| the blog of human failure
I’ve got a fuzzy memory of being about 6 years old at the beach, playing in the waves and riding them back in towards the sand. I caught the crest of an especially big wave and immediately in my feeble young mind I knew I had, in the sage words of my father, started something that I couldn’t finish. This wave was big and it took me and slammed me directly down into the glittering foggy bottom of the surf and held me tight under six feet of water while it slowly dragged me on my supple young belly towards land. After what felt like over two full minutes completely submerged and helpless I arrived at the shore with the recumbent waves lapping at my feet, blood and pebbles covering my chest, my swimsuit pockets filled with sand. And I cried. I pulled myself up and brushed my off my raw front with pruned and salted fingertips and wandered up and down the shoreline crying. Crushed and bleeding, young and confused at the time I needed them most. Where were my parents. Where were my parents? My parents had gone back to the hotel restaurant to have lunch. This was not some Partridge Family/Mormon pick nick-sized congregation of relations. I’m an only child. Besides their five dollar deposit resort towels, I was all they had to remember to bring along. It was only 45 minutes later when my mother had finished her club sandwich and couldn’t find her room key card that she came plodding back to the life guard station to retrieve her kin.
It’s been two weeks since the last time I addressed you folks. Are you battered broken? Have you wandered out of the woods of isolation where I had so startling plopped you down in the center of? Has the experience allowed you to build character and trap, kill and clean small game? I can’t imagine that it has. Here you are, sitting on the same stump where I left you. And how was my club sandwich, and didn’t I think you would want lunch too? It’s all too obviously that I abandoned you not out of some altruistic attempt to encourage you to develop into adulthood, but out of simple neglect. Neglect of a kind ubiquitous in this lazy solipsistic and fast paced culture. Was the life guard nice to you? How long did you have to wait for mommy? Oh, baby how’d you cut yourself; do you want my pickle?
Of course you don’t want my tragically nonsensical pickle of self redemption. You want loving arms waiting at the shore to run into: a bosom on which to cradle your weighty water logged head. You want consistency and I failed you. Well, the future of the Blog of Human Failure is pledging itself to the fraternal order of consistency, to be here for you several times a week when you need us. We’re at the beginning of a long sturdy effort to rebuild your trust and comfort. We promise never to leave you on your own without explanation again until we do. And I was on vacation, so blow me.
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I’ll pass on your pickle, but it is great to have you back!
Comment by Sota — August 18, 2008 #
obvious. it is describing it.
Comment by Kelly — August 22, 2008 #