win and tonic

I want kids.

I keep making plans, but they get interrupted by humans or disease or the overlap of the two. This is how life works, and I’m thankful I’m alive to experience it. I am becoming more and more okay with planning smaller and smaller chunks, for as the grandiosity of life as it lays before you becomes more and more foreshortened as you move forward you learn to accept that you cannot possibly prepare for every pothole that lies ahead.

But this is a plan I’m holding onto for a while.

I can’t yet see myself cohabiting with a peer-aged person. I feel at this point I’m fundamentally incompatible with the concept of a “mate”. I’ve been dating for the first time in three years but there are compromises that I can’t reconcile. It might be selfish, but I feel like only I can live my life to the best of my ability, with steady parallel input instead of from one but many. So I’m planning on moving in January and taking LSD in February and getting a dog in March and adopting a baby boy by the time I’m 30. Everything else between now and then is dependent on context and variables and I’m okay with that, but my main goal in life is to fill another with knowledge and send him into the world, partially just to see what would happen, and partially because there is indescribable joy hard wired into what I imagine is most people, in general, when passing knowledge from oneself to an empty vessel that they have a bond or kinship with.

I live with kids. Two newborn twins and a two year old. I’m so thankful to see and hear and learn with and from them every day. I come home from work and Neven shouts “Koo-wee!” with a grin and hands me a toy truck. I sit down and he tells me what we’re doing now. And I get to share with him a tiny slice of input with which he can use color his world.

The babies make faces and noises that surprise and delight nearly every moment of their existence. Soon they will speak their own secret language and we will simply have to watch, content in our inability to understand. I am excited to witness it.

Their mother and I watched the nigh dialogue-less documentary Babies together. We were transfixed for the entire two hours, watching babies start as newborns and progress into toddlerhood. We watched them do nothing but absorb the world around them, and we were overjoyed. So I guess I’m a mom-type, if there is such a thing. As if I needed any more confirmation.

I give guitar lessons to a seven year old. I taught him the groundwork with which to build upon his own ruleset. He wrote his first song. It was in the key of C, and as he was walking me through the tabs he wrote he said “and to build tension I want to hold the Am for longer before resolving back to the root” and I nearly wept.

I promised to help him record it once he can sing and play it at the same time at full speed. It’s the first item on the agenda every week now. The song itself is terrible, but bless his stars, I am so goddamn proud of him. I see him tomorrow.

I can’t wait.