new occupation = feeling sorry for myself

Current mood: foggy and tumbled

now if only someone would really pay me for it.

it's almost one am, and i'm feeling that sort of frustrated that seems like invisible arms firmly squeezing your appendages, so even flailing about to get rid of that excess energy is difficult work. somehow i can't get warm, either. the heat's on, i'm wearing so many layers that it may explain my inability to flail about, and i even found my hat.

guess i shouldn't have opened that last beer.

i spent the evening cleaning slides of my parents' honeymoon. my photographic obsessions have collided with my need to save every last bit of history having to do with me or anyone i've ever been affiliated with. so, cleaning dirty, thirty-year-old slides, and putting them in archival sleeves. i have a bit of a fixation on these slides. as a young'un, my mom asked us please not to mess with them. i remember that clearly, mostly because forbidden things are the most interesting. i assumed, when i got to the age that i needed to formulate an explanation, that it was because they are fragile, and young fingers like to touch everything they can. now i think she said such things to spare us the spectacle of seeing my most-probably-naked father, reclining, wrapped in a sheet, holding a can of budweiser on his bare belly. such is the stuff of nightmares.

my father holds an almost mythic position in my mind at this point. the mythic position of a hydra, that is. or a murderous, gigantic cyclops. i haven't set eyes on the man for something like 23 years, a fact that i never cry over. i almost wish i had never known him. but when i come across him in images, like i have so often tonight, i experience a shock of recognition and disappointment that throws me. it's almost like seeing someone in person that you have grown used to through the mediated images of television or film. up close, they are just people. and usually surprisingly short.

pictures of my father as a young man are even more shocking. clean cut, in suit and tie, overcoat thrown over his arm, pipe clenched in his teeth, he seems so unlike the small bit of actual person that i remember. and most definitely not the person my mind and so many years of absence have redefined him to be. how can that be the same person? what the fuck's going on here?

i get the added shock, now, of knowing that one of the boxes of slides i cleaned are actually shots of him with his first wife, in somewhere like morocco. i don't know if i knew before that my mother was his second wife. perhaps. but when she told me a few weeks ago, maybe for the second or third time, it totally surprised me. my memory is not what it once was, but i'm pretty sure i didn't know that.

i guess the marriage didn't last long, and the divorce was quick. but it adds fuel to the fire of that surprise perception, that my father was (is) just a guy. a really, really fucked up guy.

these are the thoughts running crazy circles around my head tonight, as i wander back and forth, frustrated by, well, everything. i'm afraid the winter has gotten to me, despite its persistence in being a surprisingly "warm" winter. snow has fallen exactly twice in the month and a half that i've been here, the first time dusting the air for about a half hour, the second time calmly falling for hours, with only a thin layer of white on the highest points of things to show for it.

nothing is really as it is supposed to be.