082918 the candy colored weight of the school year comes crushing down with it’s crayon toothed jaws can’t believe how SUDDEN summer’s end feels this year partly because i forgot to go to summer institute ah heheh i’m not sorry i missed it; just hope it doesn’t cause any um problems or anything. melancholy. all the podcasts in the capsulized world of the car couldn’t make the trip back from cape any more melancholy. it kind of sucks when your parents get old, i guess--is that what it is? millie barges in through my curtain (i have NO FUCKING PRIVACY) with a towel piled up on her princess head, and shoves a piece of paper at me, indicating some problem she has, and i can’t. i don’t know what to tell her. the printer didn’t work right or something. I’m so FUCKING TIRED of everybody’s computer problems. EVERYbody’s fucking ineptitude with technology. They’re supposed to be the smart ones, the “digital natives”--even that term seems beige and outmoded, like fucking Chris Schulteis thinking kids were going to come up to the eAchieve booth at the district open house and play a “game” on an old laptop that tested your MOUSE SKILLS, for crying out fucking loud. Half of those kids don’t even barely know what a mouse is, and not in the way our parents didn’t know what a mouse was in 1985, you stale git. The kids don’t know what mouse skills are in the same way we don’t know what ball point pen skills are. it’s just under the radar. it’s not cool. it’s not new. it has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you’d want to go to online school. Schulteis is a nice guy, but I bet we’d explode if we got someone in there who was even just a LITTLE less completely out of touch with reality and people. Who knows. The worst thing about Millie’s having barged in here, besides the fact that I’m so sick of being tech support for everyone’s little problems that they could fully solve themselves if they would just be willing to pay attention to logic and learn something about how computers work other than how popularity and the compulsion to “like” stuff and click hearts on people’s bogus desperate self representations (aka “consuming” “content”), is that I’m not wearing a shirt, because I like to be sultry and open and free when I’m doing my little morning writing times, except that, haha, unlike the old days in that little wood-floored Fratney apartment across from West Bank Cafe, with the open windows and the scarred old yellow wood table top and the the typewriter clacking away, now I look like a saggy melting flesh colored crayon. And my daughter had to see that and be momentarily puzzle/shocked by that, kind of like how i was momentarily puzzle/shocked the other day when I walked past her playing video games in her bra, except with her, it was shocking that she looked like an adult, and young, and with me, it’s shocking (to me at least, and i can only presume to her by the way she said ‘jesus’ under her breath) that I look like a pile of flab. Why is that such a big deal these days? It sucks getting old--is that it? Could that be what it is? Well I truly don’t know, but I’m sad and I’m scared and I’m not ready for school to start, and once again, despite all my little whatever, I still have left 80% of the work for the last few days before the deadline, and I don’t really feel like poking my head up out of the hole of my own little fantasy world and talking to anyone, except that I kind of do feel like it, and I kind of did a LITTLE I mean just at least a LITTLE BIT more than none of the work earlier this summer, so I guess you could say it’s a LITTLE better than last year, and that’s got to be worth something, in the currency of this melancholy land where immortal super-people like your parents can get old and hooked up to oxygen and confused and wrinkle-faced and arthritic and where you can hear the regret and yearning and acceptance and maybe, maybe even a little bit of fear in their telephone voices when they say I hope you can come, in their kitchen voices when they say I’m going to have to start hiring someone to help around here soon. Time to take a shower and go to my stupid meeting and hope that no-one noticed or cares that I missed the first two days of even stupider meetings, and hope I can bullshit enough to get through this and get to the good parts and make it good and maybe have some fun and stop being so sad and mad about cat piss and mad at the kids for not noticing the cat piss while i was gone so that once again, I have to drag my ass in off the sad melancholy highway and the first thing that hits me is not “I’m home I can relax” it’s “I’m hope jesus fucking christ it reeks in here.”