The weekend of my forty-ninth birthday, my brother brought his young daughters to visit.  They have very high energy and we have degenerative disc disease, so they get away from us.  How do you yell at them to prevent reckless injury without sounding too angry?  I pulled it off, but was on the whole much less successful at reining them in than other adults with similar aged children in their charge.

It was bad enough that the morning after they left I had a dream about failing to keep up with one of them.  Don’t get squished, kids.  Don’t get squished.

As Whitney’s songwriter said, I believe the children are the future.  Teach them jeezis and tell them don’t be gay.  Er, however that went.  But srsly, having children at this spectacular turn for the worse in politics, in the environment, in human rights…  That’s a fuckin’ mess.  The only way I’m going to have to care for a child again is if a freak accident kills my brother and sister in law both before their children turn eighteen.

I think about love and obligation.  My family was black sheep plus black sheep, and love was far from our experience of family.  What does it mean to love those children?  To even love my brother?  It feels so remote, like the sort of feeling you won’t understand until it’s tested – and then you better hope you pass.  I probably will?  I feel bad about that question mark, like, to what extent did I inherit the Antisocial Personality Disorder from mom?  But I don’t feel very bad about it, so don’t cry for me.  Just puzzling out my feelings.

I went to the beach where they filmed Temple of the Dog’s “Hunger Strike,” but those tall beach grasses that Eddie Vedder was standing around in were nowhere in sight.  I think they got choked out by invasive blackberries.  Terns screamed and dove for fish, herons waded and spearfished.  The closest heron was surprisingly fussy, walking around with a fish, washing it in the water, waiting minutes before swallowing.  I saw the largest crabs I’d ever seen alive in the wild.  Not remarkably large, but still nice for me.

My husband made a very good cake.  My homeboy brought his kid around and he helped keep the wild girls occupied.  My brother didn’t have a breakdown.  Coulda been worse.

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