7.1.26 - Untitled: Chapter 2
2. A Nap Cut Short
"Jesus fucking christ. Enough already! Every fucking day with this shit. We don't know what they are! We get it! What the--what the hell is the point of saying that seventeen different ways. It's a--it's a fucking demoralization campaign." Dad's yelling wakes me up--again. I had just gotten comfortable and dozed off in the sofa chair. Last I remembered I was watching cartoons, on purpose. I guess he took my falling asleep as permission to come in and turn on the news.
"Jacob, turn off the T.V then. Come back here and help me with this." Mom was trying to be patient--I know her trying to be nice voice. But whenever she is dad just takes it as permission to be himself until it actually makes her mad.
"We don't need an endless parade of PhDs and politicians to tell us they don't know shit! I knew that! These people are fucking parasites, they, they, these people ought to be ashamed! They're in a position to actually--if they cared--create some context, give people some sense of direction or at maybe a healthier way to think about what's happening. Instead they're just on here scaring everyone twenty-four hours a day!"
"Baby, just come here. I know, it's ridiculous. I don't even want to think about it. I need your help with this." Mom was making homemade meatballs for dinner tonight. She knows she can get dad to chill if she gives him something he thinks he's good at, like chopping the garlic real small (he insists on salting it first and doing a back and forth rocking motion--thinks its better than a food processor). She wasn't always good at handling him like that. But since I've come home I've noticed that their relationship has gotten a lot better. She knows how to bring him down. Seems like being empty nesters really gave them a chance to understand each other better. To my surprise, he had the self-control to drop it and actually went back to the kitchen. I actually smiled when he did. Really.
The thing is, dad's not wrong or completely unjustified in what he's saying, and no one thinks that. But he's just not good at being, well, a dad or a husband when he's always worked up like this. Not really a real comforting, stable presence. If he's anxious about something, it's got to be everyone else's problem. It used to really piss me off, and it still does. But these days, I get it. There isn't a real outlet for anyone's anxiety with this thing, and it puts normal people on edge. And he's been a neurotic his whole life. It's a lot to ask him to learn to just be chill now of all times.
I'm a lot better about just not thinking about things if I don't want to, about thinking about the things I want to think about. Really to a fault. I'm like my mom in that way. He can't do that. If we have to leave for a place in twenty minutes, he's the kind of guy that will remind you every three minutes to be ready. If something's wrong with the car, he can't just set an appointment and drive the other car for a little bit. He has to know what's going on right fucking now. This is an infuriating kind of person to be around when you're a kid or a teenager. But I think I appreciate it a little bit more as I've gotten older, and I've realized a lot of dudes are chill because they don't really care.
Sometimes I worry that I'm like that--apathetic. I can't get myself to the same level of righteous indignation my forty-eight year-old father can. It's not that I don't care, I just, constitutionally cannot get as heated about things so out of my control. At some point the anxiety just...fades away. It doesn't get resolved, but you can't just be on one for months. I mean, he can. But I can't. And from what I can tell, most other people can't either.
We were sent home in around March, and it was almost June. Which means I had been back in River View for almost three months now. Three months into the Emergency and nothing had happened. After their little "show" at the very start they stopped doing anything. They didn't move. They didn't bother anyone. They were just there. There's only so much of a sustained emotional response anyone could have to that kind of state of affairs. My friends were shockingly nonchalant about it by week two. They weren't here in River View after all. Apparently just every major urban center on the planet.
But if you left your phone at home and walked outside in little River View, or throughout any of the Parishes, for all you knew nothing out of the ordinary was happening. You could enjoy the same suburban tranquility of any summer afternoon that preceded this one. And we did. Michael and I were on a serious walking streak as of late. We had spent the last three months retracing every beaten path we had from third to twelfth grade. There was nothing else to do. Waken up from my 1PM nap, I figured I would call him up again and propose a nice walk that cut through the soccer fields near Cherry Hill elementary and got you up to the trails that lead to Great Oaks park.
It was a longer walk than usual and I was expecting a little push back. But the thing is, when you went up Cherry Hill and onto the paths that take you back down to Great Oaks, there's a point where you can actually get high enough to see across the Potomac towards the capitol.
It was a really far vantage point. But if you squinted hard enough--or used a good pair of binoculars--you could probably just barely see them.
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