I can't stop watching this Japanese show where they send babies alone on errands. It's called Old Enough. Like they ask a two year old to go pick up her mother's watch. Like across some streets, and down a block. I don't want to watch it but babies are cute and the reasoning behind the show is so wrong. It's like twisting yourself to look in a shoe mirror.
I think that's why I can't stop watching. What do people do when they're shoved out unprepared and without the actual brain and deduction even wired in.
I was walking down the garage stairs from physical therapy where Joe Ho real name mangled my fingers like he was twisting a whale into salt water taffy. I was thinking as I went from the broccoli level to the red pepper level (the builders were hungry when they named the floors) about this flood of sadness I sometimes get, like when my mom tips out of her wheelchair onto her head and I'm watching it happen, in slow motion, and she's all bloody but she's ok, then later I can't stop crying because I'm not old enough. I mean, aside from this immensity of caring for a vulnerable mother, who let me have a car?
I need to shout out to all you people out there who already lost their parents. How are you doing it? I am still that two year old Japanese kid just walking around bewildered looking for the watch shop. Just wanting to be back where my mom's safe arms are. Where she used to melt crayons so we could do art. Where nothing big ever happened, just a regular day. Like geese resting on a wide, still lake. Because it's restful, no rushing off. Stay, is the word she still says.
On the drive home with my throbbing hand I saw a big truck carrying about a hundred sandwiched flattened cars all stacked up neatly like a salami car sandwich piled for filing into the recycle car pit or the molten metal machine or whatever they do with them. I thought well, there we all go. That's pretty much it.
So I cry sometimes, and I text my little daughters and tell them I'm proud of them. I'm sad but taking care of mom and the house keeps me busy enough that I don't feel the sad except in little leaks that get through and sometimes it's a deluge. I'm not trying to block my life, only sandbag some of it. Only because the love is so big, always has been too big for me to control very well. So I slop some over here, and mess up this little portion, or write a gay western or channel it toward someone who's flailing or if there's nowhere else it ends up in food or jellybeans.
I'm guessing this is just life then. As Joe Ho said, when he gets home he just watches Family Feud for two hours. Not really for the game but for what the people say. What weird answers they give to basic random questions. I like to think of young Joe, with his hairless sloping arms like a gentle muscly tan man sculpture, not able to get off the couch after a day of mangling people's broken parts. To try and fix.
Play, mangle, couch, tend, cry, eat tuna, repeat.
But don't forget there's a quiet best thing
Outside, the blanket of sunlight on the trees filtering at about 5 pm, maybe 6. The magical starlight that is there for almost a whole few minutes of true golden. It warms, glistens, glows radiance and then disappears.
