august imbroglio

On the eve of my dear wife’s Cit­i­zen­ship Cer­e­mony I have a few moments to untan­gle the skeins and make sense of august, the most august of months: play­ground of the leo; birth day of my daugh­ter; string of sleep­less nights; frac­tured arrhyth­mia of unfo­cused days; the late night slosh-and-hum of the dish­washer; the bram­ble thicket of inchoate words that never quite man­age to stain the pages of my jour­nal. A month of blurs, with a few moments that sur­face in clar­ity: a beach party & watch­ing my daugh­ter weave her way in and out of her friends; a dis­cov­ered fever for the micro-blog; rat­tlesnake (!); an inex­orable (though anx­ious) roll towards Iryshka’s cit­i­zen­ship; a watch that informs me of the tides; stunned paral­y­sis in front of the mixer; a touch of the beau­ti­ful sun­set after weeks of cloud­less, clean fades; the weight of code and pho­to­shop files that drags my face down into a soft jelly; sleep train­ing long over­due; the teenagers’ passion-play of love & betrayal as an ancient rit­ual played over and over again, every gen­er­a­tion; the grad­ual but inex­orable meta­mor­pho­sis of songs that start out too over­run by their influ­ences but begin to sound more and more like just me every change; days of par­adise walk­ing along the ocean, feet in the clear water, watch­ing mas­sive waves curl in slow motion and pound the surf with a fluid strength that has built to break­ing over geo­logic spans of time; Infi­nite Jest by David Fos­ter Wal­lace; being reminded every day how amaz­ing humans are– what they can do with their incom­pa­ra­ble brains– by watch­ing the mir­a­cle of con­scious­ness explode expo­nen­tially in my child.

As I fin­ish this, I real­ize how Leo­nine this August really is… it’s a water­shed month, it’s a turn­ing point, it’s the peak; in so many ways, it is (impe­ri­ously) deter­min­ing the months to fol­low. In like a lion, out like a maiden.