Say hello to the goo

It's a little bit hard to make sense of what's going on. After slowly building on a theme that's been present all summer, the theme of all-out busyness, we're peaking here in Boston as August draws to a close (Let me note that referring to a period of time 'drawing to a close' is probably the last thing I'd expect to hear in my brain, but it seems to have come to that). This is going to lead to a pretty non-linear post here and probably some related posts that I'll eventually link together, but follow along if you choose.

We're here to move our daughter into her new apartment. We have a minivan full of stuff and a shopping list of furniture to buy after we've dumped all of said stuff into said premises. Moving, of course, is among the busiest busy's you can have, especially Boston at the beginning of everyone's school year, so things would be a bit out of hand in any event. But that's just the tip of the iceberg (oh god, there I go again).

We came here from a weekend on Cape Cod for an informal reunion of Ronnie's high school (give or take) friends. It's a group of people I've gotten to know pretty well over the years; I like them all and enjoy hanging out with them. It was fun and as relaxing as would be possible for me under the circumstances, which are complicated circumstances.

Let's start with the visiting old friends thing. It resonates with me on a particularly deep level because one of the busy's this summer has been scanning all of my parents' old photo albums to create my own life album. There's no way doing this kind of project from scratch can have any result other than leaving your emotional self as a puddle of goo on the floor. It hasn't been exactly chronological (I'm just taking binders out of boxes in no particular order) but the pattern is clear. Every bit of family baggage I've been carrying is on 600 DPI display as I pull photos of myself, my immediate family and relatives, close 'family' friends (i.e., my parents' friends), my own friends, places we've been, most but not all of which I remember.

You can probably see how that could be overwhelming, especially since my father took multiple shots of every pose and my mom did no editing when she put them in albums. I'm not able to do too much of it at once, so it's been pretty omnipresent in my life all summer. So ending the summer by hanging out with the outcomes of someone else's childhood, much as I may love them, is emotionally jarring. A natural result of seeing all the pictures is to make me intensely miss a lot of people and that's only increased by the synergy with a different group of old friends.

Let's add to this the virtual certainty that I will be turning 60 in October. Much as I wish this were a typographical mistake (not in the blog, in the Book of Life perhaps), I've been feeling age creeping in on me here and there, both in my internal processes and what people say to me. Sixty is not old (actually it is old, but it's not death), but it ain't young either, and though I've never gotten too caught up in the round number thing, this is a milestone that I can't escape. I'm guessing I will write more about aging at some other time (senior discounts!), so I'll move on.

The part of this that I absolutely brought on myself is that I've been reading Infinite Jest this summer. IJ is an 1100 page monster of a book by the late David Foster Wallace, (the movie, The End of the Tour is about the book tour for this book). Reading this book is a life-changing experience in ways I don't even know yet. Every page has something that stirs me up and it's hard to understand what the cumulative effect will be. I've got fewer (not less- that's a book reference FYI) than 100 pages to go and it's like rolling down a hill that gets steeper and steeper. It's funny and insightful and weird and impossibly complicated and deeply affecting, at least in some part because you read it knowing that Wallace ultimately committed suicide and you can get a glimmer of insight as to what might have been going on in his head that eventually led to that.

We also went to Ireland, of course, and I've done a fair amount of biking, though not as much as I'd like, and school is starting soon, and I'm in the midst of an IRS audit for some gut-wrenching medical expenses. And now I'm in Boston. Moving day is tomorrow and then school starts the next day. So if you see a strangely familiar-looking puddle of goo somewhere, make sure to say "Hi."