Back in Burque, Folks.
Been home in New Mexico for a few days. Heading up to see the old man today. I don’t know what to expect but I know I can't expect him to be better. It’s kind of amazing that I am the age I am and I still have a dad alive at all. And a mom! Who I can't seem to get to pick up her phone. I’m doing my part.
I think I am having some old guy mental phenomenon happening. Maybe specifically childless old guy stuff. I think if you have kids your sense of time passing is different. You can see it in your kids. It hits me out of nowhere and somewhat suddenly.
Maybe something is shorting out in my brain. I don’t know.
I was standing outside a theater in Los Angeles last week. I have been there many times over the years since I’ve lived in LA. Which is on and off but mostly on since 2002. Twenty-two years. That number just stopped me in my tracks for some reason. I was standing on a familiar corner and I could remember all the times I had been there with many different people, friends, girlfriends, a wife. It was bits and pieces and it all seemed so far away and so immediate simultaneously.
I knew some of the events were a long time ago now but I couldn’t really account for time since they happened. It was like my mind couldn’t process time. It was past but all present. Like it all happened last week. Like everything that's happened in the years I can remember happened yesterday. It was as if the gap between the past and the present was lifted but everything seemed far away but all one experience. My life. I don’t know if I’m explaining it clearly.
I was looking at the last 22 years all at once and I felt like I was separate from it. It was a kind of grief. It was all behind me but alive and active in my mind. The memories that fight to be held. The place they hold in my mind is/was alive in a place in time and it’s conflicting with what is now. The present.
My memories become a parallel universe that I’m living in outside of myself. That I have to engage with. I guess the memories that make us who we are happen to be the ones we revisit enough to define our thinking about who we are. Some are connected to scars, souvenirs of a past.
Apparitions of life experience are haunting my aging vessel. I’m happy to have them.
Maybe when I come home to Albuquerque it grounds me in a way where I have the space to recollect. Or just collect. Bits and pieces of my life swirling around in my mind. I have to stop them one at a time, grab them and connect them to the story. Make them linear.
Seeing my dad as his memories fade and disappear along with his basic ability to function also weighs heavy on me.
I guess I’m scared of the ghosts leaving. What else do we have?
Today I talk to Anthony Jeselnik again. Just catching up. It’s been years since he’s been on. On Thursday I talk to Steve Furey. A very funny guy I’ve gotten to know recently whose mom is going to be very excited he’s on the show.
Enjoy!
Boomer, Monkey and LaFonda live!
Love,
Maron
