I want to tell you a story, that happened about ten years ago. An adult man, in his 30s, picked up the phone and learned that his father, who had just turned 61, had had a massive heart attack. The kind where he clinically died and was only revived by the fortune of having a first responder immediately behind his vehicle when it swerved off the road. The type of heart attack where he was in a coma in an ICU with no timeline for when he would wake up. A heart attack and subsequent coma that made it very possible, to that man, that his father would not wake up, or would wake up with only the barest of functionality. And that wasn't the only problem: that man was the caretaker of a relative with a degenerative condition, but as he got older, it seemed more and more likely that he wouldn't have the physical stamina to do so anymore. And so that man begin the process of travelling, and of also worrying about what he was going to say to a lot of lawyers and social workers. And on the long journey back home, he stopped at a Dollar Tree to buy a toothbrush and also a fantasy novel because he needed something to read while waiting, and there would be a lot of waiting coming up.
Later, when recounting this period of his life, he wouldn't say anything about the fear, or the waiting, or the meetings where he had to tell social workers he didn't think his father was up to it. He wouldn't say anything about the desolate feeling he had when his father refused to get physical therapy, and he just walked out. What he would do...was review the fantasy novel he bought at the Dollar Tree.
Goodness, ready for the tomato surprise? That man was me.
So here is the thing: through my 24 years on E2, I have had fun with this website by writing about bits and bobs and potpourri and things that have crossed my path. Hopefully someone reading along has gotten some hints of where I've been and what I care about. But my primary role on here is an observer, not as an actor in the drama. And sometimes, I fear, that might make people think I am not serious, that my life doesn't have problems. The truth is, right now, my life has so many things going on that I don't even know where to start. I am 45, and that means that when I scan my Instagram stories, right there between the cute dogs and nostalgia and outrage, some of my friends are getting inexplicable cancer. My own body is in pretty good health, but I am a little bit worried how I will sustain myself as I get older at my current monthly wages, which are in the three digits. I am worried that the world will get worse, when all through my youth I thought that things had to get better, eventually, right? It is very hard to deal with all of this. But I don't know how to communicate it, because I have somehow painted myself into a corner. I'm the guy who likes snack food and cheap fantasy novels and random geographic trivia, right? That isn't what Serious people talk about, right? Twenty four years on, and staring at my mortality, I am still the baby here, who is going to get a pat on the back, when I am on my knees. So, I ask: how do I become Serious Coded?
Of course, Serious Coded people don't ever admit that they are Serious Coding. The fact that I would use such a term just shows I don't take the entire thing seriously.
So one thing I have thought about, and have thought about quite a lot since January of this year, is that maybe I was not meant to be Serious, I was meant to be serious. Serious is a style that is full of importanceness and gravity. serious is when what you do and say show some accord with reality. Seriousness is in reference to itself, seriousness is in reference to getting through this thing we call life. The Serious Latin America is full of slums and drugs and ontologie and $10,000 Ayahuasca retreats and struggle against late capitalism's neoliberal commodification of the global south and of evocative graffiti spray painted on walls and of...well, of everything that isn't wondering why the AM/PM insists on giving you a receipt for a donut. I have walked across a lot of little mountain roads on volcanoes here. I've wondered if that is enough to make me a personality on the internets, with a portentous voice, intoning about the struggles of the farmers in the "villages". I could probably even form a cult with that type of background. But I haven't quite figured out how to sell myself as an interpreter of the global south to isolated Americans in suburbia. That would require Seriousness that I don't have, especially when I am looking at the serious things like basalt and buses.
I dunno, maybe it just isn't in the cards for me, maybe I can't communicate what is in my heart no matter how full it feels. Maybe I should resign myself to be a baby at the little kids tables while the adults talk about Serious Business at the adult table. And maybe it is after 10 PM and I should eat something and get ready for bed because I have a lot of emotions and logistics that didn't happen today.