That Strength which in Old Days Moved Earth and Heaven

A bit of a decompress after the last post

Timmy’s funeral was held last Sunday. Really, it was more of a family get together in a city park where everyone brought some food. No church, no casket, no urn, no ceremony, no bother. I couldn’t help feeling that we’d all failed him somehow. I sat with his sister for a few minutes and helped her make a big photo collage. Her daughter was there, too. Others cousins arrived with their children as well. I hadn’t seen most of them for a long while. I found myself often repeating one of the most profound and important truths of the universe, that sounds so trivial until you hit your middle years, “Kids grow up so fast.”

They do.

We all do.

Without regard to human sentiment, time keeps marching on.

I thought I was done dwelling on Timmy after the funeral. I’m blessed with a busy life. My work tempo is nuts. This is the time of year when I get to make unpopular decisions about what can and can’t be delivered with the remaining budget. Everyone and their uncle is putting time on my Outlook calendar. I’ve been at a hundred plus meetings a week for the past month. Plus, I had some pretty bad food poisoning to distract me. As an aside, always rinse your grapes especially if you are busy. In fact, you don’t have time to not rinse your grapes. Oh, and I have a toddler who wants to play no matter how well I feel. Time marches on.

I figured there would be time enough for Timmy whenever I eventually find out what happens after you die. I’ll get there one day as we all will. If things go well, hopefully I’ll be able to tell him hello.

In a surreal turn of events, on the drive home from the funeral my wife told me that her best friend’s little sister had died. She was nineteen years old. There are other, more dramatic events surrounding it, but she’d been living in a homeless camp for some period of time. Her forty-two year old boyfriend took her out onto the river in what was no doubt a stolen kayak. They apparently slept on the kayaks that night, smoked some fentanyl, and when he woke up she had disappeared. They found her washed up on an island in the harbor.

To be clear, I’ve never met this young woman. Never even laid eyes on her. But from what I know of her childhood, she had even less of a chance than Timmy. Abandoned, unloved, uncared for, and with a crackhead mother so coldly mercenary her first thought on hearing the news was to set up a gofundme, not for funeral expenses, but to buy herself a vacation to another state. One of her aunts had to pay for her cremation. It’s not an uncommon story where I grew up. I suppose at times I’ve felt sorry for myself, but only in passing. I know too many people who’ve had it much worse. Still, it got me thinking about what the world even is that things like this can happen.

But I told myself I couldn’t have stopped it. I couldn’t have done anything to stop someone’s mother from becoming a crackhead decades ago. So, charging onward. Be upbeat. Exuberance! We fight the Devil by living our best lives. Nobody helped by grief.

My wife caught me tearing up recently over some Costco muffins. Which is a very embarrassing thing to tear up over, but Timmy and I used to eat them by the row. I ate blueberry and he ate poppyseed. And because Costco muffins aren’t calorically dense enough, even though they’re probably one of the most calorically dense foods you can buy, we’d cut them in half, butter up each side, and put them in the microwave for exactly twenty seconds. Plus a glass of milk.

All I could think was that Timmy would never have a Costco muffin again.

Brush it off. Move on. Just a feeling. You can’t unwind the clock.

I had a very brief panic attack during a presentation last week and then again this week. I suddenly couldn’t make my mouth work. It was like all at once I didn’t understand how I’d come to be in charge of the things I’m in charge of, I didn’t understand how I’d come to make the decisions that I’d made, and didn’t understand how to speak to them. Mercifully this was all on a zoom call. I started life swinging a hammer but now I get to open a laptop inside the confines of my own home as lonely as that can sometimes be. I made some excuse about something going down the wrong tube, turned off my camera, took a deep breath and managed to push through it. For a minute it was unbearable but once I got to talking I still knew all the answers. When it got technical it was like my soul breathing a sigh of relief.

The first time I considered it transitory. I have a good reputation and my only hope was that I hadn’t tarnished it. I’m punching above my weight class in some of these presentations and my hope is that in five years I can be a managing director even without a college degree. After the second incident, I’m thinking I might need to take a bit of time to process. I need to do something to balance the scales of the universe.

We saw a lot of new subscribers after the last piece. It made me feel odd. It’s not really the kind of thing I aspire to write here. It made me think I probably ought to have called Timmy by some fake name or not published it at all. I’m terrible at controlling “content” or being “on brand” but there are times in my life where I can’t get my feelings right in my head until they’ve poured out of my fingers first. I needed to write that piece, I think, for the same reason I need to write this one. I’m just so tired of bullshit.

Time marches on, and all around me I feel like a lot of the arrows are pointing the wrong way. Oh, technology is better, sure. What about mental health? What about deaths of despair? Cost of living? Maybe the panic attacks are because I’m worried over the world I’m leaving for my son. That’s the whole reason I started this substack to be honest. It’s not meant to be solely a journal of my life.

This substack is about how to save America. Full stop. Not in some general sense. Not in a “we will have more goodness through more betterness” sense where you ask questions and there’s not an actual executable plan. There are multiple parts. Most of what I’ve laid out on this substack is my plan to fix the news industry so that we can have good, accurate, honest sources of truth that we can rely upon. Then to fix the election process so that when you show up in the voting booth you don’t get suckered into backing the city supervisor who is going to let people die of despair in the middle of the goddamn street. There are other parts but those are the biggest two.

We can spin our wheels and try to fix small symptoms, but until we fix the things that fix other things like news and elections we’re going to be in for a rough season.

I’m not trying to make money off this stuff. That may be stupid and counterproductive. I keep trying to find time to build this all myself but keep encountering roadblocks from my work and family obligations. You can read the whole basic idea here. I need to find some way to make the time.

Because time keeps marching on and I think if I don’t do this that no one will. If I had done it a long time ago, I wonder if the world would be different. I had hoped that X or Substack would push in the right direction but even though Community notes is almost, agonizingly close, it’s not going to fit the bill. I jokingly call myself the King of America sometimes because for whatever reason I’ve always felt solely responsible for the direction of the country, which is so egoistical you wouldn’t think that I’d have a paralyzing fear of living my life in public. Or then again, maybe it wouldn’t surprise you at all. I suppose the world only improves through courage.

I woke up at 3am this morning and couldn’t get back to sleep.

Someone has to do something to push all of this back to right and I think it’s me. I owe it to my son.

So to all the new subscribers, welcome. You may want to unsubscribe. I no longer know what this post is about precisely.

Now, if only being that public as myself didn’t make me want to barf…