I don't have any cohesive thoughts on it just yet, having finished reading it about 2 minutes ago, but Harry Crews' memoir A Childhood really got my wheels turning, mostly about my heritage and my childhood and how things change but never really get better because of the inevitable trade-offs that we make. 

What I mean is, less than a hundred years ago, members of my family, some of whom are still alive, lived in self-made homes with no wiring or plumbing.  They lost siblings just barely old enough to walk to illnesses that can be cured today by getting a shot or taking a pill.  They had chickens living under their houses that they fed through holes in the floor.  They paid the doctor with jams or fresh vegetables.  Their lives were unimaginably hard - almost to a mythological degree.  They had to do terrible, horrible things to survive, but they did them because they had to, and that was that. 

On the backs of those people, and on the backs of every generation since then, was laid the foundation for modern America, and subsequently the modern world, that we live in today.  Every generation wants to make life better for the generation that follows it.  And so we find cures and invent and advance and try and fail and try and fail until we succeed and then we take that success and try and fail and try and fail until we make it even more successful, and so on.  In so little time, we've moved so far beyond where we were back then, that now, as I said, it all seems like a myth.  Like the stories our grandmothers and grandfathers tell couldn't possibly be true.  Not in this world.

Harry Crews makes a very good observation early on in his book when he talks about the day his Uncle Alton took him to meet some old friends of  his father.  Harry never knew his father, as he died when Harry was only a few months old, so one day, on the front porch of his Uncle Alton's old house, he asked his uncle to tell him something about him.  Instead of doing what any one of us might do and floundering his way through a few piecemeal memories, his uncle took him out to where some of Harry's father's old friends were known to congregate, and the stories commenced.

As Harry listens to the men, he thinks about how no one will be able to tell these kinds of stories about him when he is old.  His life has been scattered across so many acquaintances and unnamed places that if it weren't for the books he'd written, you'd scarcely know he'd ever existed.  Not so with these old men.  They were rooted and grown right where they sat, and their connections to the people around them ran deep and long.  They knew everything about each other.  It was just the way things were during those times, when life was too hard not to be in each other's business.  People couldn't survive on their own, isolated from their neighbors.  It just wasn't done.

I don't have to explain how that's changed.  We all know how.  But I think there's something to be said for what's been lost in exchange for an easier life.  Yeah, we can go down to the doctor's office and get a prescription and not have to worry about dying from simple infections.  We can get from one place to another quickly and without much preparation or thought.  We have running water and electricity that gives us the ability to hole up inside our apartments for days on end without having to ever see the sun.  We can live our lives never really having to know anybody and still get by, and even be successful.

All of that has its definite advantages, but in an attempt to gain these advantages, I'm afraid that we inadvertently laid the idea of real community on the bargaining table.  We move from place to place and job to job and clique to clique, never really planting roots or investing in anything except ourselves.  And in our society, this is acceptable and even expected.  You can't sit still for too long or you're seen as backwards or unambitious or lazy.  Even in the south, where some of those old ways still exist, it's hard to find anyone under the age of thirty that wants to stay in their small towns.  There's a drive to move away and make something of ourselves. 

Listen, I'm not saying that's a bad thing.  I did it myself, and I think an important part of growing up is trying to find yourself and all that that entails.  I'm just saying, I wish it didn't have to start so early, and I wish it wasn't driven so hard into us that we have to be better than our parents and we have to make the world better for our kids.  I wish we'd had that stillness and patience instilled in us that only comes from pain and struggling and scrapings with death - so many scrapings that you no longer feared it but accepted it as just another thing that happens. 

And maybe that's it - maybe we never became familiar enough with death that we learned to accept it.  Maybe we're all running around with such blind fury because we're scared it might catch up to us if we ever stop.  But it's not something that chases you, and it's not something that you're running toward.  It just is.  Life is a binary state - you're either alive or you aren't.  That's it. 

I don't know why I got off on that.  Like I said, my thoughts about this are a bit fragmented.  I'm just thinking about how I wish that one day, there will be a group of old men sitting around a table in the back of an old country store playing dominoes and telling stories about me to my kid.  It won't happen because the world is different now, and tonight, that makes me sad.

I moved today.  I hate moving.  But now it's done.  I don't feel like writing, so here's a song.

Today was my last day of work at Apple.  Funny.  I didn't get the same sense of relief that I've felt when leaving other jobs.  This felt sad and kind of scary.  Like a lesser version of graduating college.  Maybe it's because I worked there for a whole year and sort of built my life around that schedule.  I knew exactly where I was going to be Monday through Friday from 7-4, and I knew exactly what I would be doing during that time.  I was comfortable in my routine.  Now that routine has been taken away from me, and I'm going to have to get comfortable somewhere else, doing something new.  I'm a creature of habit, really.  That's a boring thing about me.  I think it's because I'm afraid of failure.

Anyway, I start my new job next Tuesday.  I think it's going to be a really good change for me.  I'll be making more money and have full benefits.  I won't be in a corporate environment.  I'll be challenged to do my best, and I'll be working toward a promising future. 

Yeah, this will be good for me.

But tonight, I say goodbye to Apple and a year of dead end misery.  Later, bitches.


Goodbye - The Postmarks