Nathaniel Clark

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.

It is late, it is early, it is dif­fi­cult to decide. I am hun­gry, I am wasted, I am aching, I am wired. It is dawn some­where in the world, right now, this moment. I have a puls­ing vein in my tem­ple, I have a an excess of ions in my blood, I have bur­dock in my eyes, I have two iron legs. I have found that chas­ing demons tends to bring the Devil him­self out. The baby starts to wake up, and when he does– well, then it’s his world. The churn­ing of the dish­washer merges with the soft plush implo­sions echo­ing from the speak­ers, mak­ing a sort of liq­uid insect sym­phony. That reminds me that the sound­track of life is rarely a melodic one — rather, it is com­min­gled tex­ture; com­merce with the ghosts; ethe­real entan­gle­ments– invis­i­ble, tac­tile, & some­how– in the end– inter­nal. I am rid­ing a wave of choco­late con­scious­ness, a hazy sub­tle orgasm of endor­phins and a con­stant push towards unblink­ing­ness. I know it won’t last. There is a place in your head that gives all thoughts extra­or­di­nary depth. There are only 2 ways of look­ing at your mate­r­ial pos­ses­sions, and one of them is exhaust­ing. In the end. 10 min­utes have passed. Good Night.

Sit­ting in bed, in the silver-blue glow of my lap­top, watch­ing my son sleep, sooth­ing him first with sound when he wakes. Inter­est­ingly, more than half the time he wakes with a vio­lent start, and starts cry­ing imme­di­ately — before even open­ing his eyes. So I have to ask — is he hav­ing night­mares? Or is he sim­ply hyper­sen­si­tive to his sit­u­a­tion– in the crib, not in the bed, and alone, no bod­ies next to him? I can’t decide. I know that he’s upset before he’s fully con­scious. It makes me sad to think that a child of a mere 8 months could have any­thing in his head other than warm, fuzzy, liq­uid, fleshy happiness.