THE THREAD | My so-called life of day drinking, dry-erase boards, and weird dreams
We’re now rolling ten months deep with a pandemic that keeps upending our daily lives. Those of us with young kids at home and adults attempting to work are still living in our own special brand of bizzaro-world funhouse purgatory. I don’t know about you, but some of the brilliant ideas I thought would help me and my family cope last spring have turned out to be utterly absurd at best and ridiculously disastrous at worst.
For example, the day drinking? Turns out that’s not the kindest way to treat myself. I consider myself just an occasional drinker, and in the spring of 2020 there just always happened to be a good occasion. The Bible says that the body is a temple, and last summer I threw a tabernacle house party in my gut. It was LIT! And not in a good way.
Or, for example, this dang pandemic puppy. Why did I do this to myself? Sure, I have gradually come to accept this beagle as a part of our family. Sometimes I even enjoy her presence, like just now, when she walked into the room, ripped a fart, and turned around quickly as if surprised by her own sound, like she was trying to pretend it wasn’t her. That was funny in particular. But in general, I remain un-amused.
Or, for example, the idea we had last March to paint a small section of our kitchen wall with special dry-erase marker-board paint. I thought it would be a great place to write grocery lists, chores, and inspirational quotes. Our kids really loved the movie Wonder, so they embraced the idea of having our own “daily precept” displayed on the dry-erase wall. Kristen found a Daily Brilliant Quotes book from the Half Price Books sales section. I was certain this idea would help steer our family toward something stable and positive as we navigated the seas of chaos. Look at us, calmly reflecting on humanity’s greatest wisdom while eating breakfast!
By week three I began to notice that the marker wasn’t wiping off the wall as easily as the paint can said it would. I also noticed that calmly reflecting on humanity’s wisdom isn’t really a thing when you’re worried that you might not have Cloroxed all of the virus-laden snot particles off of the milk carton or the cereal box before bringing them in from the grocery store.
But we kept using the marker-board for our chores, checklists, and precepts. I think it was week four or five when I found a quote I liked from Rosemary Radford Reuther. I wrote it at the top of the wall:
IT IS THROUGH GENERATING STORIES OF OUR OWN CRISIS AND HOPE AND TELLING THEM TO ONE ANOTHER THAT WE LIGHT OUR PATH.
Maybe I mixed the paint wrong. Maybe I left the marker on the wall way too long. Either way, I realized I could not erase it.
So what did I do? Did I find an industrial-strength cleaner? Did I double down on my elbow grease? Heavens no. This is a pandemic, and I have limited energy to expend on non-essential tasks. It is now nearly a year later, and that quote is in the same spot. I just left it and began adding new precepts in the space below. I found a marker I thought might work better. A couple weeks later I wrote this Frederick Buechner quote:
PEACE IS NOT THE ABSENCE OF STRUGGLE BUT THE PRESENCE OF LOVE.
Once again, as of today, that quote is also still there. My new marker wasn’t any better. The dry-erase situation turned out to be fake news. After that, we decided to stop writing precepts on the board. We continued to write chores up there. Sometimes drawings or scribbles would appear on the lower half. Sometimes they are drawings of unicorns with excessive anatomical parts. Sometimes I write down what I just did and then I erase it immediately so that I can feel extra accomplished and responsible.
And now these two quotes permanently hover over my head every day in the kitchen, taunting me to heed the wisdom of humanity in the midst of just so much human folly. Some days I truly cannot fathom how to be more present than I am right now. I mean, I’m just, like, very much HERE . . . all of the time! But the presence of love? My fullest presence? My attentiveness to HOW I show up daily to my wife and children? Welcome to Strugglesville, y’all.
And the stories of hope? Welp. I try and put pen to paper every single day. I tell myself a story or two. I figure out which ones might be worth sharing. I hope for hope.
Today I told Kristen a new story. It was actually a dream I had last night: I was at a big fancy party, all dressed to the nines and mingling with so many friends. When I went to use the restroom, I realized there was only a single gender-neutral bathroom with a long line of people waiting. But in order to ensure equal access between men and women, you had to push a button on the door to indicate if your gender and then take a ticket—that way the restroom could alternate who would go next. A gender-neutral bathroom that required you to state your gender? It was all very confusing, trying to figure out this über-woke bathroom situation, and while I was standing there trying to comprehend how the line worked, a woman came up and put her entire mouth all over the Take-a-Ticket machine and slobbered all over it. That’s when I panicked and realized that we were still living through Covid. Nothing about this party was okay. The siren in my head started flashing NOT SAFE NOT SAFE. But then I also realized that I still needed to go to the bathroom very badly, and instead of waiting in this long confusing line it might just be easier to wake myself up and use my real life bathroom, and so that’s what I did. I just woke up.
Does this have something to say about crisis and hope? Does it light our path? Nope nope nope. That’s just the weird shit my subconscious keeps generating to help me cope—with what exactly? I don’t know. What’s the Jungian symbolism of a Take-a-Ticket system for a gender-neutral bathroom? Beats me.
What I do know is that all of this is impossibly difficult, even ten months later. And that in the midst of fatigue and uncertainty and anxiety and cold winter days, in the midst of struggle, I also know without a doubt that the presence of love is still possible. In small moments, in the midst of the struggle, it is possible. And it is the only thing that brings peace. I know this. I need to know this. I’ve etched it upon my dry erase board; the writing’s on the wall. Love is still the path.
May the reminder of this hover over all of the days.
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What I'm reading: Carol Dweck's Mindset, Sven Birkert's The Other Walk
What I'm listening to: Shovel and Rope's O' Be Joyful, Tom Waits' Closing Time, Moby's Live Ambients
What I'm learning about from my sons: All things Naruto
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Peace,
Andrew
BUSKER JAR: If you want to support my projects this year with a lil' bit of patronage, I'd welcome it. You can use my PayPal (andrewjohnsonkc@gmail.com) or Venmo (@Andrew-Johnson-45954).