to keep my identity a secret from the mob, one step ahead at best, reduced to hiding in bushes from the monsters waiting to snag and devour me. Sort of a delicacy and a poison – a non-specific drug that exudes memes instead of hormones and physical highs – subconscious, primitive analog get-off-ness apparently responsible for some weird competitive advantage consolidating over geological time out of our mixed genus ancestors, or maybe Texans. At the same time, I feel like spasmed dots from gods own printer cartridge ejaculated onto the canvas of a great emptiness, the thought of which is expressed in the three-dimensional representation of the position I’m braced into while doing the splatting -- all hologram like but only juicier and used -- like an in and out burger wrapper chewed on by a trashcan opossum. Or better, a goat in a pickup heading for a quinceanera debating Schrödinger with the

Free Willy

“…Some say it's just a part of it We've got to fulfill the book.” B. Marley Before I completely run away from the point, the subject of this essay is free will, or, more accurately, the illusion of free will. It will be interesting to see if free will even comes up laterally over the next few hundred words now that I’ve set it up as a specific goal.  The imp of the perverse makes it a sure thing that I won’t – but that surety might also double back and force  me to stay on point. There are no dogs to pick  in this fight and it’s not a fight,  and if I’m right, none of this is anything but documentation for a litigious god that will never see it. Like quantum mechanics, life is about either time or place, never both, and how we choose to pretty up our choices is neither the point, or even a choice – it’s after the fact punctuation we use to justify and make sense of our ontological messiness.  (Science has proven that we decide things with our body before the brain